NASA has decided to give Pluto another chance to receive a visitor from Earth. NASA Associate Administrator for Space Science Ed Weiler sat down with reporters this week to discuss a new round of proposals NASA is soliciting for the exploration of Pluto. Earlier this year Weiler put a stop work order in place on the Pluto-Kuiper Express mission when the projected costs for both this mission and the Europa Orbiter mission got out of hand. The planetary science community wasn't at all happy with this decision. Now, Weiler is looking for newer, cheaper ways to reach Pluto.

Results of a National wide survey, released today, show that the U. S. public supports the exploration of two fascinating bodies in the outer solar system. According to Sky & Telescope magazine, which sponsored the poll, 64% ofAmericans want NASA to send a spacecraft to Europa, an enigmatic satellite of the planet Jupiter. Moreover, 58% approve sending a probe to Pluto, the only major planet not yet seen at close range. The exploration of Mars also continues to receive strong support, as 70% of people would like to see samples of the Red Planet returned to Earth for analysis. "

Thousands of years ago, on a small rocky planet orbiting a modest star in an ordinary spiral galaxy, our remote ancestors looked up and wondered about their place between Earth and sky. On the threshold of the 21st century, we ask the same profound questions:

• How did the universe begin and evolve?
  
• How did we get here?
  
• Where are we going?
  
• Are we alone?

Planets like the Earth cannot form unless elements heavier than helium are available. These heavy elements, or 'metals', were not produced in the big bang. They result from fusion inside stars and have been gradually building up over the lifetime of the Universe. Recent observations indicate that the presence of giant extrasolar planets at small distances from their host stars, is strongly correlated with high metallicity of the host stars. The presence of these close-orbiting giants is incompatible with the existence of earth-like planets. Thus, there may be a Goldilocks selection effect: with too little metallicity, earths are unable to form for lack of material, with too much metallicity giant planets destroy earths.

According to NASA JPL: "A thick layer of melted, salty water somewhere beneath Ganymede's icy crust would be the best way to explain some of the magnetic readings taken by NASA's Galileo spacecraft during close approaches to Ganymede in May 2000 and earlier. In addition, the types of minerals on parts of Ganymede's surface suggest that, in the past, salty water may have emerged from below or melted at the surface, according to a study of infrared reflectance measured by Galileo."

"Microscopic plant and animal life is providing scientists clues about the climate system that existed as long as 10,000 years ago, David M. Anderson of NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center told attendees of the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in San Francisco today."

"Even during an extraordinarily violent era in Earth's early history, when our young planet was being whacked by asteroids and comets so frequently that scientists refer to it as "Late Heavy Bombardment," conditions most of the time at the Earth's surface were quite hospitable for the microbes that lived here, according to research being presented Friday, Dec. 15, at an invited talk at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The work has also been accepted by the Journal of Geophysical Research. "

"A team of scientists reports it has isolated crystals of magnetite, an iron oxide, from the meteorite and examined the crystals with electron microscopy. Among the crystals are some ranging in size from 10 to 200 nanometers across that have an unusual shape. The scientists determined that these magnetite crystals from the meteorite resemble magnetite crystals produced on Earth by biological processes. "

"In a paper to be published Dec. 14 in the journal Nature, Northwestern University geologist Craig R. Bina reports that, in a novel twist on current thinking, water may be transported into the interior of planets as a high-pressure form of ice, rather than simply being transported while trapped within hydrous minerals or escaping as a fluid. Bina and co-author Alexandra Navrotsky, a chemist and materials scientist from the University of California, Davis, suggest that this process should become more important as planets cool, for example on a future Earth or on Mars. "

"A new scientific report offers compelling evidence that primitive life existed on Mars. Tiny magnetite crystals, identical to those used by aqueous bacteria on Earth as compasses to find food and energy, have been found in the Martian meteorite ALH84001. The report on the finding is in the December issue of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. Written by a group of scientists led by Kathie Thomas-Keprta of Lockheed Martin at Johnson Space Center and funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the report strongly supports the primitive life on Mars hypothesis of David McKay and coauthors in 1996."

"An Iowa State University professor is part of a research team that has found compelling evidence that Mars once supported primitive life. The researchers discovered evidence of bacteria in a Martian meteorite. Tiny magnetite crystals -- so called magnetofossils -- embedded in the meteorite were confirmed to be the type produced only by a biological process unique to magnetotactic bacteria. "

"Using transmission electron microscopy (TEM), we have analyzed magnetite (Fe3O4) crystals acid-extracted from carbonate globules in Martian meteorite ALH84001. As a possible terrestrial analog for the ALH84001 elongated prisms, we compared these magnetites with those produced by the terrestrial magnetotactic bacteria strain MV-1. Of the ALH84001 magnetites that we have examined, the elongated prismatic magnetite particles (~27% of the total) are indistinguishable from the MV-1 magnetites in five of these six characteristics observed for biogenically controlled mineralization of magnetite crystals. "

"A new hydrothermal vent field, which scientists have dubbed "The Lost City," was discovered December 5th on an undersea mountain in the Atlantic Ocean. "These structures, which tower 180 feet above the seafloor, are the largest hydrothermal chimneys of their kind ever observed," said Deborah Kelley, a University of Washington geologist and co-principal investigator on the cruise. "

On 12 December 2000 Dr. Timothy Hammond from the Tulane University Medical Center will present a seminar titled: "Latest Findings: Genomics and Proteomics of Kidney Cells in Space". Hammond and his co-workers have sought to identify which genes are activated and deactivated during spaceflight - specifically, which genes operate during exposure to microgravity - and what aspects of metabolism they control. The research findings to be discussed are the result of experiments flown on Neurolab (STS-90) in 1998 and STS-106 in 2000. Hammond's work takes advantage of cutting edge genomics tools such as gene arrays (so called "gene chips") which are used in, among other places, understanding the structure and function of the human genome.

"Layered and massive outcrops on Mars, some as thick as 4 kilometers, display the geomorphic attributes and stratigraphic relations of sedimentary rock. Repeated beds in some locations imply a dynamic depositional environment during early martian history. Subaerial (such as eolian, impact, and volcaniclastic) and subaqueous processes may have contributed to the formation of the layers. Affinity for impact craters suggests dominance of lacustrine deposition; alternatively, the materials were deposited in a dry, subaerial setting in which atmospheric density, and variations thereof mimic a subaqueous depositional environment. The source regions and transport paths for the materials are not preserved."

"The latest images from the Red Planet are suggesting that water ponded across its equatorial region eons ago, just when life might have been emerging. Although the authors offer more than one interpretation, the one they prefer has the sediments laid down beneath broad lakes and shallow seas at a relatively clement time in the planet's history. The geologic implications of the pictures plus supportive signs from earlier missions mean that these possible lake sediments will be prime candidates for NASA missions seeking signs of past life on Mars."

"It has long been conjectured that the canonical genetic code evolved from a simpler primordial form that encoded fewer amino acids. The most influential form of this idea, "code coevolution", proposes that the genetic code coevolved with the invention of biosynthetic pathways for new amino acids. It further proposes that a comparison of modern codon assignments with the conserved metabolic pathways of amino acid biosynthesis can inform us about this history of code expansion. Here we re-examine the biochemical basis of this theory to test the validity of its statistical support ... we conclude that coevolution theory cannot adequately explain the structure of the genetic code. "

"Layered geologic outcrops on Mars, described in today's issue of the journal Science--may be composed of sedimentary rock that dates from the earliest span of martian history, between 4.3. and 3.5 billion years ago. Images of these sedimentary rock exposures, captured by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC), suggest that parts of ancient Mars may have resembled a land of lakes, and that the geology of early Mars was much more dynamic than previously suspected."

"NASA scientists have discovered ancient sea or lake beds on the surface of Mars that could once have harboured life, writes Jonathan Leake. The discovery is among the most significant concerning Mars so far, because such places are the most likely locations for fossils or other signs of past life. Nasa will announce the discovery in this week's edition of Science with the suggestion that the next generation of Mars landings should be sent to such areas. "

"Imaging scientists Dr. Michael Malin and Dr. Ken Edgett from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft will present what they describe as their most significant discovery yet at a Space Science Update at 2:00 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 7. Their findings are being published in the December 8 issue of Science Magazine."

Editor's note: Among the presenters is Dr. Ken Nealson, director of the Center for Life Detection at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA.

"High-precision magnesium isotope measurements of whole chondrules from the Allende carbonaceous chondrite meteorite show that some aluminum-rich Allende chondrules formed at or near the time of formation of calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions and that some others formed later and incorporated precursors previously enriched in magnesium-26. Chondrule magnesium-25/magnesium-24 correlates with [magnesium]/[aluminum] and size, the aluminum-rich, smaller chondrules being the most enriched in the heavy isotopes of magnesium. These relations imply that high gas pressures prevailed during chondrule formation in the solar nebula."

"Within the lunar meteorite breccias MAC 88105, QUE 93069, DaG 262, and DaG 400, seven to nine different impact events are represented with 40Ar-39Ar ages between 2.76 and 3.92 billion years ago (Ga). The lack of impact melt older than 3.92 Ga supports the concept of a short, intense period of bombardment in the Earth-moon system at ~3.9 Ga. This was an anomalous spike of impact activity on the otherwise declining impact- frequency curve. "

" ..early analyses of lunar rocks returned by Apollo astronauts hinted at a sudden violent episode 600 million years after Earth's birth. Seemingly out of nowhere, a hail of objects pummeled Earth, the moon, and perhaps the entire inner solar system. Now this "late heavy bombardment" is getting strong support from analyses of rocks the astronauts never saw: meteorites that fell to Earth from the moon's back side."

"[Leon Alkalai, director of JPL's Center for Integrated Space Microsystems] hopes to fly technology demonstration experiments by 2006. By 2012, he expects to see spacecraft powered and managed by CISM-designed chips exploring the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, or fetching material from a comet back to Earth. And in the longer term, he plans to explore revolutionary computing strategies to create "a thinking spacecraft", able to integrate the information from multiple sensors, recognize patterns, adapt to rapidly changing environments, and deal with faults or external emergencies."

"Michael Drake, who chairs the solar system exploration subcommittee of NASA's Space Science Advisory Committee, says he is "sympathetic to NASA on this because fiscal discipline must be maintained". The space agency has been plagued by unrealistically low bids from contractors, says Drake. But Mark Sykes, chairman of the DPS, says Weiler's hardline approach risks "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". He fears that the Europa orbiter - a mission to explore one of Jupiter's moons for signs of life - could be next for the chop."

"Microorganisms have flourished in the oceans since at least 3.8 billion years (3.8 Gyr) ago, but it is not at present clear when they first colonized the land. Unusually carbonaceous ancient soils - palaeosols - have been found in the Mpumalanga Province (Eastern Transvaal) of South Africa. Here we report the occurrences, elemental ratios (C, H, N, P) and isotopic compositions of this organic matter and its host rocks. These data show that the organic matter very probably represents remnants of microbial mats that developed on the soil surface between 2.6 and 2.7 Gyr ago. This places the development of terrestrial biomass more than 1.4 billion years earlier than previously reported."

Evidence of life on Earth has been found as far back as 3.8 billion years. Until recently, the most ancient evidence pointing to life on solid ground came from 1.2 billion year old microfossils found in Arizona. A paper in the 30 November 2000 issue of Nature magazine reports evidence of land-based life 2.6 to 2.7 billion years ago. Not only does this push back the origin of land life by more than a 1.5 billion years, it also suggests that we may find it easier to detect life on planets circling other stars by virtue of what life does to the atmosphere of the planet it lives on.

"Soffen will be buried in Hampton, VA. A grave-side ceremony will be held Sunday, Nov. 26 at 1:00 p.m. at the Park Lawn Memorial Park in Hampton. Immediately after the service, a reception will be held at the Virginia Air and Space Center located at Settler's Landing Road in Hampton."

Editor's note: I was saddened to learn that Jerry died suddenly last night. I had frequent contact with Jerry over the past years as NASA's Astrobiology program got off the ground. Jerry's passion for the exploration of space was matched only by his passion for educating tomrrow's space explorers. He was a true believer - and will be greatly missed.

"This series of cancellations is unprecedented in the history of NASA's Space Science program," the Division of Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society said in a recent news release. This, plus the loss of three Mars missions, it added, "gives rise to serious concern for the future of the U.S. planetary exploration program."

"Researchers said that in the filter of a high-flying balloon operated by the Indian Space Research Organization, they found a strain of bacteria unlike anything on Earth. The bacteria were found at an altitude of 10 miles and scientists from the ISRO, Cardiff University and the University of Wales College of Medicine said it may have come from a comet on a close approach to earth, according to the Daily Mail."

"Seafloor hydrothermal vents support ecosystems with enormous biomass and productivity compared with that observed elsewhere in the deep oceans. What is the energy source that fuels these oases of life, and what adaptations allow them to exist in these extreme environments?"

"The Leonids meteor shower of November 1998 has shown a double activity. An unexpected shower of fireballs occurred about 16 hours before the expected maximum of the meteor activity. The activity profile of the fireball shower revealed also a fine structure. The hypotesis of tidal origin of such sub-structures is discussed. The close encounter of the meteoroid stream with the Earth in 1366 and the encounters with Saturn (in 1630) and Jupiter (in 1732), are identified as the cause of the main features of the structure. Such analysis can be applied to the incoming 2000 Leonids' display. "

"What was the genetic material of the earliest life forms on Earth if it was not RNA? As Leslie Orgel explains in his Perspective, the answer may be simpler nucleic acid polymers perhaps like the RNA analogs called (L)-a-threofuranosyl oligonucleotides or TNAs (Schöning et al.). These molecules have threose rather than ribose in their sugar-phosphate backbones and yet retain many of the properties of RNA including the ability to pair up in double helices. "

"An unusual coalition of scientists, activists, and politicians is pressuring NASA to rethink a September decision to put a 2004 mission to Pluto on hold because of budget constraints. The growing clamor is shaking up the planetary science community, which is also preparing for a mission at mid-decade to Europa, a moon of Jupiter. The biggest impact may be felt at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which could face serious competition for the first time in decades on contracts to build planetary missions."

"Carbon on the surface of an ultradense star detonated in a 3-hour thermonuclear explosion, according to a report at a meeting here last week of the American Astronomical Society's High Energy Astrophysics Division. If confirmed, the burst would be the first known cosmic explosion fueled solely by carbon rather than hydrogen or helium and could verify or revise models of carbon combustion. "

"With calls to tie the European Space Agency (ESA) more closely to the business and security sectors , space scientists hope David Southwood, who will take over next May as ESA's science director, can nurture the agency's research with the skill he showed transforming its earth sciences division. Experts say he's up to the task."

"Space is too important to Europe to be left to scientists alone, according to a report on the future of the European Space Agency (ESA) released last week. "We see the need to integrate space efforts, or space activities, with European political and other activities much more clearly than has been the case in the past," says former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who led the study."

"The Ames Research Center hosts a program that is another excellent example of amateurs, in this case, students, helping professionals with research. NASA funds a collaborative project between Ames and the nonprofit Marine Sciences Institute, a science education organization that runs educational cruises for teachers and students in the San Francisco Bay area. [Marine Science Institute] The program's director, Lynn Rothschild, has utilized the samples and physical data (temperature, UV radiation, water clarity, etc.) collected by students on the cruise to help her identify UV-absorbing pigments in plankton and to measure DNA damage experienced by plankton in the Bay at different times of the year. Students are being immersed in research and given part-ownership in scientific data. This program not only nurtures the next generation of scientists but has allowed Ames to provide useful data that would otherwise have an economically prohibitive price tag. We need federal funding to support more programs like this one."

According to the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine: "Computer simulations have revealed that a vast region of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, may have behaved like a fluid during the formation of the Chicxulub impact crater. The Chicxulub crater is thought to have resulted from an impact with an asteroid or comet 65 million years ago. Many scientists believe that there is a link between the impact and the environmental change and mass extinction, including perhaps that of the dinosaurs, at the end of the Cretaceous period. "

Comets have been found to contain a wide collection of organic materials as well as water. Given the intense bombardment of the inner solar system shortly after Earth and Mars formed it is thought that many volatile components - and perhaps organic compounds - may have arrived via impacts by cometary bodies. As such, the characterization of comets - or in this case, pieces of comets - is crucial in developing an understanding of the role of comets in seeding planets with the raw materials from which life might arise. The annual Leonids meteor shower is a perfect opportunity to understand the composition of comets. The Leonids result when the Earth passes through a trail of debris left by comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle as it orbits the sun.

According to the International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA) "If you are within a 65-mile (104-km)-wide band crossing the Midwest and western Canada, you can see the naked-eye star Tejat wink out for about 10 seconds as it is covered by the asteroid Sulamitis shortly before sunrise Monday morning, November 20.  Millions of early risers in Charleston and Huntington, West Virginia; Dayton, Ohio; Muncie and Gary, Indiana; Chicago, Illinois; Madison and Eau Claire, Wisconsin; St. Paul, Minnesota; Grand Forks, North Dakota; Brandon, Manitoba; and many other smaller towns in the path have a chance to see this event, the eclipse of the brightest star predicted to be eclipsed by an asteroid as seen from the U.S.A. since such predictions have been computed starting in 1975."

According to Johns Hokpins University "NEAR Shoemaker captured a movie of 433 Eros on Oct. 26, 2000, as it swooped from within 8 to 5 miles (13 to 8 kilometers) of the asteroid's surface. Rocks of all shapes and sizes cover the landscape. The smallest visible rocks are about 1.4 meters (5 feet) across. NEAR Shoemaker's low-altitude flyover on Oct. 25-26 brought it about 3 miles (5.3 kilometers) from Eros' surface, the closest any spacecraft has ever come to planetary body without landing on it."

"The formation of life is an automatic stage in the consolidation of rocky or "terrestrial" planets. The organic (=carbonaceous) matter, light elements, gases, and water must "float" toward the surface and the heavier metals must sink toward the center. Random processes in the molecular soup that fills microfractures in unmelted crust eventually produce self-replicating microtubules. In an appendix I suggest that some primordial crust remains because there is not enough consolidation energy to melt the whole planet. Energy is lost when iron planetesimals first partially melt and then coalesce to form the molten iron planetary core. Stony planetesimals accrete onto the surface of an already consolidated core."

"Scientists who have in the past been sceptical about space-based research should recognize and applaud the changes under way at NASA. The station has never been exclusively a science project, and should not be judged as such. It is most impressive as a feat of off-planet engineering, and it exists primarily because the United States and its partners want to establish a continuous human presence in space. For scientists, however, Alpha offers a real chance, at last, to find out whether there are substantive research questions worth pursuing on the high frontier."

"Under the leadership of chief scientist Kathie Olsen, the agency has already reorganized its Office of Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications, and given it a new name, the Office of Biological and Physical Research (OBPR). More importantly, the office has been made an 'enterprise', on a par with human spaceflight and space science. The move reflects the importance that administrator Daniel Goldin has attached to beefing up his agency's capability in the biological sciences."

