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Astronotes: The inside scoop on the Universe at large.
posted: 30 June 2005
06:14 am
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November 1 Mini-Astronote - Today is the 40th Anniversary (1962), of Mars 1, the first Spacecraft to Reach Mars. It was launched by the Soviet Union. Electronic Ear on Europa If you want to know more about one of Jupiter's many moons, Europa, here's some sound advice. Acoustical oceanographer, Nick Makris, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) says a single "geophone" listening device could reveal how the icy moon's surface snaps, crackles, and pops. This electronic ear would be similar to gear already tested on Arctic Sea ice here on Earth. The idea was discussed at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America being held in Denver this week. To perform a better field test of the geophone technique, Makris and his colleagues hope to collaborate with NASA and venture to the Antarctic. There the frozen Lake Vostok and other Antarctic deep ice sheets provide more Europa-like conditions, Makris explains. By using the device on Europa, just how the resulting vibrations bounce around inside the enigmatic moon might reveal the depth of the ice and extent of the potentially life-sustaining liquid ocean underneath. Despite its promise of detecting the structure of Europa, one thing a geophone cannot do is look for evidence of life under the ice, Makris reports. That will still require the far more complicated and inevitably more expensive drilling technologies that are being studied and developed by other researchers. NASA has begun studying how best to investigate Europa less-expensively, an effort recently rekindled after skyrocketing costs forced cancellation of an earlier spacecraft mission that would orbit the mystifying moon. -- Leonard David October 31 Halloween High Jinks at the ISS? That Would Appear Logical CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The International Space Station's first official science officer donned pointed ears Thursday to offer "spocky" Halloween Day greetings to her colleagues at Mission Control in Houston. "Happy Halloween," Expedition Five astronaut Peggy Whitson said from the U.S. Destiny science module during a brief broadcast on NASA TV that showed her wearing a set of pointed ears. | 
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(like these ears need to be
any bigger, right?)
| "There's not much you can say at a moment like this," came the reply from Houston as laughter could be heard in the background. Ever since NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe named Whitson the space station program's first science officer, Whitson has endured a lot of teasing and jokes related to a certain Vulcan named Spock, the fictional science officer from the "Star Trek" television series. Along with Russians Valery Korzun and Sergei Treschev, Whitson has been in space since June. They are scheduled to return to Earth aboard shuttle Endeavour, which is being targeted for launch Nov. 10. An official launch date is expected to be chosen Thursday afternoon. -- Jim Banke Remember the Alamo Impact A 3-mile wide (5 kilometer) comet that struck the Earth 370 million years ago tossed out a unique "spindle-shaped bomb" that landed distant from the original impact site. Charles Sandberg, a U.S. Geological Survey emeritus researcher, announced the discovery during the Geological Society of America annual meeting in Denver. Sandberg, along with fellow scientist, Jared Morrow of the Univ. of Northern Colorado, said their work proves that the Alamo Breccia, yielded by a cometary impact into the Earth's Late Devonian sea -- which covered North America for tens of millions of years -- is far more extensive than thought. Their studies center on the Alamo Impact in southern Nevada. A comet hit the former deep ocean, resulting in bits of the sea floor being uplifted into space. That material vaporized, then recrystallized into a projectile that landed farther west in Nevada. The Alamo Impact projectile was found in southern Nevada. It is loaded with deep-water deposits of calcite, altered feldspar crystals, bits of melt rock, fragments of black quartzite, and a few shocked-quartz grains. Similar deposits have been recognized at four other locales to the north and south of the projectile's landing site. The Alamo Impact, named after a town in the area, took place three million years before one of the five greatest extinctions of life in Earth's history late in the Devonian Period, when most organisms lived in the ocean. -- Leonard David October 30 Eruption of Sicily. s Mt. Etna Caught by Aqua Satellite Mt. Etna, Europe's largest, most active and most studied volcano, is at it again. It has been spewing ash and oozing lava since the weekend, apparently awakened after hundreds of small earthquakes struck that area in Sicily. A plume of smoke and ash has reached Africa and was imaged by NASA's Aqua satellite, which was launched in May. Also visible in the image are two areas of red near Mt. Etna that may indicate lava flows on the volcano's slopes. Etna, which means tongue of lava, last erupted in August of 2001. | 
