UM Home | Search Advanced Search
NASA planning plane bound for Mars
WASHINGTON (AP) - To mark the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first airplane flight NASA wants to duplicate the event - sort of - on Mars. The NASA budget for 2000 contains $50 million to begin development of a Mars airplane. An animated video played at the budget briefing showed a small, pilotless plane parachuting toward the sandy surface, unfolding its wings and propeller, and puttering off. In actuality, a lot about the plane remains to be determined, including actual design and means of propulsion and delivery to Mars, NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin said. Flying in Mars' atmosphere is like flying at 100,000 to 130,000 feet altitude above Earth, he said, so much research needs to be done. A long-range jetliner flies at about 30,000 feet altitude. There is also an eight-minute time lag for radio messages between Earth and Mars, complicating the control of the plane, which would be unmanned. The goal, is all goes well, is to make the flight in 2003, the 100th a! nniversary of the Wright Brothers flight, though NASA's briefing papers admitted it could slip to 2005.
Friday, March 26
Earth's Water: Not From Comets
Astronomers at Caltech reported in the March 18th issue of Nature that the chemical composition of water seen in comets, specifically Comet Hale-Bopp, does not match the water that covers the Earth. The difference is in the ratio of "heavy water," in which one of the hydrogen atoms in H2O has an extra neutron (an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium). Geoff Blake and his colleagues explain that the water in Hale-Bopp -- as detected using the Owens Valley Radio Observatory Millimeter Array -- has much more heavy water than the Earth currently does. This implies that the water in our rivers, lakes, and oceans did not originate from cometary impacts. See the researchers' paper for for details.
New Asteroid Satellite
For the first time, ground-based astronomers have directly imaged a satellite orbiting an asteroid. William J. Merline (Southwest Research Institute) and his colleagues announced on IAU Circular 7129 that several images of minor planet 45 Eugenia show a fainter companion. The satellite -- designated S/1998 (45) 1 -- was first seen in a series of pictures during a 10-day span in November 1998 using the 3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The object was spotted again on January 4th. Merline and his colleagues determined that the object orbits the 200-kilometer-wide asteroid in a near-circular orbit every 4.7 days. Details of the discovery will appear in a forthcoming issue of Nature.