"There will certainly be some interesting science [on the space station]," says Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, "but probably not $90 billion worth. The only way that you can really justify this project is if you want Star Trek to come true."

"Life exists even at the South Pole, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. Microbiologist Ed Carpenter of the State University of New York in Stony Brook and his colleagues have found between 200 and 5000 bacteria per millilitre of melted snow from the pole. To their surprise, biochemical tests and electron microscope images show that the organisms can grow and divide even at -17 degrees C-the coldest condition the team tested. "Probably they could live at even lower temperatures," says Carpenter."

"Large populations (200 to 5,000 cells ml^-1 in snowmelt) of bacteria were present in surface snow and firn from the south pole sampled in January 1999 and 2000. DNA isolated from this snow yielded ribosomal DNA sequences similar to those of several psychrophilic bacteria and a bacterium which aligns closely with members of the genus Deinococcus, an ionizing-radiation- and desiccation-resistant genus. We also obtained evidence of low rates of bacterial DNA and protein synthesis which indicates that the organisms were metabolizing at ambient subzero temperatures - 12 to -17°C)."

"The first known extrasolar planet in orbit around a Sun-like star was discovered in 1995. This object, as well as over two dozen subsequently detected extrasolar planets, were all identified by observing periodic variations of the Doppler shift of light emitted by the stars to which they are bound. All of these extrasolar planets are more massive than Saturn is, and most are more massive than Jupiter. All orbit closer to their stars than do the giant planets in our Solar System, and most of those that do not orbit closer to their star than Mercury is to the Sun travel on highly elliptical paths. Prevailing theories of star and planet formation, which are based on observations of the Solar System and of young stars and their environments, predict that planets should form in orbit about most single stars. However, these models require some modifications to explain the properties of the observed extrasolar planetary systems. "

"Cardiff is to become home to the UK's first Centre for Astrobiology ­ providing the UK with a facility to contribute to space missions probing for life on solar system bodies. The Centre, a joint initiative between Cardiff University and the University of Wales College of Medicine, forges a connection between astronomy and biology. It is led by two UK leaders in these fields: Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe and Professor Anthony Campbell. "

"In the wake of last month's announcement that scientists have found what they believe to be a living microbe that pre-dates Tyrannosaurus rex, Dr. Melanie Mormile is keeping one eye on salt crystals that contain ancient earth-bound bacteria and another on Mars. Mormile, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri-Rolla and an expert on microscopic organisms, thinks living bacteria might be trapped in the sulphate and chloride salts of Mars. Her work is partially funded by NASA, which announced Oct. 26 that it has officially scheduled six robotic missions over the next ten years to hunt for signs of life on the red planet."

A Soyuz rocket left Baikonur Cosmodrome today carrying the first crew to live aboard the International Space Station. Upon arrival at the space station this crew will inaugurate an unparalleled chapter in human history: hence forth, humans will no longer be limited to living on planet Earth.

We no longer just visit space. We live there.

° Space Station Users Guide

"This week an international team of astronomers announced the discovery of four new moons of Saturn, restoring the ringed planet to its status as commander of the largest retinue of satellites in the solar system. Their appearance should help researchers understand not just how the new moons were formed but also how the giant planets themselves came to be."

"For several years, ever-improving telescope technology has allowed astronomers to peer farther and farther beyond Neptune to discover a rapidly increasing number of bodies littering the outer reaches of the solar system. Now many researchers agree that an end is in sight, although some remain skeptical. "

"The ejection of material from Mars is thought to be caused by large impacts that would heat much of the ejecta to high temperatures. Images of the magnetic field of martian meteorite ALH84001 reveal a spatially heterogeneous pattern of magnetization associated with fractures and rock fragments. Heating the meteorite to 40°C reduces the intensity of some magnetic features, indicating that the interior of the rock has not been above this temperature since before its ejection from the surface of Mars. Because this temperature cannot sterilize most bacteria or eukarya, these data support the hypothesis that meteorites could transfer life between planets in the solar system. "

"A collaboration between Joseph L. Kirschvink, a professor of geobiology at the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues and Vanderbilt scientists has resulted in an article that appears in the Oct. 27 issue of the journal Science. In the article, the scientists do not claim that microbial life actually traveled from Mars to Earth aboard the meteorite, but they do conclude that the famous meteorite's interior remained cool enough to allow such a thing to happen. "

"Here we report that all nine of the Kuiper-belt objects (KBOs) in our survey on near-circular (low-eccentricity) orbits with perihelion distances larger than 40 AU have extremely red surfaces, thereby connecting an observable property with a dynamical class. Of the objects with orbital eccentricities greater than 0.1, about half are also very red, while the rest have colours similar to the Sun, meaning that reflected sunlight is not strongly modified by the objects' surface properties."

"An international team of eight "satellite hunters," astronomers who pluck tiny specks of light out of the distant solar system, has discovered four new outer moons of Saturn orbiting at least 15 million kilometers (more than 9 million miles) from the surface of the giant planet. "

"Shadowy asteroids and comets sharing Pluto's frigid part of the solar system mysteriously come in two colors, red and gray. Arizona and Oklahoma astronomers say they've made a step toward solving what's behind the coloring with the discovery that each color group has a unique orbit around the sun. "

"Astronomers observing with the adaptive optics instrument on the Keck II Telescope have obtained the best pictures yet of the planet Neptune, showing an upper atmosphere rich with moving features such as vortices, waves and narrowly spaced bands of clouds similar to those present around Jupiter. "

"A spectacular new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of the group of galaxies called Stephan's Quintet provides a detailed view of one of the most exciting star forming regions in the local Universe. This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a close-up view of the central part of Stephan's Quintet, giving a magnificent view of a gigantic cosmic collision."

"When scientists from NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission took their first close-up look at 433 Eros on Feb. 14, they had more questions than facts on their target asteroid. Now, after eight months of examining Eros with the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft's array of instruments and sensors, NEAR team members say they have solid data on the history, makeup and topography of the complex, oddly shaped space rock. "

"Two NASA spacecraft are teaming up to scrutinize Jupiter during the next few months to gain a better understanding of the planet's stormy atmosphere, diverse moons, faint rings and vast bubble of electrically charged gas. The joint studies of the solar system's largest planet by the Galileo and Cassini spacecraft will also resemble the passing of a baton from the durable veteran to the promising rookie, say mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA."

"A Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher said today (Oct. 24) that the number of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) may be higher than recent estimates. Research presented by MIT graduate student Scott Stuart at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Science showed that because the inclinations -- angles of orbit in relation to the plane of the Earth's orbit around the sun -- of known NEAs are not representative of the entire population, there may be more undetected NEAs out there."

"On Oct. 26, after more than eight months in orbit around asteroid Eros, the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft will swoop to within three miles (5.3 kilometers) of the asteroid, taking images and collecting data from a distance closer than any spacecraft has ever come to an asteroid."

According to Arizona State University, "a remarkable set of hot springs in the Mexican desert may hold the key to understanding one of the greatest mysteries in evolutionary biology: Why did Earth's biosphere suddenly erupt into a profusion of more complex forms at the "Cambrian Transition"?" Research being carried out by astrobiologist Jack Farmer and biologist James Elser is aimed at studying "the ecology of a set of remarkable desert springs located near Cuatro Cienegas, Coahuila, Mexico which may give scientists a modern "analogue" for conditions during the transition from Earth's ancient bacteria-based biosphere to the present, more complex one."

"We have discovered frequent variations in the near-infrared spectrum of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, which are indicative of the daily presence of sparse clouds covering less than 1% of the area of the satellite. We propose that Titan's atmosphere resembles Earth's, with clouds, rain, and an active weather cycle, driven by latent heat release from the primary condensible species."

"According to a paper published in the 19 October 2000 issue of the journal Nature, scientists claim to have coaxed bacteria to grow from spores found within salt crystals. If these bacteria were trapped (as spores) when the salt crystals formed, they are 250 million years old. The implications of this discovery are rather profound - both for the prospects of life upon other worlds - but also for the possibility of life being swapped between worlds."

"US researchers claim to have revived bacteria that have spent the last 250 million years in suspended animation. If true, the bugs smash the accepted record for the oldest living creatures ever discovered, previously held by bacteria a mere 25-40 million years old. "

"Here we report the isolation and growth of a previously unrecognized spore-forming bacterium (Bacillus species, designated 2-9-3) from a brine inclusion within a 250 million-year-old salt crystal from the Permian Salado Formation. Complete gene sequences of the 16S ribosomal DNA show that the organism is part of the lineage of Bacillus marismortui and Virgibacillus pantothenticus."

"The potential implications are profound. For instance, can spores effectively be immortal? What is the biochemistry that allows them to survive for so long? Where else on Earth, and to what depths, might ancient bacterial life be lurking? And, given this startling example of apparent bacterial durability, do spores in rocks even provide a mechanism for life to be transported between planets by 'panspermia', as has been proposed?"

"In what sounds like something out of "Jurassic Park,'' bacteria that lived before the dinosaurs and survived Earth's biggest mass extinction have been reawakened after a 250-million-year sleep in a salt crystal, scientists say."

"Magnetic field perturbations measured during Galileo flybys of Europa and Callisto are consistent with dipole fields induced by the temporal variations of the ambient jovian magnetospheric field. These fields are close to those expected for perfectly conducting moons. We investigate the implications of these observations for the electrical structure of the moon's interiors using a simple shell model. It is found that Europa and Callisto must possess regions where the conductivity exceeds 0.06 and 0.02 S/m at a depth of less than 200 and 300 km below the surface, respectively. Global Earth-like oceans under the surface of both moons could account for the observations provided they are at least a few kilometers thick. "

"The paper deals with a coupled model of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere of Titan. "

"We present two photoclinometric profiles across a trough in the martian northern polar layered terrain. Complications caused by albedo variations were avoided by using an early springtime Viking image with a thin cover of seasonal CO2 frost. The topographic profiles were constrained with stereogrammetric elevations derived from summertime Viking images of the same region. We find that the photoclinometric profiles are consistent with a nearby MOLA (Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter) track crossing the same polar trough. "

"Imaging spectrometer data from the ISM instrument on Phobos 2 were used to characterize spatial variations in near-infrared spectral properties of the martian surface, to determine the correspondence between near-infrared and visible-wavelength spectral variations, and to assess lithologic variations in the surface materials. "

"It is suggested that methane was the dominant carbon-bearing component of the primary atmosphere of Mars. In this atmosphere CO₂, being a minor component, became enriched in ¹³C due to isotopic exchange with methane. In the presence of water CO₂ was deposited as carbonate. Subsequently the methane atmosphere was lost to outer space possibly due to impact erosion. Eventually, ¹³C-enriched carbonates became a source of atmospheric CO₂."

"An alternative explanation is proposed for the hydrogen excess observed by the Lunar Prospector neutron spectrometer: solar wind protons trapped on radiation defects in regolith particles and effectively retained at the temperature of the lunar poles can be misinterpreted as water. Protons from the Earth's magnetotail plasma can be a source of hydrogen atoms in the regolith of permanently shadowed areas of the lunar surface. "

"We investigate the evolution of a circumterrestrial disk of debris generated by a giant impact on Earth and the dynamical characteristics of the moon accreted from the disk by using high-resolution N-body simulation. We find that in most cases the disk evolution results in the formation of a single large moon on a nearly circular orbit close to the equatorial plane of the initial disk just outside the Roche limit, which is consistent with the previous work by S. Ida et al. (1997, Nature 389, 353-357)."

"NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin named Dr. Baruch Blumberg, director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute and winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, as senior advisor to the Administrator, effective today. As senior advisor, Blumberg will provide guidance for NASA's newly created enterprise, the Office of Biological and Physical Research in its efforts to develop an interdisciplinary research program focused on biology, bringing together physics, chemistry, biology and engineering. Blumberg also will continue in his role as director of the Astrobiology Institute."

"The preatmospheric mass of the Tagish Lake meteoroid was about 200,000 kilograms. Its calculated orbit indicates affinity to the Apollo asteroids with a semimajor axis in the middle of the asteroid belt, consistent with a linkage to low-albedo C, D, and P type asteroids. The mineralogy, oxygen isotope, and bulk chemical composition of recovered samples of the Tagish Lake meteorite are intermediate between CM and CI meteorites. These data suggest that the Tagish Lake meteorite may be one of the most primitive solar system materials yet studied."

"Primitive meteorites provide a glimpse into the early history of our solar system, but some of the most primitive meteorites are also rarely found on Earth. Well-preserved organic matter in the Tagish Lake meteorite provides a unique opportunity to study the nature and origin of organic matter that may have accreted on early Earth and played a role in the origin of life."

"Researchers at The University of Western Ontario (Western) and the University of Calgary -- working with colleagues from Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom -- have found that meteorites recovered in northern British Columbia may be one of the most primitive solar system materials ever examined. "We can now say that this may be the 'crown jewel' of meteorite finds," says Peter Brown, a professor in Western's Department of Physics and Astronomy. "This discovery will aid scientists in the reconstruction of the early solar system."

"We investigate the low-mass population of the young cluster IC 348 down to the deuterium-burning limit, a fiducial boundary between brown dwarf and planetary mass objects, using a new and innovative method for the spectral classification of late-type objects. "

"In a young star cluster perched near Orion's belt, a team at the Astrophysics Institute of the Canary Islands has spotted nearly a score of what appear to be balls of gas several times as massive as the planet Jupiter. Unlike planets, the objects are celestial free agents, drifting through the cluster rather than orbiting stars."

"We present the discovery by optical and near-infrared imaging of an extremely red, low-luminosity population of isolated objects in the young, nearby stellar cluster around the multiple, massive star Orionis. Like the planets of the solar system, these objects are unable to sustain stable nuclear burning in their interiors, but in contrast they are not bound to stars. This new kind of isolated giant planet, which apparently forms on time scales of less than a few million years, offers a challenge to our understanding of the formation processes of planetary mass objects."

"Scientists have discovered 18 planet-like objects, drifting free of any central star, in a region of the Orion constellation. If the young, cool bodies are in fact planets, these free floaters may pose a considerable challenge to current theories about how planets form. Planets are generally thought to form over tens of millions of years, as gas and dust in the disk swirling around a star condenses and clumps together. The objects discovered by the Science researchers seem to have quite a different origin and evolutionary history. They lack a central star like our sun, and they are part of a star cluster, sigma Orionis, that is no more than five million years old. (Our sun is billions of years old.) "

"The results to be released today by Science show, for the very first time, images and spectra of bodies showing planetary masses which oddly enough are not linked to any of the surrounding stars. These so-called superjupiters float freely within a star cluster, but at distances sufficiently large to allow them to avoid the gravitational attraction of other stars. Of the eighteen candidates detected so far, three have been scrutinised using spectroscopic techniques and have been confirmed as gaseous objects with surface temperatures in the range 1,500 degrees Celsius, as expected for planets slightly less massive than Jupiter undergoing very early evolutionary phases."

"Here we report the discovery in Pavilion Lake, British Columbia, Canada, of a distinctive assemblage of freshwater calcite microbialites. The morphologies of the modern microbialites vary with depth, and dendritic microstructures of the deep water (>30 m) mounds indicate that they may be modern analogues for the ancient calcareous structures. These microbialites thus provide an opportunity to study the biogeochemical interactions that produce fabrics similar to those of some enigmatic Early Cambrian reef structures. "

"A team of interdisciplinary astrobiologists from NASA and other agencies is homing in on recognizing the microbial biosignatures for life, making it easier someday to identify life on other planets. A scientific paper analyzing the team's research results, titled "Modern Freshwater Microbialite Analogues for Ancient Dendritic Reef Structures," will be published in the magazine Nature on Oct. 5. The paper focuses on the study of mounded microbialite deposits - layers of living and non-living organisms - found at Pavilion Lake in Canada. Microbialites are organic sedimentary mineral deposits covered by a thin layer of microbes that become entombed in the mounds as they grow outward. "

"A renowned cadre of researchers from diverse scientific disciplines will present the latest findings in terraforming Mars at a 2-day conference at NASA's Ames Research Center. The conference, "The Physics and Biology of Making Mars Habitable," will focus on restoring Mars' environment so it can support life, including possibly human life."

"A team of scientists at the University of Massachusetts led by microbial genetics professor Shiladitya DasSarma, in collaboration with noted molecular biotechnologist Leroy Hood of the Institute of Systems Biology (ISB), Seattle, Wash., has completed the genome sequence of Halobacterium species NRC-1, an "extremophilic" microorganism that grows best in an environment 10 times saltier than sea water. The achievement will be published in the Oct. 3 edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). "

Editor's note: this draft presentation contains proposed org charts for the new Office of Biological and Physical Research at NASA HQ.

"The following discussion of division structure and organization reflects the philosophy and strategic plan recommended by the Chief Scientist and the Administrator. This is only a preliminary organizational structure and it will be fine-tuned over the next six to twelve months by the selected Associate Administrator and Division Directors using advice obtained from the Life and Microgravity Advisory Committee and the Space Studies Board."

"A 16-month sequence of radio images of the active galaxy 3C120 with the Very Long Baseline Array reveals a region in the relativistic jet where superluminal components flash on and off over time scales of months, while the polarization angle rotates. The cloud, which rotates the polarization direction and possibly eclipses a section of the jet, represents a "missing link" between the ultradense broad-emission-line clouds closer to the center and the lower density narrow-emission-line clouds seen on kiloparsec scales. "

"Cepheid variables are giant yellow stars that grow dimmer and brighter over periods of days or weeks. Astronomers have caught Zeta Geminorum in the act of swelling and shrinking, making it the first Cepheid that astronomers have actually seen change its size."

"We determined the mass of asteroid 433 Eros, its lower order gravitational harmonics, and rotation state, using ground-based Doppler and range tracking of the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR)-Shoemaker spacecraft and images of the asteroid's surface landmarks. The mass of Eros is (6.687 ± 0.003) ? 10¹⁸ grams,which, coupled with our volume estimate, implies a bulk density of 2.67 ± 0.03 grams per cubic centimeter. The asteroid appears to have a uniform density distribution. The dynamical environment of Eros suggests that it is covered with regolith and that one might expect material transport toward the deepest potential wells in the saddle and 5.5-kilometer crater regions."

"Eros is a very elongated (34 kilometers by 11 kilometers by 11 kilometers) asteroid, most of the surface of which is saturated with craters smaller than 1 kilometer in diameter. The largest crater is 5.5 kilometers across, but there is a 10-kilometer saddle-like depression with attributes of a large degraded crater. Spectra (800 to 2500 nanometers) are consistent with an ordinary chondrite composition for which the measured mean density of 2.67 ± 0.1 grams per cubic centimeter implies internal porosities ranging from about 10 to 30 percent."