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| According to news reports, at least two lava flows were still streaming down the summit. s flanks as of Monday, October 28, but the flows had not come far enough down the mountain to affect any towns or villages. The lava did topple some ski resort facilities and power lines. Regional airports were closed when the ash and smoke decreased visibility to unsafe levels. Etna is one of the most studied volcanoes on Earth. In the summer of 2001, French scientists reported that Etna appeared to be undergoing a gradual shift from being a "hot spot" volcano, in which magma wells up from within the Earth, to an "island arc" volcano, in which magma is produced from the collision of tectonic plates. Jam-proof Chinese Satellite Chinese satellite officials have announced in Beijing that APSTAR VI will become that country's first foreign-made spacecraft designed to thwart malicious interruptions, that is, airwave hi-jacking. The satellite will be made for China by Alcatel Space of France, and launched in 2004 atop a Chinese Long March booster. Once in Earth orbit, the APSTAR VI can provide broadcasting and telecommunications services for regions including China, Southeast Asia, Australia and Hawaii of the United States, the state-controlled news outlet, China Today, has reported. There's good reason for China wanting anti-jam countermeasures built into its satellites. Last month, Falun Gong followers -- a spiritual movement banned in China -- mucked up the transmissions of China's SINOSAT-1. The illegal electronic intrusions made TV screens abnormal, distorting normal video viewing. Chinese government officials traced down the sabotaging of SINOSAT's radio and TV transmissions to the Falun Gong. Jamming signals were broadcast from an area of Taipei City in Taiwan Province. The China Anti-Cult Association (CACA) denounced the hijacking of SINOSAT signals, calling the repeated acts a violation of international laws and basic rules of civil telecommunications. -- Leonard David NASA Plans Long Duration Stay for Shuttle at Station CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA space station managers have proposed keeping a shuttle docked to the outpost for extended stays during missions in 2005 and 2008. Instead of remaining for a more normal six- to seven-day visit, a shuttle would linger at the International Space Station for as long as two weeks, said ISS program Bill Gerstenmaier. Gerstenmaier said it won't be a done deal until the shuttle program knows for sure which orbiter will be assigned to those flights. Of the four-orbiter fleet, only Discovery is not capable of flying the EDO pallet. Gerstenmaier also said engineers are exploring ways to feed the shuttle electrical power from the station's solar arrays. That could further extend a shuttle visit to 18 to 20 days. New hardware and new funding from Congress would be required to make that happen. -- Jim Banke October 29 Happy Trails for Right Stuff Pilot The first human to break the sound barrier has brought his 60-year career of flying military aircraft to a close. The most righteous of the right stuff, Chuck Yeager, slipped into high gear and revisited the infamous sonic boom above California desert at Edwards Air Force Base. The event took place on October 26 during air show festivities. Some 55 years earlier, on October 14, 1947, Yeager pushed the rocket-powered Bell X-1 to the speed of Mach 1.06, shattering the myth of the sound barrier forever. At the air show flight, Yeager was accompanied in an F-15 Eagle cockpit with Edwards test pilot Troy Fontaine in the back seat. For his final military flight, Yeager was also joined in the air by another F-15, this pane flown by longtime friend and former shuttle astronaut, Joe Engle. | 
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| Yeager's F-15 was specially adorned with the name "Glamorous Glennis" in honor of Yeager's wife. The moniker is similar to that painted on the Bell X-1 that Yeager flew in breaking the sound barrier. The 79-year old Yeager said he's not parking his flying interests, although the retried general announced earlier this year that 60 years of military flying is long enough. Rather, he'll still fly the "light stuff". "Now is a good time," said Yeager. "I've had a heck of good time and very few people get exposed to the things I've been exposed to. I'll keep on flying P-51s and light stuff, but I just feel it's time to quit." -- Leonard David Nazi's Name to be Dropped from Moon Crater
An inquiry launched at the request of the advocacy group Lunar Republic has resulted in a decision to drop the designation of a Moon crater named to honor an accused Nazi war criminal.
The unanimous decision by the Lunar Task Group of the International Astronomical Union's Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN) to remove the designation "Eppinger" from a six-kilometer wide crater on the Moon was announced after the group verified that Dr. Hans Eppinger, Jr., for whom the crater was named, had conducted experiments on Gypsy prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany during World War II. The heads of the IAU Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature and the Lunar Task Group could not be reached to verify that a final decision had in fact been made. However, an IAU member who voted during the review recent process to remove Eppinger. s name from the crater told SPACE.com the working group had made such a recommendation to the IAU. . Recently it has been brought to the attention of the working group that Dr. Eppinger & conducted cruel experiments on prisoners. the language of the read, and that his conduct . disqualifies him from being honored on the Moon..
The experiments, which involved giving unaltered sea water and sea water whose taste was camouflaged to the prisoners as their sole source of fluid, caused severe physical problems or death within six to twelve days. According to witness reports, the prisoners became so profoundly dehydrated that they were seen licking the floors after they were mopped just to get a drop of water.
Eppinger, who was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1879, also served as personal physician to the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, and was a professor at the universities in Freiburg, Cologne and Vienna. Eppinger killed himself in September 1946, one month before he was scheduled to testify in the Nuremberg war crimes trial. He committed suicide by taking poison, according to his obituary in The New York Times. Missed something from last week? Astronotes Archive
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 on NASA s Aqua satellite captured this true-color image of the ongoing eruption of Europe s largest and most active volcano, Mt. Etna, on the island of Sicily.)
