From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Sat Dec 06 2003 - 20:45:07 PST
----- Original Message -----
From: bulletins_at_SkyandTelescope.com
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 7:46 PM
To: ljk4_at_msn.com
Subject: S&T's Weekly News Bulletin for December 5
========================================================================
* * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - December 5, 2003 * * *
========================================================================
Welcome to S&T's Weekly News Bulletin. Images, the full text of stories
abridged here, and other enhancements are available on our Web site,
SkyandTelescope.com, at the URLs provided below. (If the links don't work,
just manually type the URLs into your Web browser.) Clear skies!
========================================================================
HUBBLE IN LIMBO
Can you imagine shutting down the Hubble Space Telescope even if it were
still working perfectly? Six months ago NASA was thinking of doing just
that in 2010. Such a move would save up to $200 million dollars a year,
enabling the cash-strapped agency to keep Hubble's successor, the James
Webb Space Telescope, on track for a planned launch in 2011. NASA has
since stopped threatening to turn off the world's most famous telescope,
but Hubble is far from out of danger of coming to a premature end....
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1117_1.asp
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
EJECTING THE KUIPER BELT
It's been a little more than a decade since astronomers confirmed the
existence of the Kuiper Belt -- the ancient disk of planetesimals circling
the Sun outside the orbit of Neptune. In that time astronomers have found
more than 700 icy, asteroid-size objects in the classical Kuiper Belt and
have learned that it has a sharp outer edge around 50 astronomical units
from the Sun. There seem to be no objects larger than 200 kilometers in
diameter beyond that boundary.
But it remains unclear how the Kuiper Belt came to be. A new study
published in the November 27th Nature by Harold F. Levison (Southwest
Research Institute, Boulder) and Alessandro Morbidelli (Observatoire de la
Cote d'Azur) sheds some light on the mystery. Their work suggests that
Kuiper Belt objects formed inside the present orbit of Neptune and that
the planet itself gradually pushed them outward....
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1115_1.asp
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ASTRO NEWS BRIEFS
Mars Satellite Damaged
Satellites orbiting Earth generally made it through the late-October solar
storms just fine, but Mars Odyssey orbiting the red planet took a bad hit.
A coronal mass ejection from the Sun knocked out Mars Odyssey's Mars
Radiation Environment Experiment (MARIE). Controllers at NASA have been
trying to nurse the instrument back to life since October 28th without
success. MARIE was designed to characterize the radiation that future
astronauts will face in interplanetary space and on the Martian surface.
"Even if the instrument provides no additional data in the future, it has
been a great success at characterizing the radiation environment that a
crewed mission to Mars would need to anticipate," said Jeffrey Plaut,
project scientist for Mars Odyssey, in a press statement. Efforts to
revive MARIE are continuing. Mars Odyssey's mapping cameras and other
instruments were unaffected.
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1116_1.asp
========================================================================
HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY
* Full Moon on December 8th.
* On December 8th, Mercury is at greatest elongation, 21 degrees east of
the Sun. Look for it very low in the southwest in early twilight, to the
lower right of brighter Venus.
* The Geminid meteor shower peaks on night of December 13th.
For details, see This Week's Sky at a Glance and Planet Roundup:
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/observing/ataglance/
========================================================================
TIS' THE SEASON (Advertisement)
Perfect holiday gifts for navigating the heavens!
Sky Atlas 2000.0 2nd Edition
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/campaigns.asp?id=56
SKY & TELESCOPE Deluxe Chart Carrier
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/campaigns.asp?id=89
Sky Atlas 2000.0 Companion, 2nd Edition
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/campaigns.asp?id=57
LightWedge Night Vision
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/campaigns.asp?id=380
========================================================================
Copyright 2003 Sky Publishing Corp. S&T's Weekly News Bulletin is provided
as a free service to the astronomical community by the editors of SKY &
TELESCOPE magazine. Widespread electronic distribution is encouraged as
long as our copyright notice is included, along with the words "used by
permission." But this bulletin may not be published in any other form
without written permission from Sky Publishing; send e-mail to
permissions_at_SkyandTelescope.com or call +1 617-864-7360. More astronomy
news is available on our Web site at http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
To change your address, unsubscribe from S&T's Weekly News Bulletin, or
subscribe to S&T's Skywatcher's Bulletin, which calls attention to
noteworthy celestial events, go to this address:
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/shopatsky/emailsubscribe.asp
=======================================================================
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Sat Dec 06 2003 - 20:51:36 PST