"Measurements from the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR)-Shoemaker Laser Rangefinder (NLR) indicate that asteroid 433 Eros is a consolidated body with a complex shape dominated by collisions. Impact crater morphology is influenced by both gravity and structural control. Small-scale topography reveals ridges and grooves that may be generated by impact-related fracturing. "

"Low aluminum abundances for all regions argue against global differentiation of Eros. Magnesium/silicon, aluminum/silicon, calcium/silicon, and iron/silicon ratios are best interpreted as a relatively primitive, chondritic composition. Marked depletions in sulfur and possible aluminum and calcium depletions, relative to ordinary chondrites, may represent signatures of limited partial melting or impact volatilization."

Results from the NEAR Shoemaker mission to asteroid 433 Eros show that the asteroid is very ancient. So ancient, in fact, that it may have witnessed the earliest days of our solar system's history. Dr. Andrew F. Cheng of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., which manages the NEAR mission said "we can now say that Eros is an undifferentiated asteroid with homogeneous structure, that never separated into a distinct crust, mantle and core. We have definitive mass and density measurements plus spectacular images and movies showing ridges, pits, troughs and grooves that provide fascinating clues about its history."

"Sherry L. Cady, Ph.D. Assistant Professor in the Department of Geology of Portland State University, Portland, Ore., has accepted the post of Editor-in-Chief of an innovative new peer-reviewed journal, ASTROBIOLOGY, which will be published in 2001 by Mary Ann Liebert Inc. "Astrobiology, in its broadest sense, is developing as an area of distinct academic endeavor,'' said Mary Ann Liebert. "This Journal will provide a home for multidisciplinary studies and play an important role in the growth of the field. It will be published both in print and online."

According to the Executive Summary of a report from the UK Task Force on Near Earth Objects "The threat from Near Earth Objects raises major issues, among them the inadequacy of current knowledge, confirmation of hazard after initial observation, disaster management (if the worst came to the worst), methods of mitigation including deflection, and reliable communication with the public. The Task Force believes that steps should be taken at government level to set in place appropriate bodies - international, European including national - where these issues can be discussed and decisions taken. The United Kingdom is well placed to make a significant contribution to what should be a global effort."

"The Viking Landers were unable to detect evidence of life on Mars but, instead, found a chemically reactive soil capable of decomposing organic molecules. This reactivity was attributed to the presence of one or more as-yet-unidentified inorganic superoxides or peroxides in the martian soil. Using electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, we show that superoxide radical ions (O2-) form directly on Mars-analog mineral surfaces exposed to ultraviolet radiation under a simulated martian atmosphere. These oxygen radicals can explain the reactive nature of the soil and the apparent absence of organic material at the martian surface. "

"Fungi have been implicated in the early colonization of land by plants. The discovery of a fossil fungus provides strong support for this hypothesis. The important role of symbiotic associations of fungi with plants and animals is increasingly being recognized, as is the fact that some of these associations date back to the origin of terrestrial life on Earth."

"Earlier this summer, two dozen scientists gathered to take another crack at the question of viral origins and evolution. Fresh evidence that viruses have existed for billions of years suggests that they were on hand when the first cells arose. That has scientists wondering what role these stripped-down microbes played in the evolution of life. "

"A million years ago, in the constellation Scorpius, one of a pair of binary stars erupted into a supernova. Its nonexploding partner shot off into space and is now Zeta Ophiuchi, a bright, giant "runaway star" racing through the neighboring constellation Ophiuchus. The supernova has been harder to trace. Astrophysicists know it must have collapsed into a neutron star, but where it wound up has been anyone's guess. Now, however, astronomers are fingering two candidates, one of which is the closest known neutron star to Earth. "

"Recent results on Polaris and other Cepheids, variable stars used as a yardstick for astronomical distances, illustrate some of the new capabilities we have for studying this important class of stars."

Excerpt from Conference Report (H. Rept.106-843) to authorize appropriations for NASA for FY 2000, 2001, and 2002:

SEC. 314. LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE.

(a) Review: The Administrator shall enter into appropriate arrangements with the National Academy of Sciences for the conduct of a review of--

(1) international efforts to determine the extent of life in the universe; and

(2) enhancements that can be made to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's efforts to determine the extent of life in the universe.

(1) an assessment of the direction of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's astrobiology initiatives within the Origins program;

(2) an assessment of the direction of other initiatives carried out by entities other than the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to determine the extent of life in the universe, including other Federal agencies, foreign space agencies, and private groups such as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute;

(3) recommendations about scientific and technological enhancements that could be made to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's astrobiology initiatives to effectively utilize the initiatives of the scientific and technical communities; and

(4) recommendations for possible coordination or integration of National Aeronautics and Space Administration initiatives with initiatives of other entities described in paragraph (2).

According to A UC Irvine press release: " a new NASA project to grow protein crystals on the International Space Station takes off tomorrow when the Space Shuttle Atlantis travels to the unique orbiting laboratory. In addition, as part of a NASA pilot education program, middle and high school students from Alabama, California, Florida and Tennessee gave NASA a helping hand.

"Large-scale nonlinear simulations of Jupiter's 5-micron hot spots produce long-lived coherent structures that cause subsidence in local regions, explaining the low cloudiness and the dryness measured by the Galileo probe inside a hot spot."

"Waves of up-and-down winds that span great ranges in air pressure may explain the surprisingly clear, dry areas near Jupiter's equator, new research based on data from NASA's Galileo entry probe indicates."

"The Permian-Triassic transition in the Karoo Basin of South Africa was characterized by a rapid and apparently basin-wide change from meandering to braided river systems, as evidenced by preserved sedimentary facies. This radical changeover in river morphology is consistent with geomorphic consequences stemming from a rapid and major die-off of rooted plant life in the basin."

"Two hundred and fifty million years ago, at the end of the Permian period and the opening of the Triassic, 85% of the species in the sea vanished in a geologic moment of less than half a million years. Now from South Africa comes evidence that the Permian-Triassic extinction of land plants was equally brutal and swift. In a paper in Science, researchers report that rocks that started as sediments laid down in South Africa's Karoo Basin 250 million years ago tell of an abrupt switch in style of sedimentation, as if the land had been permanently stripped of the rooted plants that held it in place."

"Phylogenetic analyses of multiple magnesium-tetrapyrrole biosynthesis genes using a combination of distance, maximum parsimony, and maximum likelihood methods indicate that heliobacteria are closest to the last common ancestor of all oxygenic photosynthetic lineages and that green sulfur bacteria and green nonsulfur bacteria are each other's closest relatives. These results challenge previous conclusions based on 16S ribosomal RNA and Hsp60/Hsp70 analyses that green nonsulfur bacteria or heliobacteria are the earliest phototrophs. The overall consensus of our phylogenetic analysis, that bacteriochlorophyll biosynthesis evolved before chlorophyll biosynthesis, also argues against the long-held Granick hypothesis. "

"The Bauer group's work also reinforces recent fundamental changes in molecular genetics that show bacteria evolved in a complex manner that resembles a tangled briar patch, with branches going every which way from a number of stems, instead of a traditional evolutionary tree that shows all species neatly branching out from a single stem that represents their common ancestor, usually regarded as the universal ancestral cell. This change in perspective is necessary because gene-swapping was common among ancient bacteria early in evolution. "

"The next milestone in telescope size is likely to be one with a primary mirror 30 meters in diameter, which would provide ten times the light-gathering area of each of the Kecks. The University of California and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have teamed up to design and build a 30-meter telescope, dubbed the California Extremely Large Telescope (CELT). The project is still in the early planning stages, but researchers led by UC Santa Cruz astronomers are making steady progress on the conceptual design for CELT. "

"Broccoli is just the thing to keep astronauts' bones healthy. If people are ever to reach Mars or other planets, they had better take some broccoli plants with them. French researchers have found that a deficiency of vitamin K-which is particularly abundant in broccoli-may contribute to bone loss in astronauts."

On the morning of 18 January 2000, a small asteroid slammed into the Earth's atmosphere over northwestern North America. As the object approached the Earth's surface the shock of entering the atmosphere caused it to shatter into many pieces. A sizeable portion of the meteorite's fragments landed on an ice-covered lake in British Columbia - Lake Tagish - and were quickly encased in ice. A dedicated amateur had the foresight to exercise extreme care in collecting the meteorite samples - including keeping them encased in the ice within which they had come to rest. His actions were to allow others to open a door into an early portion of our solar system's history.

"Biological life is in control of its own means of reproduction, which generally involves complex, autocatalysing chemical reactions. But this autonomy of design and manufacture has not yet been realized artificially. Robots are still laboriously designed and constructed by teams of human engineers, usually at considerable expense. Here we report the results of a combined computational and experimental approach in which simple electromechanical systems are evolved through simulations from basic building blocks ... We thus achieve autonomy of design and construction using evolution in a 'limited universe' physical simulation coupled to automatic fabrication."

"One of the greatest challenges in robotics is to create machines that are able to interact with unpredictable environments in real time. A possible solution may be to use swarms of robots behaving in a self-organized manner, similar to workers in an ant colony."

"For three billion years, before the Cambrian diversification of life, laminated carbonate build-ups called stromatolites were widespread in shallow marine seas. These ancient structures are generally thought to be microbial in origin and potentially preserve evidence of the Earth's earliest biosphere. Despite their evolutionary significance, little is known about stromatolite formation, especially the relative roles of microbial and environmental factors in stromatolite accretion."

"The recent news that two high-tech titans have donated $12.5 million to energize the hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence invites cynicism. To the world at large, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and former Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold might appear to be two men gripped by midlife crises of the billionaire kind. "

"An amateur astronomer has discovered a new comet - using not a back garden telescope but a multi-million pound satellite. "

"When they first set out to create an entry for the international website design competition, Thinkquest, the three students from the United Kingdom and Canada had no idea how far their entry would go. Adrian Hon from England, and David Sewell and Katherine Harris from Canada spent the last year constructing one of the most comprehensive educational websites on the Internet - and all of this was done while they were still at school. The website, Astrobiology: The Living Universe, covers every aspect of the young science of astrobiology that includes exobiology, humans in space, planetary biology and the origins of life."

Editor's note: This site is well worth an extended visit.

"At a ceremony last Friday (Aug. 25) in which the National Science Foundation's Green Bank Telescope (GBT) was formally dedicated, U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd (D - WV) announced that the gigantic telescope had successfully opened its two-acre 'eye' on the Universe earlier that week. The telescope was christened the "Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope" at the ceremony, which was held at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) site in Green Bank, West Virginia. The event also featured remarks from Dr. Rita R Colwell, Director of the National Science Foundation. "

"Last week, the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory shattered its own record for comet discoveries when astronomers announced that the orbiting spacecraft had recorded its 200th sungrazing comet. Michael Oates, an amateur astronomer in Britain, spotted SOHO-200 in an online image captured by one of SOHO's coronagraphs. The picture showed the comet evaporating as it plunged through the superheated solar corona."

"Scientists claim to have recreated one of the vital steps in the origin of life on Earth. Their experiments show that a chemical vital to all living creatures can be synthesised from organic and metallic compounds. "

"Experiments exploring the potential catalytic role of iron sulfide at 250°C and elevated pressures revealed a facile, pressure-enhanced synthesis of organometallic phases formed through the reaction of alkyl thiols and carbon monoxide with iron sulfide. The natural synthesis of such compounds is anticipated in present-day and ancient environments wherever reduced hydrothermal fluids pass through iron sulfide-containing crust. Here, pyruvic acid was synthesized in the presence of such organometallic phases. These compounds could have provided the prebiotic Earth with critical biochemical functionality. "

According to NASA "researchers have the strongest evidence yet that one of Jupiter's most mysterious moons hides a fermenting ocean of water underneath its icy coat. This evidence comes from magnetic readings by NASA's Galileo spacecraft, reported in the Friday, Aug. 25, edition of the journal Science. "The direction that a magnetic compass on Europa would point to flips around in a way that's best explained by the presence of a layer of electrically conducting liquid, such as saltwater, beneath the ice," explained Dr. Margaret Kivelson, one of five co- authors at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)."

"On 3 January 2000, the Galileo spacecraft passed close to Europa when it was located far south of Jupiter's magnetic equator in a region where the radial component of the magnetospheric magnetic field points inward toward Jupiter. The Galileo magnetometer measured changes in the magnetic field predicted if a current-carrying outer shell, such as a planet-scale liquid ocean, is present beneath the icy surface. The evidence that Europa's field varies temporally strengthens the argument that a liquid ocean exists beneath the present-day surface. "

"The possibility of a subsurface ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa has been suggested on the basis of theoretical, geological, and spectroscopic arguments. But, as Stevenson explains in his Perspective, none of these arguments were compelling. In contrast, the magnetic field data obtained by the Galileo spacecraft and presented in the report by Kivelson et al., provide persuasive evidence for a conducting layer--most likely a global water ocean--near Europa's surface. "

"There are two main groups of theories for the origin of life on Earth, the prebiotic broth theories and the hydrothermal theories, exemplified by the iron-sulfur world theory. In his Perspective, Wächtershäuser discusses the report by Cody et al., which provides key support for the latter proposal. "

"Bacteria live and grow in clouds, where they may trigger rainfall and alter climate. The discovery was made by a team of Austrian researchers, in clouds over the Alps. 'We were astonished to find actively growing bacteria,' says Birgitt Sattler of the University of Innsbruck. She says that although bacteria are known to be blown high into the atmosphere and dispersed around the Earth, no one knew if they could actually grow and divide in clouds. 'The relatively clean and cold atmosphere of high altitudes was not regarded as a suitable place for bacterial growth.'"

"The future of Astrobiology is looking ever brighter. On August 24-5, 13 of the nation's brightest college students will complete their ten-week experience at the NASA Ames Astrobiology Academy when they present the results of their summer research, conducted under the supervision of the field's top scientists. Student projects range from a feasibility study to develop a future Mars mission, to the role of ultraviolet radiation on the early evolution of life on Earth."

Dr. Chris McKay from NASA Ames Research Center made a presentation on two springs located on Axel Heiberg Island at the recent Mars Society convention in Toronto. These springs run year round and emerge out of permafrost that is approximately 1/2 kilometer thick. These are the only two springs of this type known in the world. They also bear some resemblance to recent discoveries made by the Mars Global Surveyor. Given the observed features on Earth and the apparent observation of similar features on Mars, McKay noted the usefulness of terrestrial analogs as a means whereby Martian features can be better understood.

"Mars today is arid. Its thin atmosphere and cold surface are no place for water. Yet many of the planet's surface features, vast plains and deep ravines, hint that water was once abundant. Now a chunk of rock that fell to Earth near the Egyptian village of El-Nakhla on 28 June 1911 provides the newest clue that water was once common on the Martian surface."

"Water soluble ion concentrations from the Martian achondrite Nakhla and three asteroidal achondrites are reported. The Nakhla sample contains significant concentrations of chloride, sulfate, magnesium, sodium, calcium, and potassium ions. The results are interpreted to indicate that this rock has been in contact with an seawater-like brine on the Martian surface. "

"Astrophysicists are still struggling to make sense of the extrasolar bestiary, but they will venture a few conclusions. Stars appear to be prolific planet factories, they believe, with lighter bodies outnumbering heavier ones. If the pattern holds, droves of even smaller planets are awaiting discovery. For another thing, multiple planet systems are probably common. "

"NASA's decision last week to send two rovers to Mars in 2003 is being hailed by researchers as affirming the agency's commitment to exploring the Red Planet. But once the applause dies down, cash-strapped space science managers will be forced to make tough decisions about how to shoulder the added $200 million cost of a second mission, starting with $96 million that must come out of NASA's 2001 budget."

"With the publication in recent weeks of two papers on a mass extinction 183 million years ago, researchers can add five suggestive cases to the list of extinctions with known causes. These extinctions coincide with massive outpourings of lava, accompanied by signs that global warming threw the ocean-atmosphere system out of whack. Although no one can yet pin any of these mass extinctions with certainty on the volcanic eruptions, scientists say it's unlikely that they're all coincidences."

"Physical evidence of life (physical biomarkers) from the deposits of carbonate hot springs were documented at the scale of microorganisms-submillimeter to submicrometer. The four moderate-temperature (57 to 72°C), neutral pH springs reported on in this study, support diverse communities of bacteria adapted to specific physical and chemical conditions. The presence of preserved microscopic physical biomarkers at all four sites supports a strategy of searching for evidence of life in hot spring deposits on Mars."

"As a result of the Viking missions of the early 1970s, the presence of a strong oxidant in martian soil was suggested. Here we present a hypothesis, testable by near-term missions, that iron(VI) is a likely contributor to the martian oxidative pool. "

"The detection of a sub-surface present-day ocean on Europa is of considerable interest. One possible method of detecting an ocean is by an orbiting radar sounder. The effects of a range of possible Europan ice chemistries on radar attenuation are investigated, using plausible Europa ice temperature profiles. Ice chemistries are derived from geochemical models of Europa predicting a sulfate-dominated ocean, a chloride-dominated ocean scaled from the Earth, and on experimental data on marine ice formed beneath ice shelves on Earth, on low-salinity sea ice and models of rock and ice mixtures. "

"Regional-scale undulations with associated small-scale secondary structures are inferred to be folds on Jupiter's moon Europa. Formation is consistent with stresses from tidal deformation, potentially triggering compressional instability of a region of locally high thermal gradient. Folds may compensate for extension elsewhere on Europa and then relax away over time."

"Here we report the construction of a DNA machine in which the DNA is used not only as a structural material, but also as 'fuel'. The machine, made from three strands of DNA, has the form of a pair of tweezers. It may be closed and opened by addition of auxiliary strands of 'fuel' DNA; each cycle produces a duplex DNA waste product."

Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph Coronagraphic Observations of Beta Pictoris, [abstract] The Astrophysical Journal

"We present new coronagraphic images of Beta Pictoris obtained with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph in 1997 September. The observed properties of the warped inner disk are inconsistent with a driving force from stellar radiation. However, warping induced by the gravitational potential of one or more planets is consistent with the data. Using models of planet-warped disks constructed by Larwood & Papaloizou, we derive possible masses of the perturbing object."

"We model the linear polarization of the radiation of Beta Pictoris scattered by dust particles in the circumstellar disk. The observed asymmetry in the polarization of two wings can be explained if more small grains (by 20% - 30%) are present on the northeast side of the disk. We show that such an asymmetry in the size distributions in two wings might be caused by an influence of the interstellar medium; a required amount of small grains could be produced by destructive collisions of interstellar grains with the circumstellar dust particles."

"The Society's increased support of SETI@home is part of an unprecedented new strategic alliance with Project Voyager, led by Ann Druyan of Carl Sagan Productions and Joe Firmage of Intend Change. The new alliance will allow the Society to merge the power of space exploration with the tremendous outreach potential of the Internet, expanding its Internet presence and initiating new programs for public participation."

"A total of ten new extrasolar planets were announced this morning at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in Manchester, UK. The total number of extrasolar planets now known is 50. Several of the planets are the size of Saturn or smaller. In addition, analysis of previous extrasolar planet discoveries suggests that as many as 50% of the systems discovered thus far may actually have multiple planets."

"The three new planets discovered around the stars HD12661, HD 92788 and HD 38529 are large gas giants similar to the planet Jupiter. All are in highly eccentric orbits that alternately bring them close to the planet and carry them far away. This dance alternately drags the star toward and away from Earth by a distance about half the radius of the star, causing a Doppler shift in the star's light that astronomers can detect. "

"Today we report the discovery of a second extra-solar planetary system with two Saturnian planets around the star HD 83443. In addition to the new planet HD83443c described above, we can also announce new planetary candidates discovered in our planet-search programmes in both hemispheres. "

"5 extrasolar planets discovered with CORALIE including a 2 Saturnian planet system; 1 extrasolar planet detected with ELODIE; The HD 168443 system: A planet + a brown dwarf?"

"On Monday 7 August 2000, an announcement will be made at a meeting of the IAU (International Astronomical Union) that a Jupiter-sized planet has been discovered orbiting the nearby star Epsilon Eridani. The newly discovered planet is in an elliptical orbit with an average distance estimated to be just under 300 million miles from its parent star - a distance roughly equivalent to the distance that the asteroid belt is from our own sun. The announcement will be made by Dr. William Cochran of the McDonald Observatory.

"We search for signatures of planets in 43 intensively monitored microlensing events that were observed between 1995 and 1999. Planets would be expected to cause a short (~1 day) deviation on an otherwise normal smooth, symmetric, single-lens light curve. We find no such anomalies and infer that less than 1/3 of the ~0.3 M_sun stars that typically comprise the lens population have Jupiter-mass companions in the range of semi-major axes 1.5 AU < a < 4 AU. "

"This paper compares the statistical features of the sample of discovered extrasolar planets with those of the secondaries in nearby spectroscopic binaries, in order to enable us to distinguish between the two populations. Based on 32 planet candidates discovered until March 2000, we find that their eccentricity and period distribution are surprisingly similar to those of the binary population, while their mass distribution is remarkably different. The mass distributions definitely support the idea of two distinct populations, suggesting the planet candidates are indeed extrasolar planets. The transition between the two populations probably occurs at 10--30 Jupiter masses. We point out a possible negative correlation between the orbital period of the planets and the metallicity of their parent stars, which holds only for periods less than about 100 days. These short-period systems are characterized by circular or almost circular orbits. "

"Oil is formed in some modern seafloor vent systems after rapid thermal maturation of sedimentary organic matter by hydrothermal fluids. Although most of this petroleum escapes into the ocean, some hydrocarbons may be trapped as fluid inclusions in hydrothermal precipitates or as bituminous residues in cavities. From the Pilbara craton of Australia, we report the discovery of pyrobitumen and oil in an Early Archean (ca. 3235 Ma) deep-sea volcanogenic massive sulfide deposit."

"NASA bureaucrats [are putting] the finishing touches on a realignment of the agency's struggling biology effort that should bolster fundamental research and allow scientists to make better use of the [ISS], scheduled to be completed in 2005."

"Most researchers have believed that the days were long gone when water splashed on the surface of Mars or even near it. Now continuing analyses of martian meteorites and stunning images from the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), which has been in orbit since 1997, are breathing new life into the Red Planet."

"Japan's x-ray astronomy program was dealt a new blow last month when a solar geomagnetic storm left an orbiting x-ray telescope spinning out of control."

"On Monday 7 August 2000, an announcement will be made at a meeting of the IAU (International Astronomical Union) that a Jupiter-sized planet has been discovered orbiting the nearby star Epsilon Eridani. The newly discovered planet is in an elliptical orbit with an average distance estimated to be just under 300 million miles from its parent star - a distance roughly equivalent to the distance that the asteroid belt is from our own sun. The discovery was made by astronomers at the McDonald Observatory in Texas in collaboration with other astronomers around the world."

"Scientists analyzing some of the oldest-known rocks on Earth have discovered for the first time a way to recover from the geological record details about the evolution of oxygen and ozone in the planet's early atmosphere - two key ingredients that permitted and recorded the expansion of terrestrial life."

"The globular cluster Messier 15 is shown in this color image obtained with the NASA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). Lying some 40,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Pegasus, M15 is one of nearly 150 known globular clusters that form a vast halo surrounding our Milky Way galaxy. Each of these clusters is a spherical association of hundreds of thousands of ancient stars. "

"The University of Wisconsin-Madison has joined forces with an international consortium to help build and operate a major new South African observatory. "

"Planning a mission to Jupiter, its moons and other destinations in the solar system has gotten quicker and easier, thanks to a Purdue University engineer. "

"Models of Titan's thermal history indicate that an ocean consisting of an ammonia-water solution, as much as 200 km deep, is presently concealed beneath a crust of water ice. Conditions within this hypothetical ocean are discussed here and compared with conditions in terrestrial biomes. "

"We have constructed a numerical simulation of the formation of water-ice planetesimals in the outer solar nebula which incorporates global turbulence, condensation and sublimation of H2O, and collisional accumulation. "

"While we clearly detected the CO⁺ in both of these comets, no N⁺2 was detected in either comet."

"General structure and composition of the near-solar dust cloud are investigated. Based on estimates for sources and transport of dust to the near-solar region, we derive a representative set of trajectories of dust grains by numerical integrations and obtain the spatial distribution of different dust populations within 10 solar radii from the Sun."

In 1996 the world held its breath for a moment as David McKay and Everett Gibson from NASA's Johnson Space Center revealed evidence which they felt pointed to the distinct possibility of past life on Mars. The source of their evidence was the ALH84001 meteorite - a piece of Mars blown clear off the planet millions of years ago which sat in Antarctica for thousands of years before being picked up by a team of meteorite hunters.

Not everyone agrees with their conclusions.

"The complex chemical structures found in a meteorite from Mars, which scientists in 1996 hailed as possible evidence of past life on the planet, can be reproduced quite simply in any laboratory according to new research from the University of Greenwich."

"In a dramatic boost toward the search for life on other planets, two high-tech leaders have agreed to donate $12.5 million to help Bay Area astronomers construct the world's largest telescope specifically designed to seek out signals from other civilizations across outer space. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan P. Myhrvold will provide the funding to the SETI Institute in Mountain View, a non-profit organization, and the University of California-Berkeley."

A webcam is now located in the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station on Devon Island in the Canadian high arctic. Over the next several weeks, the webcam will be moved around so as to show different views out the windows - as well as activities inside and adjacent to the habitat. This webcam is sponsored by SpaceRef.com and makes use of new PlanetNet wireless technology developed by Simon Fraser University in partnership with NASA.

"The risk of damage to terrestrial ecosystems by putative Martian or Europan microbes is slim, but it is not zero. NASA¹s approach is sensibly cautious: don't let it loose until you know what it is. The agency has even separated the functions of astrobiologist and planetary-protection officer so there is no apparent conflict of interest. "

"The theory that microbial life once came to Earth on a meteorite from another planet will be tested on July 26 when a NASA rocket carries into space special microorganisms from research at the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI). The tiny space pioneers will be riding an apogee, or suborbital, flight path similar to the historic 1961 flight of astronaut Alan Sheppard. The passengers this time will be four dime-size cultures, each holding about 100 million cells of the microbes that will be exposed to space vacuum and solar radiation for 10 minutes. "

"The astronauts' repair of the international space station captured media attention during the space shuttle flight in May. But inside the orbiter, a life science experiment took another small step toward creating a technology that may eventually save thousands of lives around the world. The latest trial in a study ongoing for two years, the experiment involved a gene transfer in soybeans that the researchers hope will lead to edible vaccines, among other products, in the not-too-distant future. The Wisconsin Center for Space Automation and Robotics (WCSAR) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Producers' Natural Processing (PNP), a West Lafayette, Ind., biotech company, are directing the study; it is part of the first wave of research projects in NASA's drive to commercialize space. "

"Norman Pace strides across his office and returns with a small rock plucked from the frigid wastes of Antarctica. The University of Colorado biologist, who is credited with finding organic life in some of the harshest places on Earth, turns the stone in his hand and says, "A fundamental question is whether there is photosynthesis going on, on the surface of Mars," itself a frosty wasteland. "If there is life on Mars, this is what you're going to see," says Dr. Pace, pointing to a colored layer in the rock, once home to millions of microorganisms.

"The timescale for the accretion of bodies in the disk surrounding a young star depends upon a number of assumptions, but there are few observational constraints. In our own Solar System, measurements of meteoritic components can provide information about the inner regions of the nebula, but not the outer parts. Observations of the evolution of more massive protostellar systems imply that significant changes occur in the physical properties of their dust with time. The simplest explanation is that thermal annealing of the original, amorphous grains in the hot inner nebula slowly increases the fractional abundance of crystalline material over time. When applied to our own Solar System, this process can explain observed variations in both the volatile and dusty components of comets, while also providing a natural indicator of a comet's mean formation age."

"Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light". This admonition about superluminal travel from Einstein stood as an intellectual challenge for most of the past century. While science fiction television series regularly flaunted this speed limit, the physics of today was unable to do so - at least not in a fashion wherein the results can be considered conclusive. In a report in the current issue of Nature magazine, researchers report that they have clear evidence that something can actually travel faster than light - or at least appear to do so. Moreover, the researchers contend that this is not at odds with Einstein's theories pertaining to relativity. Rather, it takes advantage of some of the less commonly considered implications of this theory.

A webcam sponsored by SpaceRef.com is now operational inside the lab tent at Haughton Mars Research Project on Devon Island.

"The universal phylogenetic tree not only spans all extant life, but its root and earliest branchings represent stages in the evolutionary process before modern cell types had come into being. The evolution of the cell is an interplay between vertically derived and horizontally acquired variation. Primitive cellular entities were necessarily simpler and more modular in design than are modern cells. Consequently, horizontal gene transfer early on was pervasive, dominating the evolutionary dynamic. The root of the universal phylogenetic tree represents the first stage in cellular evolution when the evolving cell became sufficiently integrated and stable to the erosive effects of horizontal gene transfer that true organismal lineages could exist. "

"Although weightlessness is known to affect living cells, the manner by which this occurs is unknown. Some reaction-diffusion processes have been theoretically predicted as being gravity-dependent. Microtubules, a major constituent of the cellular cytoskeleton, self-organize in vitro by way of reaction-diffusion processes. To investigate how self-organization depends on gravity, microtubules were assembled under low gravity conditions produced during space flight. Contrary to the samples formed on an in-flight 1xg centrifuge, the samples prepared in microgravity showed almost no self-organization and were locally disordered. "

"A team of French researchers may have uncovered a clue to why space travel affects the human body: Gravity¹s pull appears to play an essential role in the process by which cells organize their structure. "

"A volunteer group of scientists, engineers and shuttle experts believe the Hubble Space Telescope could be equipped with an 8-meter primary mirror, giving NASA what amounts to a new space observatory for half the cost of a new spacecraft. "

"Way out beyond the icy rings of Saturn there's a mysterious world called Titan. The cloud-shrouded surface of this huge moon is one of the largest unexplored regions in the Solar System. Somewhere here, in the icy soup of organic molecules that coats its surface, scientists believe they will discover primitive proteins, or better still, living cells that could help them solve once and for all the mystery of the origin of life. "

"The skeletons within living cells may not form properly in zero gravity, say researchers in France. This could dent human ambitions to live in space -- at least without artificial gravity. Their work also proves that, contrary to received wisdom, gravity can influence chemical reactions. "

"Life may have begun not in the sea but in tiny water droplets drifting high in the sky. Thrown up by ocean waves, these droplets could have provided just the conditions needed for complex molecules to form. "

"The variation of ¹⁸O that results from nearly all physical, biological and chemical processes on the Earth is approximately twice as large as the variation of ¹⁷O. This so-called 'mass-dependent' fractionation is well documented in terrestrial minerals. Evidence for 'mass-independent' fractionation (17O = ¹⁷O - 0.52 ¹⁸O), where deviation from this tight relationship occurs, has so far been found only in meteoritic material and a few terrestrial atmospheric substances. Here, however, we report oxygen-isotope values of two massive sulphate mineral deposits, which formed in surface environments on the Earth but show large isotopic anomalies. The source of this isotope anomaly might be related to sulphur oxidation reactions in the atmosphere and therefore enable tracing of such oxidation. These findings also support the possibility of a chemical origin of variable isotope anomalies on other planets, such as Mars. "

"The 'characteristic age' of a pulsar is usually considered to approximate its true age, but this assumption has led to some puzzling results, including the fact that many pulsars with small characteristic ages have no associated supernova remnants. The pulsar B1757-24 is located just outside the edge of a supernova remnant; the properties of the system indicate that the pulsar was born at the centre of the remnant with a substantial velocity, and that it has subsequently overtaken the expanding blast wave. With a characteristic age of 16,000 yr, the pulsar is expected to have a proper motion of 63-80 milliarcseconds (mas) per year. Here we report observations of the nebula surrounding the pulsar, which limit its proper motion to less than 25 mas yr-1, implying a minimum age of 39,000 yr. A more detailed analysis argues that the true age may be as great as 170,000 yr, which is significantly larger than the characteristic age. We conclude from this result and other discrepancies associated with pulsars that characteristic ages greatly underestimate the true ages of pulsars."

"Chemists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered an isotope anomaly previously thought unique to meteorites and other extraterrestrial rocks in sulfate minerals on Earth. "

"NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a view of a stellar demolition zone in our Milky Way Galaxy: a massive star, nearing the end of its life, tearing apart the shell of surrounding material it blew off 250,000 years ago with its strong stellar wind. The shell of material, dubbed the Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888), surrounds the "hefty," aging star WR 136, an extremely rare and short-lived class of super-hot star called a Wolf-Rayet. Hubble's multicolored picture reveals with unprecedented clarity that the shell of matter is a network of filaments and dense knots, all enshrouded in a thin "skin" of gas".

According to a NSF/MIT/NRAO press release, "Pulsars, those spinning, superdense neutron stars that send powerful "lighthouse beams" of radio waves and light flashing through the Universe, have been "lying about their ages," leading astronomers, and possibly particle physicists, to erroneous conclusions for the past 30 years, according to researchers using the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope. A pulsar that was thought to be 16,000 years old is at least 40,000 years old and may be as old as 170,000 years."

Yet another molecule has been detected within dust clouds near the center of our galaxy. This time it is methyl radical CH₃. What makes this discovery of considerable interest to astrobiologists is the fact that terrestrial biochemistry makes frequent use of this molecule in the assembly of complex biomolecules. The discovery was made by ESA's Infrared Space Observatory which was aimed toward the center of our galaxy.

"The Chandra X Ray Observatory has detected an x-ray flare from LP 944-20, a brown dwarf star - the first ever recorded. Brown dwarfs are bodies smaller than our sun but many times the size of Jupiter. These observations will help astronomers further understand the nature of the magnetic fields that surround brown dwarfs and the manner in which hot gases are created and distributed within their atmospheres."

"A new member of the family of asteroids that can pass close to the Earth has been discovered. The space rock was found by accident on 2 July by astronomer Leonard Amburgey of Fitchburg, Massachusetts"

According to the Mars Society: "The primary components of the Mars Society's Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station have been successfully dropped by parachute of Devon Island. The low-altitude air drop was done by two US Marine Corp Reserve C-130 Hercules aircraft from Marine Aircraft Group 41 in Fort Worth Texas. The cargo was prepared for air delivery by Marines from the 4th Air Delivery Platoon based in San Jose. A tremendous amount of coordination and work went into the construction, preparation and loading of the cargo, and the Marines involved did what was necessary to ensure the cargo was ready for a safe delivery."

"This is the first field report of the season. The first field members arrived at base camp Friday, June 30th. There were 11 of us to start. Our camp has since grown to 30 including five Marines. Due to poor weather conditions - including a windstorm with gusts up to 100kph - deployment was slower than expected. In addition, some of our supplies have had routing problems on their way to Haughton Crater. Our satellite communications links were established on Tuesday, July 4 at 23:24 PM CDT. The quality and bandwidth are exceptional considering where we are. "

"The bulk of the carbon in our universe is produced in the triple-alpha process in helium-burning red giant stars. Here, we show that outside a narrow window of 0.5 and 4% of the values of the strong and Coulomb forces, respectively, the stellar production of carbon or oxygen is reduced by factors of 30 to 1000. "

"Officials at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, would like to trade the use of part of their land for a new building largely dedicated to NASA's nascent astrobiology program, the core of which is a 2-year-old virtual institute based at Ames. Although some scientists applaud the idea, others say that it undermines the idea of a virtual institute and that operating costs would take money away from higher priorities. Two panels have offered conflicting opinions, which may be aired at a meeting next week."

"When the rocket carrying Cluster, one of the European Space Agency's most ambitious scientific projects, exploded after being launched on 4 June 1996, dismayed scientists doubted whether ESA could muster the will, or the funds, to start over. But Cluster is poised to fly again. If all goes well, four Cluster II spacecraft, built entirely from scratch, will reach orbit two at a time in mid-July and early August."

"Even for deep-space objects, radio galaxies are odd beasts--so odd that scientists have trouble explaining why they exist at all. Now astronomers in the Netherlands have deepened the mystery by discovering that some radio galaxies live twice. In the 21 June issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, they report finding what they call double-double radio galaxies--classic double-lobed galaxies sporting a second, older pair of radio lobes much farther out than the first."

"The team's findings, published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, the journal of the American Society for Microbiology, indicate that a population of active bacteria, some of which have DNA sequences that align closely with species in the genus Deinococcus, exists at the South Pole in the austral summer. A similar species lives elsewhere in Antarctica, but the discovery of microbes at the Pole may mean that the bacteria have become uniquely adapted to the extreme conditions there, including a scarcity of liquid water. A species in the genus Deinococcus was first discovered in cans of irradiated meat in the 1950's, and is able to withstand extreme dryness and large doses of radiation. It is possible that the related bacteria from the South Pole may also possess these characteristics. "

A Hercules C-130 ("Herc") transport has successfully made the first three paradrops of equipment and supplies at Haughton Crater on Devon Island. This summer the closest thing to being on Mars will be happening in Canada. A number of research projects geared towards astrobiology, geology, and human factors research will take place at several locations in the Canadian arctic this summer. In SpaceRef's latest "Focus On" feature, we'll be looking at three of them over the course of the summer.

° Mars on Earth: Summer 2000 Field Season ...

This summer the closest thing to being on Mars will be happening in Canada. A number of research projects geared towards astrobiology, geology, and human factors research will take place at several locations in the Canadian arctic this summer. In SpaceRef's latest "Focus On" feature, we'll be looking at three of them over the course of the summer: the Haughton Mars Research Project; the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station; and McGill University's Axel Heiberg Island Station. Regular news and updates will be provided for all three projects.

"It began as a whisper on the Web a week ago Monday evening, grew to a noisy torrent of media babble by Wednesday, and on Thursday morning crashed onto the front pages. Moving at the light-speed pace of modern media, a wave of chatter about water and therefore possible life on Mars swept a paper at Science into headline news a week before its scheduled publication. "

"Microquasars are stellar x-ray binaries that behave as a scaled-down version of extragalactic quasars. The star LS 5039 is a new microquasar system with apparent persistent ejection of relativistic plasma at a 3-kiloparsec distance from the sun."

"Researchers are fawning over improved images from the new Landsat 7 satellite, the latest in a line of earth-monitoring satellites first launched in 1972. But at the same time they are also worrying that there may not be a suitable successor to the government-built spacecraft, which is scheduled to operate until 2006, at which time the government plans to turn the reins over to private industry."

"A fabrication method for creating individually addressable and controllable polypyrrole-gold microactuators was developed. With these individually controlled microactuators, a micrometer-size manipulator, or microrobotic arm, was fabricated. This microrobotic arm can pick up, lift, move, and place micrometer-size objects within an area of about 250 micrometers by 100 micrometers, making the microrobot an excellent tool for single-cell manipulation. "

"A team of researchers recently discovered a significant amount of deuterium (heavy hydrogen) raining into the center of our Milky Way Galaxy".

"Here we report the detection of deuterium (in the molecule DCN) in a molecular cloud only 10 parsecs from the Galactic Centre. Our data, when combined with a model of molecular abundances, indicate that D/H = (1.7 0.3) 10-6, five orders of magnitude larger than the predictions of evolutionary models with no continuous source of deuterium. We conclude that the observed Galactic Centre deuterium is cosmological, with an abundance reduced by stellar processing and mixing, and that there is no significant Galactic source of deuterium. "

"The Isaac Newton Group Red Imaging Device (INGRID) saw its first light on the William Herschel Telescope on March 16. INGRID provides astronomers with the opportunity to make large field of view, deep near-infrared observations of the universe, as demonstrated by the images achieved on the first night of scientific use. "

"So it could be that life did not originate in the warm puddle imagined by Darwin, or in the deep-sea hydrothermal vents, but somewhere else entirely. The big problem with the off-Earth idea, however, is that it does not solve the riddle of the origin of life, it simply moves the problem to a different location. "

"[The authors] have deduced the orbital and size distributions of the near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) and predict that there are ~900 NEAs with absolute magnitude less than 18 (that is, kilometer-sized), of which 29, 65, and 6% reside on Amor, Apollo, and Aten orbits, respectively. These results suggest that roughly 40% of the kilometer-sized NEAs have been found. The remainder, on highly eccentric and inclined orbits, are more difficult to detect."

"Despite a rapid increase in the amount of available archaeal sequence information, little is known about the duplication of genetic material in the third domain of life. Although bacterial and archaeal replication proteins differ profoundly, they are used to replicate chromosomes in a similar manner in both prokaryotic domains. "

"Earlier this month astronomers won an international agreement that guarantees critical wavelengths safe for research."

"About 900 astronomers gathered 2 weeks ago near the birthplace of Eastman Kodak Co. to share their latest pictures of the sky at the American Astronomical Society's 196th Meeting. Notable findings pointed to a cold origin for comet Hale-Bopp, a nasty environment for extrasolar planets, and a maximum size for the biggest structures in the universe."

"In what could turn out to be a landmark discovery in the history of Mars exploration, imaging scientists using data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft have recently observed features that suggest there may be current sources of liquid water at or near the surface of the red planet. "

"Science is posting the articles below as freely accessible PDF files in advance of their publication in the 30 June issue because of extreme media attention and inaccuracies in some early news reports. "

NASA will make a major announcement tomorrow regarding the presence of liquid water on Mars. The results to be announced are expected to focus on visual evidence from the Mars Global Surveyor that water has been present on or near the surface of Mars. Moreover, it would seem that this has happened quite recently and that it may well continue at present. No direct or indirect evidence of life has been found. Rather, this announcement will be limited to describing the identification of conditions on Mars that could be favorable to life, were it to exist.

° Full story and Background information ...

"A number of recent press reports have mentioned a forthcoming paper in the international journal Science regarding new Mars data. These press accounts, based on unnamed sources, represent varying degrees of accuracy."

"Under terms of the sponsorship agreement, the Discovery Channel will provide substantial financial support for the project. In return, it will obtain exclusive TV media rights to activities within the Mars Arctic Research Station during the 2000 and 2001 field seasons. The Discovery Channel plans to produce several in-depth segments for its weekly science newscast, Discovery News, in 2000 and a series of weekly half-hour programs in summer 2001.''

Note: the following contains a substantial rumor component - but our sources are rather solid. Word is circling around NASA and the planetary science community that NASA recently briefed the White House regarding a potential major discovery on Mars. Apparently, a paper is under preparation and review by members of the MGS Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) team for submission to Science magazine. Informed sources within NASA suggest that the article may be concerned with water ice and the Valles Marineris region of Mars.

° Full story and Background information ...

Astronomers have been detecting various molecules in space for decades. The collection of molecules detected now has a significant addition thanks to astronomers using the National Science Foundation's 12 Meter Radio Telescope at Kitt Peak, Arizona. The molecule discovered is the sugar glycolaldehyde. It was found in Sagittarius B2 (North), a gas and dust cloud 26,000 light years away near the center of our galaxy.

"The solar wind, magnetosphere, and ionosphere form a single system driven by the transfer of energy and momentum from the solar wind to the magnetosphere and ionosphere. Understanding of the global behavior of this system has improved markedly in the recent past from coordinated observations with a constellation of satellite and ground instruments. "

"Earth's magnetic field is generated by fluid motion in the liquid iron core. Details of how this occurs are now emerging from numerical simulations that achieve a self-sustaining magnetic field. "

"The self-sustained turbulence that develops in magnetized accretion disks is suppressed in the weakly ionized, quiescent disks of close binary stars. Because accretion still proceeds during quiescence, another viscosity mechanism operates in these systems. "

"Visible and near-infrared spectroscopic observations of the asteroid 1459 Magnya indicate that it has a basaltic surface. Magnya is at 3.15 astronomical units (AU) from the sun and has no known dynamical link to any family, to any nearby large asteroid, or to asteroid 4 Vesta at 2.36 AU, which is the only other known large basaltic asteroid. Magnya may represent a rare surviving fragment from a larger, differentiated planetesimal that was disrupted long ago."

"NASA officials have decided to test the Next Generation Space Telescope's demanding technology in a small-scale version, before forging ahead with the real thing. The technological delays that led to the shakedown mission will push the launch of the full telescope back another year to 2009 at the earliest."

"Researchers reported here last week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society that giant black holes and their host galaxies appear to be cosmic siblings that grew up at the same time."

"Earth observations from space entered a new phase with the launch of NASA's Terra (formerly known as EOS AM-1) satellite. Terra carries five new remote sensing instruments (1) for mapping ocean and land vegetation and productivity patterns, land cover and land use, snow and ice cover, global surface temperatures, cloud properties, water vapor and aerosol properties, and for making other measurements."

"We report the first detection of a planetary transit by spectroscopic measurements. We have detected the distortion of the stellar line profiles during a planetary transit. The planetary orbit is in the same direction as the stellar rotation. "

"A dust cloud of Ganymede has been detected by in-situ measurements with the dust detector onboard the Galileo spacecraft. Our analysis identifies the particles in the dust cloud surrounding Ganymede by their impact direction, impact velocity, and mass distribution and implies that they have been kicked up by hypervelocity impacts of micrometeoroids onto the satellite's surface. Dust measurements in the vicinities of satellites by spacecraft detectors are suggested as a beneficial tool to obtain more knowledge about the satellite surfaces, as well as dusty planetary rings maintained by satellites through the impact ejecta mechanism. "

"The prospects for life in the Universe just got sweeter, with the first discovery of a simple sugar molecule in space. The discovery of the sugar molecule glycolaldehyde in a giant cloud of gas and dust near the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy was made by scientists using the National Science Foundation's 12 Meter Telescope, a radio telescope on Kitt Peak, Arizona. "

"The discovery of this sugar molecule in a cloud from which new stars are forming means it is increasingly likely that the chemical precursors to life are formed in such clouds long before planets develop around the stars," said team member Jan Hollis of the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, US. "

"How and where the ocean tides dissipate their energy are long-standing questions that have consequences ranging from the history of the Moon to the mixing of the oceans. Satellite altimeter data from Topex/Poseidon [were used] to map empirically the tidal energy dissipation."

"The moon's gravity imparts tremendous energy to the Earth, raising tides throughout the global oceans. What happens to all this energy? This question has been pondered by scientists for over 200 years, and has consequences ranging from the history of the moon to the mixing of the oceans."

"Lyman-alpha images clearly illustrate features of Io's atmosphere that have been deduced from previous observations and theoretical modeling: a non-uniformity with respect to the sub-solar point dominated by a freezing out of the SO2 near the poles and variation with both longitude and time due to the variability of the sources of the atmospheric gas. Lyman-alpha imaging is demonstrated to be an extremely powerful and direct way to globally map the dynamic atmosphere of Io."

"The recent launch of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) allows for new understanding of convective processes in remote areas of Equatorial Africa. The TRMM precipitation radar data shows the highest convective rainfall rates and mean storm heights in October occurring west of the East African Highlands."

"If microorganisms exist on other worlds, the head of NASA's fledgling Astrobiology Institute plans to find them."

"How common are other civilizations in the universe? This question has fascinated humanity for centuries, and although we still have no definitive answer, a number of recent developments have brought it once again to the fore. Chief among these is the confirmation, after a long wait and several false starts, that planets exist outside our solar system. "

According to a NASA website "NASA is sponsoring a workshop at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston, Texas July 18­20, 2000." This workshop is being held "in order to cast a wide net for capturing ideas and potential participants for missions, mission elements, and experiments that fit within the broadly defined scope of this program. The workshop is open to scientists, engineers, technologists, and other colleagues from academia, NASA centers, federal laboratories, the private sector, and international partners. The intent of the workshop is to provide an open forum for presentation, discussion, and consideration of various concepts, options, and innovations associated with a strategy for Mars exploration. This strategy not only highlights "life, climate, and resources," calling for "following the water" as part of a "quest for life," but also includes studies of the martian environment as it relates to short- and long-term human presence. "

° Concepts and Approaches for Mars Exploration website, NASA

"Last week, however, a group of researchers attending the spring meeting of the American Geophysical Union here announced that the 31-kilometer-long S-type asteroid Eros now being orbited by the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft is made of the same stuff as ordinary chondrites. That conclusion comes from NEAR Shoemaker's first-ever analysis of the elemental composition of an asteroid."

"Halite crystals from the Zag H3-6 chondrite contain essentially pure (monoisotopic) xenon-129 (¹²⁹Xe) produced in the early history of the solar system by the decay of short-lived iodine-129 (¹²⁹I) (half-life = 15.7 million years). If the ¹²⁹Xe was produced by in situ decay, then the halite formed from an aqueous fluid within 2 million years of the oldest known solar system minerals."

"Small grains of halite in meteorites are generally interpreted as a sign of the former presence of water. According to the age determined for halite crystals in one of these meteorites, they are among the oldest known materials in the solar system. "

"Scientists from The University of Manchester have found traces of sea water in a meteorite that fell in Morocco in 1998. This discovery shows that the necessary conditions for life in the Universe may have existed much earlier than previously believed."

"Engineers at Ohio State University are building a new kind of radio antenna array for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Because of interference from local radio and television stations, the array probably won't be listening for signals from space in Columbus. It will serve as a prototype for a larger, more sensitive system elsewhere in the world. "

"Here, I report the discovery of pyritic filaments, the probable fossil remains of thread-like microorganisms, in a 3,235-million-year-old deep-sea volcanogenic massive sulphide deposit from the Pilbara Craton of Australia. From their mode of occurrence, the micro-organisms were probably thermophilic chemotropic prokaryotes, which inhabited sub-sea-floor hydrothermal environments. They represent the first fossil evidence for microbial life in a Precambrian submarine thermal spring system, and extend the known range of submarine hydrothermal biota by more than 2,700 million years. Such environments may have hosted the first living systems on Earth, consistent with proposals for a thermophilic origin of life."

"Geologists have found apparent fossil evidence of microbial life in scalding hot deep-ocean vent systems on the very young Earth, 2.7 billion years earlier than previously known."

"[Europa] probably hosts a subsurface water ocean, but the thickness of the outer ice crust is poorly constrained and the episodic presence of liquid water at the surface is debated. We argue that some surface features of Europa are formed by soft ice that is heated by viscous dissipation of tidal motion along faults, and do not depend on a shallow ocean. Our model suggests that transient pockets of liquid water or brine could form at shallow depths in the crust."

"Astronomical observations of elemental and isotopic abundances provide the means to determine the source of elements and to reveal their evolutionary pathways since the formation of the Galaxy some 15 billion years ago. Here we report observations of ⁷Li and ⁶Li abundances in several interstellar clouds lying in the direction of the star Persei. We find the abundance ratio ⁷Li/⁶Li to be about 2, which is significantly lower than the average Solar System value of 12.3."

"One of the greatest mysteries, which continuously fascinates many scientists worldwide, concerns the way by which life emerged on primeval Earth. The accepted notion is that prior to the appearance of living organisms, there was a stage of chemical evolution, which involved selection within inanimate chemical mixtures. This is thought to have eventually led to the crucial moment, when self-replicating molecules arose. As self-replication is a most fundamental characteristic of living entities, such an event is often defined as the birth of life."

NASA's plan to bring the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) crashing back to Earth on Sunday worked according to plan. After engine burns at 12:00 AM EDT and 1:30 AM EDT, the CGRO was sent inexorably on a path towards destructive reentry over the Pacific Ocean.

CGRO crashed at around 2:20 AM EDT with debris strewn over a 2,500 mile long elipse of ocean stretching from off the southeastern coast of Hawaii to the northwestern coast of South America.

"Ram pressure and turbulent/viscous stripping remove 100% of the atomic hydrogen content of luminous galaxies like the Milky Way within 100 million years."

"Enstatite chondrites have often been considered to be closely related to the material from which Earth accreted. However, tungsten isotopic data reveal clear differences. Internal reequilibration does not provide a ready explanation for this result. Larger scale redistribution of tungsten is more likely, such as may have occurred during collisions between planetesimals. "

"A post-stishovite phase of silica was identified in the Shergotty meteorite by x-ray diffraction and field emission scanning electron microscopy. The mixture of high-density polymorphs suggests that several post-stishovite phases were formed during the shock event on the Shergotty parent body."

"This is the find of a lifetime," says Peter Brown, meteor scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Western Ontario and co-leader of the meteorite recovery investigation. "The size of the initial object, the extreme rarity and organic richness of the meteorites combined with the number we have uncovered make this a truly unique event."

New details have been released regarding the surface of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun as well as that of Pluto, the planet furthest from the sun. Researchers using ESA's infrared space telescope (ISO) collected data that show that the temperature of Pluto's surface is not uniform suggesting a porous surface. Meanwhile, astronomers using a telescope at the Mt. Wilson Observatory obtained the first detailed images of a Mercury's surface taken from Earth showing previously unseen regions of the planet.

"Last week the U.S. astronomy community issued a 164-page compendium of projects they would like to carry out over the next 10 years. Its top choice is the Next Generation Space Telescope, a proposed $1.3 billion observatory with a mirror nearly four times as large as that of the current Hubble Space Telescope."

Earth has experienced a number of important periods in the course of life's origin and evolution. The late Proterozoic era was one of them. This period was also a point in Earth's history some call "Snowball Earth" when our planet was thought to have been completely covered with ice. Researchers at the University of Toronto and Texas A&M University have published data in Nature magazine which suggests that a belt of open water at the equator may have provided a refuge for animals while the rest of the planet was frozen over.

"When a small group of geoscientists recently revived the snowball Earth hypothesis--the idea that the planet froze from pole to pole 600 million years ago--some scientists raised serious doubts about how early life could have weathered such a horrendous environmental catastrophe without suffering a mass extinction. Now climate modelers say that their most realistic models offer a possible resolution of the conundrum: In the tropics, climatic amplifiers built into clouds, winds, and currents may have counteracted the chilling effect of ice and snow."

"Ice sheets may have reached the Equator in the late Proterozoic era (600­800 Myr ago), according to geological and palaeomagnetic studies, possibly resulting in a 'snowball Earth'. But this period was a critical time in the evolution of multicellular animals, posing the question of how early life survived under such environmental stress. [S]ome of [our] simulations result in an equatorial belt of open water that may have provided a refugium for multicellular animals."

"The precursor of modern animals may have been able to survive a Snowball Earth era that occurred some 600 million years ago because of a belt of open water along the equator, suggests scientists from the University of Toronto and Texas A&M University. This was a time considered critical in the evolutionary development of multi-celled animals and therefore the most important interval for biological evolution in general. "

"During late 1999/early 2000, the solid state imaging experiment on the Galileo spacecraft returned more than 100 high-resolution (5 to 500 meters per pixel) images of volcanically active Io. We observed an active lava lake, an active curtain of lava, active lava flows, calderas, mountains, plateaus, and plains. Several of the sulfur dioxide-rich plumes are erupting from distal flows, rather than from the source of silicate lava (caldera or fissure, often with red pyroclastic deposits). The mountains, plateaus, and calderas are strongly influenced by tectonics and gravitational collapse. Sapping channels and scarps suggest that many portions of the upper ~1 kilometer are rich in volatiles."

"The set of viable design elements available for animals to use in building skeletons has been fully exploited. Within 15 million years of the appearance of crown groups of phyla with substantial hard parts, at least 80 percent of skeletal design elements recognized among living and extinct marine metazoans were exploited. "

According to to the 12 May 2000 issue of Science magazine: "The private Astrobiology Web (www.astrobiology.com) aims to be "truly a starting point" for astrobiologists, says site editor Keith Cowing. His site offers Cowing's own articles, a steady stream of daily astronomy news, and pointers to Web sites ranging from NASA's Microgravity News to futuristic sites devoted to "terraforming," or converting barren planets to support life."

° Full review ...

"Until a few days ago, the last time anyone saw asteroid 719 Albert was 4 October 1911. On 1 May 2000, Spacewatch astronomers discovered asteroid 2000 JW8. After some mathematical calculations of the asteroid's orbit at the Minor Planet Center, it was announced that asteroid 2000 JW8 was actually asteroid 719 Albert rediscovered after having been lost for 89 years."

"This will be humankind's first planned venture outside our Solar System," says Les Johnson, manager of Interstellar Propulsion Research at Nasa's Marshall Space Flight Center. "This is a goal that is among the most audacious things we've ever undertaken."

"Proposed for launch in a 2010 time frame, an interstellar probe - or precursor mission, as it's often called - will be powered by the fastest spacecraft ever flown. Zooming toward the stars at 58 miles per second, it will cover the distance from New York to Los Angeles in less than a minute. It's more than 10 times faster than the Space Shuttle's on-orbit speed of 5 miles per second. "

"Most of the matter in the Universe is not luminous, and can be observed only through its gravitational influence on the appearance of luminous matter. Weak gravitational lensing is a technique that uses the distortions of the images of distant galaxies as a tracer of dark matter: such distortions are induced as the light passes through large-scale distributions of dark matter in the foreground. The patterns of the induced distortions reflect the density of mass along the line of sight and its distribution, and the resulting 'cosmic shear' can be used to distinguish between alternative cosmologies. We find that the dark matter is distributed in a manner consistent with either an open universe, or a flat universe that is dominated by a cosmological constant."

"Astrophysicists supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) have announced the first observations of cosmological shear, an effect predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity. The discovery casts light on the distribution of the dark matter that makes up much of our universe, assembling another piece in the cosmological jigsaw puzzle. "Pieces of the puzzle are falling into place," said Morris Aizenman of NSF's Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences. "Within the first few months of this millenium, we have solved the riddle of the geometry of the universe and are now on the threshold of exploring its structure." "

"One of the world's foremost experts on molecular technology, Dr. K. Eric Drexler, will deliver the keynote address at NASA's second "Turning Goals into Reality" conference May 18-19, 2000. "

"Australian scientists have retrieved a gold-laced "black smoker" from the seafloor off Papua New Guinea. Black smokers are chimney-like structures created by underwater geysers. The waters swept up from deep within Earth's crust are rich in dissolved minerals, which are deposited as tall funnels. "

"A huge undersea chimney, laced with gold and other minerals and swarming with remarkable lifeforms has been recovered from the seabed in the Bismarck Sea, north of Papua New Guinea, by the CSIRO Research Vessel Franklin. The find is part of a voyage of discovery by the RV Franklin to probe the mysteries of vast hydrothermal systems on the ocean floor, spewing out plumes of superheated mineral-rich fluids like those which formed giant ore bodies like Mt Isa and Broken Hill over a billion years ago. "

"Astronomers at the Joint Astronomy Center in Hawaii are reporting that they have found examples of so-called "missing links" that fill the gap between Jupiter-class extrasolar planets and the larger brown dwarfs - stars that almost happened. According to a press release, the discovery resulted from a collaboration between astronomers using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii and scientists associated with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)."

"Astrophysicists at UC Berkeley have used the Millimeter Anisotropy eXperiment IMaging Array (MAXIMA) to reveal the structure of the universe in its infancy. According to a press release, "the first results from a balloon-borne experiment peering back to a time shortly after the big bang provide confirmation of a mysterious "dark matter" and "dark energy" that make up most of the cosmos.""

"In our model, mass accretion through the protoplanetary disk caused large-scale evaporation of precursor dust near its midplane inside of a few astronomical units. Gas convectively moved from the midplane to cooler regions above it, and the metal grains condensed in these parcels of rising gas. "

"High-Velocity Clouds--clouds of hydrogen gas that move faster than the Milky Way--were first identified in the 1960s, but as Zwaan discusses in this Perspective, their origin and location remain controversial. Today, there are two competing models, the Local Group model, which postulates that the clouds are extragalactic, primordial remnants, and the Galactic fountain model, in which supernova explosions are responsible for the formation of HVCs."

"Radar observations of the main-belt, M-class asteroid 216 Kleopatra reveal a dumbbell-shaped object with overall dimensions of 217 kilometers by 94 kilometers by 81 kilometers (±25%). The asteroid's surface properties are consistent with a regolith having a metallic composition and a porosity comparable to that of lunar soil. Kleopatra's shape is probably the outcome of an exotic sequence of collisional events, and much of its interior may have an unconsolidated rubble-pile structure. "

According to a NASA press release astronomers from Cornell University and NASA "have collected the first-ever radar images of a "main belt" asteroid, a metallic, dog bone-shaped rock the size of New Jersey, an apparent leftover from an ancient, violent cosmic collision. The asteroid, named 216 Kleopatra, is a large object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter; it measures about 135 miles (217 kilometers) long and about 58 miles (94 kilometers) wide. The 1,000-foot (305-meter) telescope of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was used to make the radar measurements.

Related links and background information ...

The European Southern Observatory has announced the discovery of a collection of planet-sized objects circling stars similar to our sun. The discoveries were made by astronomers at the Geneva Observatory. The objects range in size from one planet somewhat less massive than Saturn to a very large object that is about 15 times the size of Jupiter. As planet hunting techniques become increasingly refined, smaller planets will be more easily detected. Only as these smaller worlds are detectable will we begin to be able to see if worlds similar to our own circle other suns.

Full story and background Information...

According to NASA; "Astronomers believe at least 90 percent of the matter in the universe is hidden in exotic "dark" form that has not yet been seen directly. But more embarrassing is that, until now, they have not been able to see most of the universe's ordinary, or baryonic, matter (normal protons, electrons and neutrons)." Once again, HST has come to the rescue of theorists - this time by finding the missing matter in the form of vast amounts of interstellar hydrogen. According to NASA "the detection confirms fundamental models of how much hydrogen was manufactured in the first few minutes of the universe's birth in the Big Bang."

° Press release, Space Telescope Science Institute

According to NASA JPL; "Fiery volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io are the main source of dust streams that flow from the Jupiter system into the rest of the solar system, according to new findings from NASA's Galileo spacecraft analyzed by an international team of scientists." In placing this discovery in context, NASA notes that "the Jovian dust streams, with their Io source, are minor when compared to the huge amounts of dust created in the solar system by comet activity and asteroid collisions. Nonetheless, they add to the variety of dust sources in the solar system. In fact, the Jovian dust streams travel so fast that some particles can actually leave the solar system to join the local interstellar medium -- the gas and dust that fill the space between stars."

° Press release, NASA JPL
° EUVE Spectra of Jupiter and Io Torus, NASA JPL
° Io Plasma Torus Related Papers, Space Telescope Science Institute

Evidence of life in Martian meteorites or future rock samples from the Red Planet may be easier to identify thanks to microbes living in hot springs at Yellowstone National Park. "The existence of life itself can change the physical and chemical attributes in an environment of deposition," said Bruce Fouke, a geologist at the University of Illinois. "By studying the effects of microbial metabolism on the chemistry of the water and on the way minerals are deposited in Earth environments, we can better interpret samples from other planets for signs of life."

"With funding from NASA, Liu has recently teamed up with UI entomologist and neurobiologist Fred Delcomyn to develop a micro-integrated sensor that mimics the action of a hair cell. "The hair cell is a very fundamental structure consisting of a long cilia attached to a neuron," Liu said. "Nature uses this basic building block in a variety of ways to accomplish such sensing tasks as hearing, balance and touch."

On January 2001 the Genesis spacecraft will be placed into orbit around L1, a point between Earth and the sun. Genesis will collect particles of the solar wind return them to Earth. You can send your thoughts along for the ride by sending a "Genesis Gram", a 100 character (or less) thought that will be engraved on a special "chip" that will be carried aboard the spacecraft and brought back to Earth."

Background information and how-to instructions

Europe's Infrared Space Telescope (ISO) may have spied a planetary system in an unprecedented early stage of formation. The results of this work are presented in the 28 April 2000 issue of Science magazine. According to ESA "The system observed by ISO's infrared camera, ISOCAM, is 1200 light years away in a star-forming region in the Orion nebula. It's called VLA1/2." The Orion Nebula is not only a feast for the eyes, but is often referred to as a "stellar nursery" - one wherein stars can be seen emerging from the clouds of dust from which they formed. Initial observations of the VLA1/2 region of Orion were thought to show a dust cloud in the earliest stages of planetary formation. ISO has provided evidence that the process of planetary formation is more advanced than previously thought.

Full story and background information ...

"A Genesis Gram is a 100 character (or less) thought that will travel through space. All acceptable Genesis Grams, with the authors' names, will be engraved on a special "chip" that will be carried aboard the Genesis spacecraft and brought back to Earth."

"Jobs in the 21st century are only getting better and better, as the call for students with planet-finding talent grows louder. Through the Michelson Fellowship Program, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., recently awarded three post- doctoral and four graduate fellowships to students with innovative proposals for enhancing NASA's search for planets around other stars. "

"On 3 May 2000, the European Space Agency and researchers from academia and industry in Germany, Italy and Switzerland will sign a contract for a health research project which will lay the scientific and industrial foundations for the development of a space bioreactor for biomedical applications to be set up on the International Space Station. As Jörg Feustel-Büechl, ESA's Director of Manned Spaceflight and Microgravity points out: "This is the first in a series of over fifty contracts that ESA will sign in the coming years for application-oriented research projects that involve use of the International Space Station in the development of which Europe is participating, together with the USA, Russia, Japan and Canada."

"About 600 researchers from 30 countries came to NASA's Ames Research Center on 3 to 5 April, eager to help mold a new field. At the First Astrobiology Science Conference every talk, it seemed, touched on a new discipline. Topics ranged from prebiotic chemicals to icy life, but the conference was a story unto itself."

Editor's note: the full article is an excellent summary of the conference and well worth reading.

"The early atmosphere has played a key role on the origin and evolution of life on Earth. The accumulation of substantial concentrations of molecular oxygen is particularly important ... getting biological and geological constraints on when and how this change occurred is difficult. Sulfur isotope chemistry can serve as a proxy for molecular oxygen accumulation in the atmosphere. A study by Canfield et al. sheds some light on how the sulfur isotopic signature may be interpreted to reveal the characteristics of the early Earth atmosphere. "

"The formation and evolution of young low-mass stars are characterized by important processes of mass loss and accretion occurring in the innermost regions of their placentary circumstellar disks. Because of the large obscuration of these disks at optical and infrared wavelengths in the early protostellar stages (class 0 sources), they were previously detected only at radio wavelengths using interferometric techniques. We have detected with the Infrared Space Observatory the mid-infrared (mid-IR) emission associated with the class 0 protostar VLA1 in the HH1-HH2 region located in the Orion nebula."

"The earliest stages of formation of planetary systems remain very poorly known because of the thick layers of opaque dust that hid them. The European Space Agency's infrared space telescope, ISO, has measured the size of a proto-planetary system, surrounding a newly-born star, a Spanish team of astronomers report in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science. ISO sees a very young 'baby-star' surrounded by a disk of the same diameter as Jupiter's orbit, in which planets are likely to form in the future. "

"It is now clear that we all owe Jupiter a debt of gratitude. Without our enormous neighbor, 318 times heavier than Earth, life might never have arisen here or survived long enough to produce human beings, astronomers say."

"Five years ago, even last year, people were talking about a very curved universe. Our data says no way," said John Ruhl, a physicist at UC Santa Barbara and part of the 36-member international team that made the finding. "

"NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) intends to award a Cooperative Agreement to develop a NASA Center for Biology Inspired Technology (NCBIT). The primary purpose of the NCBIT is to focus and develop world-class interdisciplinary research leading to technology development based on concepts derived from, or inspired by, biology. An objective of the NCBIT is to develop an understanding of where and how the unique attributes of biological systems can be applied to challenges of spacecraft design and operations as well as the development of tools to promote safe and effective human work in the exploration of space."

"Interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) collected in the Earth's stratosphere and meteorites are fragments of comets and asteroids. These are 'primitive' meteorites in part because they have preserved materials which predate the formation of the Solar System. The most primitive (least altered) meteorites contain a few parts per million of micrometre-sized dust which formed in the atmospheres of giant stars."

"[A] new model [has been] developed for calculating the concentration of cations, anions, and electrons depending on the mixing ratio of electrophilic species present in the atmosphere of Titan."

"An astronaut's life is already fraught with danger, but two recent studies show that attempts to help astronauts who are injured in space may put them at even greater risk. A study with monkeys suggests that emergency surgery within hours of returning to Earth could prove fatal, while an international team of anaesthetists claims that medical equipment on the space shuttle for keeping an astronaut breathing in an emergency is inadequate. "

"The first in-situ chemical analysis of interstellar dust particles produces a puzzling result: These cosmic particles consist mostly of 3-dimensionally cross-linked organic macro-molecules, so-called polymeric-heterocyclic-aromates. "They rather resemble tar-like substances than minerals..."

"A high-flying balloon which soared over Antarctica has answered one of cosmology's greatest questions by revealing that the universe is "flat".

"The blackbody radiation left over from the Big Bang has been transformed by the expansion of the Universe into the nearly isotropic 2.73 K cosmic microwave background. Tiny inhomogeneities in the early Universe left their imprint on the microwave background in the form of small anisotropies in its temperature. These anisotropies contain information about basic cosmological parameters, particularly the total energy density and curvature of the Universe. Here we report the first images of resolved structure in the microwave background anisotropies over a significant part of the sky. [Our findings are] consistent with that expected for cold dark matter models in a flat (euclidean) Universe, as favoured by standard inflationary models."

"Inspired by the elegant efficiency of spider webs, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., have designed a tiny, web-shaped sensor that maps faint structures in the early universe, reinforcing theories that the cosmos is flat in its geometry. "

"The BOOMERANG images are the first to bring the cosmic microwave background into sharp focus. The images reveal hundreds of complex regions visible as tiny variations -- typically only 100-millionths of a degree Celsius (0.0001 C) -- in the temperature of the CMB. The complex patterns visible in the images confirm predictions of the patterns that would result from sound waves racing through the early universe, creating the structures that by now have evolved into giant clusters and super-clusters of galaxies. "

According to the SETI Institute and UC Berkeley, "In a tree preserve a dozen miles from the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, astronomers today unveiled a prototype telescope that will lead to the development of the world's most powerful instrument for finding signals from extraterrestrial civilizations." They're talking about the "One Hectare Telescope, or 1hT. So named because of its total signal 'collecting' area (one hectare is 10,000 square meters or 2.47 acres). The seven-dish prototype is a precursor to what will eventually be an array of hundreds, perhaps thousands of small backyard-type satellite dishes linked by sophisticated electronics to create an unparalleled SETI observing instrument. The 1hT also will be a premium instrument for conducting more traditional research in radio astronomy, such as examining the formation of stars."

° Press release
° SETI, The Square Kilometer Array, and Astrobiology, Jill Tarter, 1st Astrobiology Science Conference
° SETI, SpaceRef Directory

"After parking my car and loading up my cameras, I was off on a 1 mile walk to the 140 foot radio telescope where I was scheduled to meet Dr. Jill Tarter, from The SETI Institute's Project Phoenix . I had to walk because internal combustion powered vehicles and their radio-noise-generating spark plugs are strictly forbidden anywhere near the radio telescopes. Thus I entered into a curious realm of pedestrians, bicycles, diesel-powered vehicles, and interstellar communication systems."

Full story (in three parts) ...

"A hummingbird could soon be visiting the heavens -- in a manner of speaking. NASA engineers want to build a space probe that behaves like a hummingbird approaching a flower. In other words it will use a touch-and-go landing technique to capture and analyse samples from a comet's central core for the first time. "

NASA JPL released new high resolution imagery today taken by the Galileo spacecraft of Io and Europa. These images portray intricate features of Io's volcanic terrain including lava flows, terraces, and pits. The image collection also includes a high-resolution view of Europa's Jupiter-facing hemisphere. According to NASA "variations in surface materials that may indicate the presence of sulfuric acid (common battery acid) and salty minerals, possibly from a subsurface ocean."

° NASA Press release
° Images and captions: Europa: Sea Salts or Battery Acid?;   Highest resolution of lava flows on Io;   Terrain near Io's south pole

"The Italian Space Agency on 15 April began shutting down BeppoSAX's instruments on Saturday and Sunday nights, and staff will no longer work around the clock. As a result, astronomers will not be able to react as quickly as they'd like to some gamma ray bursts, the high-energy explosions that occur about once a day in the far reaches of the universe."

"A new high-performance Internet connection announced today will transform the ability of astronomers to access world-leading telescopes located on the peak of Mauna Kea on the island of Hawai'i."

The bad news: our galaxy, the Milky Way, is going to collide with our giant neighbor galaxy, Andromeda. The good news: it won't really start to happen for several billion years. According to a University of Toronto press release: "the 2.2-million-light-year gap between the Milky Way and Andromeda is closing at about 500,000 kilometres an hour. That pace will quicken as the two galaxies near each other." No one is quite sure what fate will await Earth as the collision occurs. "Two possible fates await the sun and Earth - we could be flung into the depths of intergalactic space and escape the galaxy forever or hurled into the centre of the merging pair where new stars will be formed."

Press release and link to an MPEG animation of a galactic collision...

"Writing in the May 1 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, published by the American Geophysical Union, Jean-Loup Bertaux and colleagues at the Aeronomy Service (Service d'Aeronomie) of France's National Center for Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS) and the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) report a method they have devised of detecting active regions, or sunspots, on the far side of the Sun, before they rotate to its Earthward side. Since the Sun's rotational period is 27 days, this can allow up to two weeks' advance warning of strong solar winds. "

A few years ago we expected to find other solar systems like our own but instead have found weird ones that fly in the face of what we thought we knew. 20 years ago we thought we understood the extent to which life had colonized the Earth and what should be possible elsewhere. Now we find life that can live in battery acid and inside nuclear reactors and deep within the earth's sea and crust - places where they have no right to be, if you read the old text books. Several presentations at the recent Astrobiology Science Conference examined the extrasolar planets we've found, the one's we're still looking for, and what all of this has to say about the possibility of complex (ergo intelligent) life elsewhere in the universe.

Full story, presentation abstracts, and extensive background information ...

NASA announced last week that the Cassini spacecraft, en route to Saturn, made a successful transit of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. This is not the first time this has been done - Pioneers 10 & 11, Voyagers 1 & 2, and Galileo have all made the traverse before. Despite the incorrect cinematic notion that the asteroid belt is full of asteroids jostling for an opportunity to smash a hapless spacecraft, the region is not considered a hazard to navigation.

Full story and background information ...

"NASA's Cassini spacecraft, currently en route to Saturn, has successfully completed its passage through our solar system's asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. This makes Cassini the seventh spacecraft ever to fly through the asteroid belt. Before NASA's Pioneer 10 spacecraft successfully passed through the region in 1972, it was not known whether a spacecraft could survive the trip."

"In this Perspective, Hogan discusses recent advances in estimating the total cosmic light emission at infrared wavelengths, which carries valuable information about the epoch of greatest conversion of cosmic gas to stars."

"Meteorites contain micrometer-sized graphite grains with embedded titanium carbide grains. Although isotopic analysis identifies asymptotic giant branch stars as the birth sites of these grains, there is no direct observational identification of these grains in astronomical sources. We report that infrared wavelength spectra of gas-phase titanium carbide nanocrystals derived in the laboratory show a prominent feature at a wavelength of 20.1 micrometers, which compares well to a similar feature in observed spectra of postasymptotic giant branch stars. It is concluded that titanium carbide forms during a short (approximately 100 years) phase of catastrophic mass loss (>0.001 solar masses per year) in dying, low-mass stars. "

"The hierarchical nature of phylogenies means that random extinction of species affects a smaller fraction of higher taxa, and so the total amount of evolutionary history lost may be comparatively slight. However, current extinction risk is not phylogenetically random. An additional 120 avian and mammalian genera are at risk compared with the number predicted under random extinction. We estimate that the prospective extra loss of mammalian evolutionary history alone would be equivalent to losing a monotypic phylum. "

"The distinctive palette of colors in its light told scientists that the bright red object they were studying wasn't just another star. Indeed, last week, when astronomers analyzed the spectrum from the quasar they had found, they realized they were seeing light that had left its source at time when the universe was a baby, a mere infant of less than a billion years old. They were looking at the most distant object human beings had ever identified. "

"When astronomers first discovered planets around sunlike stars three and a half years ago, many cast their discoveries in a philosophical light. Earth and the rest of the sun's family, they affirmed, were just a few faces in the planetary crowd, not special at all and certainly not the center of the universe. With some 18 worlds definitively located--roughly one per 20 sunlike stars observed--astronomers now have enough planets to test that assertion. The findings have already undermined decades of conventional wisdom about what a planetary system should look like: half the planets orbit unexpectedly close to their stars; the other half have elongated orbits unlike any in our solar system. But less widely known is another mystery--unexplained patterns in the composition of the parent stars."

"Astronomers have now demonstrated the advantages of a more sophisticated technique called multiconjugate adaptive optics, which uses light from several stars or lasers to produce, in effect, a three-dimensional map of the turbulence. With this method, optical corrections can be made across larger patches of sky. Multiconjugate techniques would improve the current generation of 8- and 10-meter aperture telescopes and "will be absolutely essential for the ultralarge, 100-meter telescopes now being discussed," says Robert Q. Fugate, an adaptive optics expert working at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base near Albuquerque."

"When low-mass stars called red supergiants die, they fade away on a wimpy wind - or so scientists have thought. New research, just published, suggests that the exact opposite may be true. These stars, in fact, may die with a bang and not with a whimper. The study, published today in the journal Science, may lead researchers to a new understanding of red supergiants, which are studied to resolve issues in nucleosynthesis, stellar structure and the evolution of stars."

"On April 14, a unique Australian scientific mission sets sail from Cairns in North Queensland to plumb the depths of the Pacific Ocean for extraordinary lifeforms that can survive in boiling water and which dine on minerals containing copper, gold and nickel. The CSIRO expedition aboard the research vessel Franklin will conduct a pioneering search of active volcanic vents a kilometre down on the seabed of the Manus Basin, north of Papua New Guinea. Their aim is to discover "extremophile" microbes endowed with the natural ability to process minerals at high temperature, to help make Australia's $37 billion mineral export industry cleaner, greener, safer and more competitive."

"Mutually catalytic sets of simple organic molecules have been suggested to be capable of self-replication and rudimentary chemical evolution ... Our analysis addresses the question of how mutually catalytic metabolic networks, devoid of sequence-based biopolymers, could exhibit transfer of chemical information and might undergo selection and evolution. This computed behavior may constitute a demonstration of natural selection in populations of molecules without genetic apparatus, suggesting a pathway from random molecular assemblies to a minimal protocell."

"Variations in solar irradiance are widely believed to explain climatic change on 20,000- to 100,000-year time-scales in accordance with the Milankovitch theory of the ice ages, but there is no conclusive evidence that variable irradiance can be the cause of abrupt fluctuations in climate on time-scales as short as 1,000 years. We propose that such abrupt millennial changes, seen in ice and sedimentary core records, were produced in part by well characterized, almost periodic variations in the strength of the global oceanic tide-raising forces caused by resonances in the periodic motions of the earth and moon."

"...one of the prime candidate landing sites for a future robotic explorer on Mars might not be a good bet after all. 'White Rock' may not, as hoped, be a mineral deposited from salty water, and so is unlikely to mark a spot where martian microbes might once have thrived, Steven Ruff of Arizona State University told NASA's First Astrobiology Science Conference at its Ames Research Center in California this week."

"[Guillermo] Gonzalez and colleagues have now proposed that entire galaxies, which contain millions of stars, also have habitable zones, beyond whose boundaries life - or, at least, advanced life - can't get a foothold. They say that the habitable zone of a spiral galaxy (like the Milky Way) may encircle its centre, just as the habitable zone of the solar system encircles the Sun. Inside or outside this band, a galaxy is sterile."

"8 April, 1960, near Green Bank, West Virginia, US: Dr Frank Drake first pointed a 25-metre (85-foot) radio telescope at two nearby stars called Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti. His aim was to detect signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. Scientists have been looking ever since. "

"A revolution is going on in robotics, in which a new army of biologically inspired robots is emerging from laboratories throughout the world. As these robots learn to walk, crawl, and fly, they are advancing both robotics and scientists' understanding of how animals move. The goal is to create robots that can go where humans either can't go or where it's not safe to send them, such as the surfaces of other planets, the bowels of a burning building, or the risky confines of a minefield or a battlefield."

"Laboratory experiments demonstrate that iron isotopes can be chemically fractionated in the absence of biology. Isotopic variations comparable to those seen during microbially mediated reduction of ferrihydrite are observed. Fractionation may occur in aqueous solution during equilibration between inorganic iron complexes. These findings provide insight into the mechanisms of iron isotope fractionation and suggest that nonbiological processes may contribute to iron isotope variations observed in sediments. "

"Researchers are turning their attention to the culinary habits of microbes in their search for a few chemical "crumbs" of evidence of ancient, remote, and even extra-terrestrial life. Scientists are analyzing rocks from the furthest reaches of Earth, and beyond, using new and sensitive instrumentation to check for tell-tale signs of ancient life. In a paper in the April 8 issue of Science, a University of Rochester team has contributed to the effort. The scientists announced that they were able to re-create in the laboratory chemical signatures that were previously thought to be produced only by living organisms."

"Groups of young stars located in the solar neighborhood have recently received a lot of attention. These stars, which are only up to about 10 million years old, can provide insights into the birth of stars and planetary systems. For example, the TW Hydrae Association is just at the age when planets are believed to form, while MBM12 represents an earlier stage."

"The atmospheric concentrations of methane, a greenhouse gas, have been shown to increase in parallel with temperature increases in ice core records of glacial/interglacial cycles. Two different sources of this methane have been proposed: Methane hydrate stored in permafrost and on the sea floor, and bacterial processes in wetland environments."

"On 29 March, NASA announced that astronomers had bagged two new planets that circle other stars. Less massive than Saturn, the objects are the smallest extrasolar planets yet found--proof that astronomical techniques are now sensitive enough that scientists could spot our own solar system from afar. The discovery has sparked hopes that glimpses of even smaller planets are soon to come."

"Last week NASA embarked on a new course for its Mars missions. But coming up with the details for changing this complex program that was set to send orbiters and landers to Mars every 2 years will be a challenge. "

"On the Snowball Earth, ice is everywhere: even the oceans are frozen. Except for a few organisms clinging on around volcanos, no life can survive. The temperature is Arctic everywhere: about minus 40°C."

".... we report a fortuitous crossing by a spacecraft of the plasma tail of comet Hyakutake (C/1996 B2), at a distance of more than 3.8 astronomical units (550 million kilometres) from its nucleus. This surpasses the tail length of 2 AU determined for the Great March Comet of 1843 (C/1843 D1). Our measurements reveal that, at this distance, the tail of comet Hyakutake was a structured entity at least 7 million kilometres in diameter."

"Data from a far-ranging spacecraft have revealed that as Comet Hyakutake was flying by the sun in 1996, its tail was still detectable some 350 million miles out in space -- nearly the distance to Jupiter."

"A chance encounter between Ulysses, the joint ESA/NASA spacecraft, and a cometís tail is leading scientists to conclude that comet tails extend much further than anyone supposed - right to the edge of the solar system."

"As often happens in science, an experiment looking for something else entirely has stumbled upon a dramatic new finding: The ionized vapor trails left behind by comets as they zing past our sun may be billions of miles longer than anyone previously recognized. That means that comets have probably been spreading more "star stuff" around the solar system than had been thought, and it opens up the possibility of new ways to capture and measure the contents of comets, which are believed to be frozen records of our solar system's birth. "

"To treat symptoms of the common cold, most people take a gel capsule containing hundreds of granular pieces of medicine as a remedy for coughing, sneezing and a runny nose. Now, imagine ingesting a capsule of similar size, containing microscopic sensors to detect, diagnose and treat disease inside the human body. "

".. in results to be published in the May Astronomical Journal, [Susan] Tereby reports, "The new data do not lend weight to the protoplanet interpretation and the results remain consistent with the explanation that TMR-1C may be a background star. Although the Hubble image is striking, there is the alternate possibility that TMR-1C is an unrelated background star, seen, by chance, projected close to the young star system. Finding a clearer answer is difficult for an object as faint as TMR-1C."

"The emphasis on Earth comes through loud and clear in the agenda for NASA's Astrobiology Science Conference, scheduled April 3-5 at Ames Research Center in California. More than half of the 51 presentations on the schedule focus on life on Earth - how it arose in the distant past, how it endures in extreme environments, how it can be affected by climate and chemistry."

"We may be a step closer towards understanding how the first cells emerged on the primordial stage, thanks to researchers in California. They have shown that proteins can spontaneously form the ion pumps that help power cells. Protein pumps are crucial in modern cells. They use the energy from light or food to move ions across a membrane, creating an electrical gradient. These gradients act as a kind of battery, driving cellular processes. "

"Researchers from the University of Delaware and Analytical Instrument Systems, Inc., have developed an electrochemical analyzer, a kind of underwater "snooper," that can detect the chemicals spewing out of super-hot vents over a mile deep on the ocean floor. The analyzer, which is mounted to the submarine Alvin, can be parked near a vent to provide readings of the sulfur-rich compounds rocketing out of the Earth's crust. Ironically, these toxic chemicals may serve as fingerprints, leading scientists to the locations of deep-sea organisms that may be beneficial to humankind. "

""My contention is that studying extreme organisms is not only interesting because you get to go to exotic places,"said Jonathan Trent, a NASA scientist who studies microbes in Yellowstone Park. "They are interesting in and of themselves because they are clearly freaks"but also because of what they teach about biology, he said. "

'Planet-hunting astronomers have crossed an important threshold in planet detection, with the discovery of two planets that may be smaller in mass than Saturn. Of the 30 extrasolar planets around Sun-like stars detected previously, all have been the size of Jupiter or larger. The existence of these Saturn-sized candidates suggests that many stars harbor smaller planets, in addition to the Jupiter-sized ones. Finding Saturn-sized planets reinforces the theory that planets form by a snowball effect of growth from small ones to large, in a star-encircling dust disk. The 20-year-old theory predicts there should be more smaller planets than large planets, and this is a trend the researchers are beginning to see in their data."

° NASA press release
° Extrasolar Planets, SpaceRef Directory
° Extrasolar Planets, The Astrobiology Web

"NASA has announced the results of its Mars Polar Lander investigation team's report. The Mars Polar Lander's December 1999 demise apparently occurred when the lander thought the jolt of its landing leg deployment was touchdown - and shut its engines off. Moments later it crashed into Mars at freeway speed, the second probe to do so in less than 4 months. The two Deep Space-2 probes, ironically designed to intentionally crash into Mars at 400 miles per hour, also vanished without a trace. The teams investigating that loss suggested simply that the DS-2 probes should not have been launched - since they were not ready to be launched in the first place."

• Summary Report (acrobat)
  
• Full Report (acrobat) [Part 1] [Part 2]

• [Part 1] , [Part 2], [Part 3], [Part 4], [Part 5]

According to a press release from Washington University, faculty geologists "have developed new theoretical calculations on how life might have arisen on Earth, Mars and other celestial bodies from volcanic gases. The calculations show not only that life can arise from the gaseous crucible of present day terrestrial volcanoes, but that it was even more likely to develop billions of years ago on early Earth, Mars and Jupiter's satellite, Europa."

° Washington University Press release
° Life in Extreme Environments, The Astrobiology Web
° Extremophiles, SpaceRef Directory
° Hydrothermal Vent Communities, SpaceRef Directory

According to a NASA ARC press release: "An internationally recognized cadre of researchers from diverse scientific disciplines will present their latest findings demonstrating the novel, multidisciplinary nature of astrobiology during the First Astrobiology Science Conference at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, April 3-5, 2000.

° NASA Press release
° Astrobiology Web
° Astrobiology, SpaceRef Directory

NASA has decided to deorbit the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) due to safety concerns that it could reenter on its own and pose a threat to people on Earth. NASA plans to maneuver the spacecraft and alter its orbit such that it will impact on Earth on 3 June 2000. NASA's Ed Weiler said "my job is to do as much science as I can" and that making such as decision was "not easy". He justified his decision by saying that he cannot sanction a trade off between science and an increased risk of loss of human life.

Full Story ...

° NASA's Successful Compton Gamma Ray Telescope Mission Comes to an End, NASA press release

According to Johns Hopkins University:" On March 7, 2000, the imager on the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft acquired the first of several planned "flyover movies" of Eros. This one shows the "saddle" region from a range of 205 kilometers (127 miles).

A flyover's purpose is to show a region of the asteroid during continually changing lighting conditions, with solar illumination coming from a variety of directions and elevations above the surface."

° Full description and movie files, Johns Hopkins University
° Focus on NEAR and Eros, SpaceRef

There was a shaker table mishap at JPL today. According to our sources there was a GSFC satellite (HESSI - High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager) - in the unit at the time. Engineers were performing a test and lost control resulting in damage to the satellite.

HESSI was scheduled to be launched in July 2000 as part of NASA's Small Explorer Program. As a result of the damage received, it will now be launched no earlier than January 2001. HESSI's primary mission is to explore the basic physics of particle acceleration and energy release in solar flares. The HESSI project is managed by the Laboratory for Astronomy and Solar Physics at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

° NASA press release
° HESSI Home Page, NASA GSFC

NASA has decided to deorbit the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) due to safety concerns that it could reenter on its own and pose a threat to people on Earth. NASA plans to maneuver the spacecraft and alter its orbit such that it will impact on Earth on 3 June 2000.

"The decision will be announced at a news conference at 1 p.m. EST Friday, March 24, at the James E. Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters, 300 E St., SW, Washington, DC. "

"Sources tell CNN that during a meeting Thursday morning at NASA headquarters in Washington, senior managers at the space agency made the decision to send the $600 million Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory to a watery grave in the Pacific on June 3. "

From: CSOC Production Operations Highlights, Program Management Review, page 4-1

Continued supporting the CGRO Deboost planning activities. Current plans are to initiate Deboost operations in late May with Reentry on 06/03/2000. CSOC formed a CGRO Re-Entry Augmentation Team (GREAT) to work closely with the Project. Extensive pre-Deboost procedure testing will be conducted and evaluated prior to Deboost operations. Dedicated support for the Goddard GRO Simulator (GGS) has been assigned throughout the planning and execution phase.

Using a new camera on the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope Dr Philip Lucas of the University of Hertfordshire and Dr Patrick Roche of the University of Oxford discovered 13 "free-floating planets" as well as more than one hundred very young brown dwarfs.

Up until now all of the extrasolar planets that have been discovered have been found orbiting stars and have been detected by virtue of their effect upon their parent star. These newly identified objects were discovered as solitary objects using detection methods that register the heat they release. The smallest of the objects discovered by this team is 8 Jupiter masses which may indicate the lower detection limit for this approach.

° Royal Astronomical Society Press Release
° Astronomers find 'planets' in Orion, BBC
° SpaceRef Directory for Extrasolar Planets

According to NASA's Ames Research Center "Extraterrestrial gases, including helium, are trapped in "buckyball" molecules in a layer of sedimentary clay found in many places on Earth, according to a paper to be published March 28, 2000, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The discovery provides a new tool for tracing asteroid and comet impacts in Earth's geological and biological records. A University of Hawaii geochemist and her colleagues, including a NASA scientist, found gases that did not originate on Earth inside buckyballs, or fullerene carbon molecules. "The buckyballs containing the gases arrived on Earth about 65 million years ago during an asteroid impact that scientists theorize ended the age of the dinosaurs. The clay layer that formed from fallout of the impact debris was globally distributed," [NASA's Ted] Bunch explained."

° NASA Press Release
° University of Hawaii press release
° Astrochemistry, SpaceRef Directory
° Astrochemistry Lab, NASA Ames Research Center
° Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Rochester
° Cosmochemistry Program, University of Hawaii
° New form of pure carbon found in Mexican meteorite; possible player in origin of life, University of Hawaii press release (July 1999)
° Buckyball Page, SUNY Stony Brook

The Galileo orbiter's close pass by Io in 1995 produced evidence for extensive mass loading of the plasma torus through the ionization of SO₂. On 11 October 1999, Galileo passed even closer to Io, this time across the upstream side relative to the flow of magnetospheric plasma that corotates with Jupiter. On the first flyby, ion cyclotron waves gave direct evidence for the production of SO₂⁺ ions. On the second flyby, ion cyclotron waves associated with SO⁺ were stronger and more persistent. Moreover, SO⁺ emissions were seen closer to Io than SO₂⁺ emissions, suggesting that the exosphere was spatially inhomogeneous. The location of the waves suggests a fan-shaped region of ion pickup extending in the anti-Jupiter direction. Because the wave spectra were different even where the 1995 and 1999 trajectories crossed, we infer that Io's exosphere is temporally variable. "

"An Earth-monitoring satellite initially proposed by Vice President Al Gore won scientific endorsement last week from a panel of the National Research Council. President Bill Clinton's science adviser Neal Lane immediately hailed the study as "a rigorous analytic review" that gives a green light to the program and called for bipartisan support for the effort. But it still may not be smooth sailing for the project, as Republican leaders in Congress have long opposed it. "

"Mathematicians have proved that three stars can chase each other forever in a figure-eight pattern, with each one passing between the other two in turn--and that this orbit is stable. Moreover, they unexpectedly found that the three stars do not have to have equal masses, as they had assumed, meaning that the configuration could conceivably be observed in the universe. "

"GC-MS on the Viking 1976 Mars missions did not detect organic molecules on the Martian surface, even those expected from meteorite bombardment. This result suggested that the Martian regolith might hold a potent oxidant that converts all organic molecules to carbon dioxide rapidly relative to the rate at which they arrive. This conclusion is influencing the design of Mars missions. We reexamine this conclusion in light of what is known about the oxidation of organic compounds generally and the nature of organics likely to come to Mars via meteorite. "

"The Viking spacecraft, which landed on Mars nearly 25 years ago, failed to find any signs of organic molecules, dashing hopes of detecting traces of life -- modern or ancient -- on the surface. Scientists have since assumed that the harsh oxidising environment on the surface would destroy such molecules and that future missions will have to drill into the ground to find them." But the chemistry of Mars could have altered organic molecules in a number of complex ways, says Steven Benner, a chemist and Mars exploration consultant at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "There are some people who can look at music scores and see the chords," he says, "and there is a similar talent for guessing what the products of organic reactions will be under certain conditions."

"Should evolution's "survival of the fittest" creed be supplemented with an appendage that reads "survival of the catastrophic?" A team of Berkeley researchers, analyzing the history of impact cratering on the moon, has reported a surprising increase in the frequency of impacts over the past 400 million years that may have played a central role in the evolution of life on Earth."

"A sudden proliferation of living things on Earth 500 million years ago coincided with an increase in meteor and comet impacts on the moon, providing new evidence that exotic organic compounds from space may have played a role in the evolution of life on our planet, a new study suggests."

"Lunar spherules are small glass beads that are formed mainly as a result of small impacts on the lunar surface; the ages of these impacts can be determined by the ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar isochron technique. Here, 155 spherules separated from 1 gram of Apollo 14 soil were analyzed using this technique. The data show that over the last ~3.5 billion years, the cratering rate decreased by a factor of 2 to 3 to a low about 500 to 600 million years ago, then increased by a factor of 3.7 ± 1.2 in the last 400 million years. This latter period coincided with rapid biotic evolutionary radiation on Earth. "

According to NASA GSFC. "Some of Mars' best kept secrets, long buried beneath the surface of the red planet, were recently revealed by instruments on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. New observations of Mars reveal that the planet's flat northern lowlands were an early zone of high heat flow that later may have been the site of rapid water accumulation. Elevation and gravity measurements, which have been used to probe beneath the surface of Mars, indicate a period of rapid cooling early in Martian history, and evidence for large buried channels that could have formed from the flow of enormous volumes of water."

"Scanning and transmission electron microscopy images obtained on the weathered samples of the Tatahouine meteorite and surrounding soil show two types of bacteria-like forms lying on mineral surfaces. The sizes of the [forms] are below those commonly observed for bacteria but are very similar to some bacteria-like forms described in the Martian meteorite ALH84001. All the previous observations strongly suggest that they are bacteria or their remnants."

"A NASA spacecraft exploring Jupiter and its moons may be deliberately crashed to avoid any chance that it could strike and contaminate the moon Europa, where scientists believe simple life forms may exist."

"Ten years ago few people had heard of the Internet. Even 5 years ago it was viewed by many as a technological curiosity - some thought it to be a passing fad. Now the so-called "dot com" economy makes multi-billion dollar deals on a regular basis. Ten years from now the Internet could be a phenomenon that has expanded beyond Earth to form an interplanetary network of Internets reaching to Mars and beyond. That is the vision of Vint Cerf and his colleagues at the InterPlanetary Internet (IPN) team.

The idea of an InterPlanetary Internet came to Vint Cerf several years ago as he was trying to formulate an idea of what the Internet might look like in the future. He envisioned a series of Internets linked by gateways and using the Internet Protocol (IP) suite (a world-wide standard) as its basis. By using the IP protocol (which he helped co-create), he felt that existing technology could be leveraged so as to speed up development of the InterPlanetary Internet."

Full Story and background information ...

"The DARPA and NSF NGI Programs are proud to announce the second event in the NGI Distinguished Lecturer series of live and telecast seminars on Next Generation Internet technologies." National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Arlington, Virginia, Ballston Metro stop.

Information and directions ...

Galileo is ready to buzz Io at close range Tuesday morning. According to NASA JPL: "This Io flyby will mark the fourth time the spacecraft has flown past Io since arriving at Jupiter in December 1995, and is the closest-ever approach, with a flyby altitude of only 200 kilometers (124 miles) above Io's fiery surface. The Io flyby is scheduled to occur on Tuesday morning at 5:47 a.m. PST. Radio signals indicating that the flyby has occurred, however, won't be received on Earth until 45 minutes later, or at 6:32 a.m. PST."

Press release and background information ...

° UPDATE: "NASA's Galileo spacecraft has scored another success by completing this morning's third and closest flyby of Jupiter's volcanic moon Io, dipping to only 199 kilometers (about 124 miles) above the fiery surface", Galileo Millennium Mission Status, NASA JPL

"Mars was on the minds of a number of attendees at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A morning session took a wide-ranging look at space exploration. At one point, Freeman Dyson suggested that bioengineered trees might be used to transform the Martian environment. More detailed discussions of Mars were held that afternoon in a session chaired by Planetary Society Executive Director Lou Friedman. Some of the highlights follow."

"Galileo won't be flying into Europa, where last month its instruments discovered the best evidence yet of a liquid ocean beyond Earth. The reason? Galileo could still be carrying microbes, 11 years after its launch from the space shuttle Atlantis. "We don't want to get anywhere near Europa, simply because of the possibility of life there,'' Bindschadler said. "They don't want to crash this contaminated spacecraft into Europa,'' said Andrew Ingersoll of the California Institute of Technology."

According to a Johns Hopkins University press release "This color image of Eros was acquired by NEAR's multispectral imager on February 12, 2000, at a range of 1100 miles (1800 kilometers). It is part of the final approach imaging sequence prior to orbit insertion and is intended to map the color properties of Eros across all of the illuminated surface. The image shows approximately the color that Eros would appear to the unaided human eye. Its subtle butterscotch hue is typical of a wide variety of minerals thought to be the major components of asteroids like Eros. "

"For the primitive organisms unlucky enough to be around 2.4 billion years ago, the first global freeze was a real wipeout, likely the worst in the history of life on Earth. Few of the organisms escaped extinction, and those that did were forced into an evolutionary bottleneck that altered the diversity of life for eons."

° Snowball Earth episode 2.4 billion years ago was hard on life, but good for modern industrial economy, research show, press release, Cal Tech

° Paleoproterozoic snowball Earth: Extreme climatic and geochemical global change and its biological consequences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science [Abstract - subscription fee required for full access]

° Snowball Earth, Scientific American, January 2000

"The location and density of biologically useful energy sources on Mars will limit the biomass, spatial distribution, and organism size of any biota. Subsurface Martian organisms could be supplied with a large energy flux from the oxidation of photochemically produced atmospheric H2 and CO diffusing into the regolith. However, surface abundance measurements of these gases demonstrate that no more than a few percent of this available flux is actually being consumed, suggesting that biological activity driven by atmospheric H2 and CO is limited in the top few hundred meters of the subsurface......"

"Geological, geophysical, and geochemical data support a theory that Earth experienced several intervals of intense, global glaciation ("snowball Earth" conditions) during Precambrian time. This snowball model predicts that postglacial, greenhouse-induced warming would lead to the deposition of banded iron formations and cap carbonates. Although global glaciation would have drastically curtailed biological productivity, melting of the oceanic ice would also have induced a cyanobacterial bloom, leading to an oxygen spike in the euphotic zone and to the oxidative precipitation of iron and manganese"

"For the primitive organisms unlucky enough to be around 2.4 billion years ago, the first global freeze was a real wipeout, likely the worst in the history of life on Earth. Few of the organisms escaped extinction, and those that did were forced into an evolutionary bottleneck that altered the diversity of life for eons."

After a nominal burn, NEAR is in orbit around Eros. SpaceRef has put together a special "Focus On" feature on the NEAR mission including information on the spacecraft, its science objectives, and the target asteroid Eros. Included is an up to date listing of news stories, press releases, images, and other information on this mission.

According to a press release from Johns Hopkins University, "Just in time for its Valentine's Day date with 433 Eros, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft snapped this photo during its approach to the 21-mile-long space rock. Taken Feb. 11, 2000, from 1,609 miles (2590 kilometers) away, the picture reveals a heart-shaped depression about 3 miles (5 kilometers) long. Photos taken from closer in during the next few days will help the NEAR team unravel the mystery of this shadowy feature. "

"For nearly 2 decades, astronomers have argued about whether polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which result from the burning of hydrocarbons at high temperatures, are as ubiquitous in space as they are here at home. Now astronomers picking over data obtained by Europe's Infrared Space Observatory, who met in Madrid last week, believe they have evidence that clinches the case for PAHs in space. But critics say the findings could be explained by solid particles rather than PAHs; to finally settle the matter, chemists will have to duplicate the results in the lab. "

"Meteorologists have long wondered whether solar energy or heat energy from within the planet predominates in driving Jupiter's powerful weather engine. In two papers in this week's issue of Nature, researchers provide an answer: Deep heat funneled upward by local storms is a major driver of jovian weather. They show that much if not all of the deep heat escaping the interior flows up through towering thunderstorms that eventually give up their energy to larger storms such as the Great Red Spot."

"This year, for a change, NASA gets to share in the budget wealth. The White House request for a $435 million increase, to $14.04 billion, marks the first time that the Clinton Administration has granted the space agency a significant increase."

"Planetary science and the scientific revolution bootstrapped each other into prominent places in intellectual history during the 15th and 16th centuries. In his Pathways of Discovery essay, David J. Stevenson of Caltech begins with this "first epoch" of planetary science, including the likes of Galileo using homemade telescopes, as he tells an expansive story of scientific discovery. While taking readers on a veritable tour of the solar system, he also recounts highlights of the ongoing "second epoch" of planetary science and its fantastic tools, such as interplanetary satellites and the Hubble Space Telescope. According to Stevenson, the best is yet to come for the field as its practitioners continue to discover extrasolar planets and join the quest to answer one of the most important questions there is: How did life first arise?"

"Scientists have discovered genes for hibernation in humans. The discovery could pave the way for human hibernation of the kind foreshadowed for astronauts in the 30-year-old film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Human hibernation would make ultralong-haul space travel feasible, with crews effectively put to sleep for months, or even years, by triggering the hibernation genes that man's distant ancestors used millions of years ago to sleep through hostile winters."

"The research team has identified and mapped two genes for enzymes that play important roles in hibernation in ground squirrels, and have discovered that these genes are nearly identical to ones found in nonhibernating mammals, including humans. "

"UK meteorite hunters have tracked down two extremely rare space rocks which will help probe the deepest parts of the Earth."

According to a Space Telescope Science Institute press release; "Previously unseen details of a mysterious, complex structure within the Carina Nebula (NGC 3372) are revealed by this image of the "Keyhole Nebula," obtained with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The picture is a montage assembled from four different April 1999 telescope pointings with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, which used six different color filters."

Full press release and images ...

According to a press release, "Preliminary indications show the NEAR spacecraft is on a steady path to Eros, after a braking maneuver today adjusted its approach speed and trajectory toward the large asteroid. At noon EST, NEAR's medium-sized thrusters fired for 90 seconds and eased the spacecraft from 43 mph (relative to Eros) to 18 mph. The maneuver also moves NEAR's trajectory about six-tenths of a mile (100 kilometers) closer to its target.

Full story and background information ...

"What form could life beyond Earth take, and where could it exist? One study indicates that the radiation driven by Jupiter¹s magnetic field could fuel the minimum conditions for life on Europa, an ice-covered moon."

The Mars Society announced today that Flashline.com had agreed to donate $175,000 towards the cost of constructing and operating the Society's Mars Arctic Research Station (M.A.R.S.) - which will now be referred to as the Flashline Arctic Research Station.

The approach being taken by the Mars Society is not at all new. Indeed, some of the more exciting and memorable research projects of the last century were done by a synergistic mixture of scientific and commercial interests. Throughout the 1960's television audiences around the world tuned in to a regular series of special programs that featured the exploits of Captain Jacques Cousteau and the red-cap wearing crew of the Calypso.

Full Story and background information...

"Few scientists thought that the Galileo spacecraft, beset by technical troubles, could conduct such a comprehensive study of the Jovian system. And few predicted that the innards of these worlds would prove so varied "

"The building blocks of DNA could have formed in space before Earth was born, providing a starter kit of genetic material for life to evolve rapidly on Earth, claim astrochemists in India. Their computer models of chemicals evolving in space may explain why life emerged only 600 million years after the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago."

"...two researchers report evidence that 84 million years ago the whole Earth rolled like a ball, turning 15° to 20° in a couple of million years. This "true polar wander," so called because the geographic poles could actually travel across the globe, would move land and sea 10 times faster than continental drift ever has. If it is real, it may be symptomatic of unusual turmoil within the deep interior of Earth."

"Chunks of ice as big as basketballs have been plummeting out of Spain's skies in recent days, baffling scientists. "

"The possibility of a hoax has not been ruled out. "There is no precedent of a natural phenomenon on this scale," said Javier Armentia, director of the planetarium in Pamplona. "I'm convinced we're dealing with a joker who decided to follow nature's example after the first couple of balls fell."

"In the past, falling blocks of ice have proven to be waste flushed out of passenger jets or pieces of comet tails. But Martinez said the current giant hail lacks the coloration of jet waste. And the chunks are too scattered and infrequent to come from a comet."

"At least ten melon-sized ice balls that have slammed into Spain in the last week are probably debris from comets, not human excrement as first suspected, a Spanish scientist said Monday."

"Australian scientists are to probe the depths of the Pacific Ocean for some extraordinary life forms that can survive boiling water and which live on minerals that contain copper, gold and nickel. "

Carnegie Mellon researchers deploy robot in Antarctica to search autonomously for meteorites and classify them in the field, press release

This Week on Galileo January 17-23, 2000 , NASA JPL

"The bacteria -- Bacillus subtilis (wild) and Deinococcus radiodurans R1 -- are resistant to high speeds, extreme heat and radiation. These properties would be necessary to survive a voyage by meteoroid from Mars to Earth, Mileikowsky, of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and others reported at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Atlanta."

"A primordial soup of complex organic chemicals that could be the precursors of life is cooked up very quickly after the birth of stars, new research suggests. "Life could have had an easier time starting than we thought before,'' astronomer Sun Kwok said Wednesday at a national meeting of the American Astronomical Society."

"The telescope, Flare Genesis, has a 32-inch (81 centimeters) mirror and is designed to show features on the sun's surface as small as 100 miles (160 kilometers) across, 50 times the resolution of ground-based solar telescopes."

"The Milky Way practically oozes with molecular hydrogen, the main ingredient for forming planets and stars, scientists from the University of Colorado at Boulder reported today."

"The discovery, announced today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society by astronomers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Colorado, is important because it provides astronomers with a look inside stellar nurseries at massive clusters of stars in their infancy. Estimated to be as young as 500,000 years, the star clusters are in the very earliest stages of development, analogous to the first day of life in human terms, the astronomers says. "This is exciting because it may reveal the types of environments where globular clusters form," says Henry (Chip) Kobulnicky, a UW-Madison astronomer. "No one has ever seen a star cluster of any type, much less a possible globular cluster, at such a young age."

"Seventy-five years after Edwin Hubble demonstrated that the universe extended beyond the Milky Way, three University of Washington astronomers using the telescope that bears his name have made some surprising discoveries about one object of his research. "

"With the help of a new satellite capable of finding the telltale, superheated gas created by stars that exploded long ago, scientists have confirmed a four-decade-old theory that the Milky Way is swathed in a corona of hot gas. The discovery is important because it provides strong evidence that supernovas continuously pump extremely hot gas atoms high into the galactic halo, a nebulous region far above the plane of the galaxy."

"The good news: There are fewer potential "doomsday" asteroids than previously believed that could cause an earthly catastrophe if they struck the planet. The bad news: Scientists say there¹s a 1 percent chance that a smaller object could smack into Earth in the next century, potentially killing millions of people."

"The number of Near Earth Objects (NEO's) is about half of that previously estimated. But the threat they pose is undiminished, according to a survey. "

On 7 January 2000, NASA announced that it was discontinuing support for the Space Science News website which had been hosted at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center since 1996. SpaceRef could not let this marvelous public website go untended - so we have created an archive of the entire website and have given it a new home.

Full Story - and a direct link to the Space Science News Archive

Full Story and background information...

According to NASA: " The First Annual Astrobiology Science Conference will be held at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, on 3-5 April 2000. The purpose of the conference is to bring together scientists working in disciplines that contribute to astrobiology in a way that will facilitate interdisciplinary interaction and communication. Unlike a number of recent planning workshops, the emphasis here will be on new and recent research results."

Full Story ....

"The NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center will no longer support the production and maintenance of the http://science.nasa.gov site, effective 10 January 2000. Archive material that is in the public domain will be available courtesy of Bishop Web Works, at http://spacescience.com. Thank you for your readership over the past three years.

John Horack
Director, Science Communications
NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center

"Observations have resolved the satellite Charon from its parent planet Pluto, giving separate spectra of the two objects from 1.0 to 2.5 micrometers. The spectrum of Charon is found to be different from that of Pluto, with water ice in crystalline form covering most of the surface of the satellite. In addition, an absorption feature in Charon's spectrum suggests the presence of ammonia ices. Ammonia ice-water ice mixtures have been proposed as the cause of flowlike features observed on the surfaces of many icy satellites. The existence of such ices on Charon may indicate geological activity in the satellite's past. "

"The first detailed spectra of Pluto's satellite Charon confirm the presence of H2O frost. No CH4 or N2 is seen, although both are abundant on nearby Pluto. The state of the H2O ice is crystalline, not amorphous, a surprise given Charon's expected cold surface temperatures. NH3 may also be present, which would make Charon the first satellite in the solar system with a positive NH3-frost detection. "

"Investigating "extreme" organisms such as weird, hydrothermal vent dwellers, uncovering clues about the seafloor's formation and testing new scientific equipment are all on the agenda for Extreme 2000. "

Galileo flew past Europa at a distance of 351 km (218 mi) today at 10:38 AM PST. According to NASA JPL: "The spacecraft is operating normally, and it appears that its instruments have completed their observations of the magnetic fields and charged particles around Europa." Observations of Amalthea, Thebe, and Metis will be performed by Galileo this evening. Observations of Io will be performed on the morning of 4 January.

Meanwhile, According to NASA JPL: "NASA Headquarters has agreed in principle to extend the Galileo mission past its planned January 31 finale. Details of funding and itinerary for the new extended mission, to be called the Galileo Millennium Mission, must still be resolved." In addition to additional flybys of Io and Ganymede, this new mission would include joint observations of Jupiter by both Galileo and Cassini in December 2000 as Cassini passes through the jovian system to perform a gravitational assist maneuver by Jupiter.

° Galileo Status Report , NASA JPL
° Galileo Mission Extended, NASA JPL
° Galileo Website, NASA JPL
° Cassini Website, NASA JPL

"What's out there? Astronomers have searched for signs of extraterrestrial life for centuries. They have yet to find an alien microbe, much less intelligent life, but the eyes of science are seeing further than ever before. Read excerpts from the article and an additional essay by Joel Achenbach. Then share your thoughts in our forum."