After a six-year, 2.3-billion-mile journey, the Galileo spacecraft reached Jupiter December 7, with the main spacecraft entering orbit around the solar system's largest planet as the probe plunged into Jupiter's atmosphere.
The Galileo Probe entered Jupiter's atmosphere at 5:04 pm EST December 7, transmitting data to the orbiter spacecraft as it descended into Jupiter's atmosphere. At 8:20pm EST the Orbiter's main thruster fired for 49 minutes, placing the $1.3 billion spacecraft into orbit around Jupiter.
On Sunday, mission controllers began playing back the Probe data. Officials estimate that the Probe returned data for at least 57 minutes before losing contact with the Orbiter. Using models of the spacecraft and the Jovian atmosphere, this time corresponds to a depth of 160 km (100 mi) below the visible cloud tops.
Data return continued until Thursday, December 14, when interference by the Sun made communication too difficult. Officials hoped to return up to 40 minutes of probe data by Thursday. The rest will be returned starting in late January, after the spacecraft passes behind the Sun and communications can be restored.
The next major event for the Galileo Orbiter is in late June, when the spacecraft makes its first close approach to Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system. Galileo will flyby two other large Jovian moons, Callisto and Europa, during the next two years, as well as study the planet and its magnetic environment.
NASA officials were very pleased with Galileo's performance last week. "Is this a great day or what?" NASA administrator Dan Goldin said at a press conference December 7. "We are all absolutely ecstatic that our tremendously ambitious, first-ever penetration of an outer planet atmosphere has been so wonderfully successful," Bill O'Neil, Galileo project manager, said a few days later.
Interest in the mission from Internet users was very high. According to JPL's Ron Baalke, the Galileo home page at JPL, http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo, was accessed 2.1 million times between December 1 and 11, with the peak on December 9. Even with an alternate site, reaching the home page became difficult during peak times during and after Galileo's arrival.
A press conference with the first science results from the Galileo Probe data has been scheduled for Tuesday, December 19.
The United States and the Ukraine are reportedly close to finalizing a trade agreement that would allow up to 20 launches by Ukrainian boosters over the next six years, a Florida newspaper reported December 14.
The newspaper Florida Today reported that U.S. and Ukrainian trade representatives, meeting in Vienna, had not yet finished an agreement. Earlier reports had stated that an agreement would be signed on Wednesday.
The agreement would reportedly allow Ukrainian launch vehicles to be used in 20 commercial launches through 2001. The Ukrainian company NPO-Yuzhnoye currently builds the Zenit booster.
News of an impending agreement had met with criticism among executives and others in the American launch industry, who feel allowing commercial launches on the cheaper Ukrainian boosters would undercut sales of American boosters.
According to Florida Today, officials of aerospace companies, unions, and several other organizations met to discuss a strategy to eliminate the launch vehicle proviso or limit the number of boosters. They hope to unveil their strategy within the next 48 hours.
The launch of the X-Ray Timing Explorer satellite, scheduled for December 10, has been delayed until no earlier than December 17 due to high winds at Kennedy Space Center.
Winds above the launch site were too high on December 10, 11, and 12, postponing launches on those dates. After the December 12 postponment, officials rescheduled the launch for Sunday, December 17, to allow for a previously-scheduled Atlas IIA launch of the Galaxy-3R satellite December 14.
When launched, the spacecraft will spend two to five years studying changes in astronomical x-ray sources over time. The spacecraft, built by the Goddard Space Flight Center, includes instruments from the University of California San Diego and MIT.
The launch of the XTE on a Delta II was originally scheduled for August, but was delayed when problems with the strap-on solid-fuel boosters on a similar Delta II placed a Korean communications satellite into the wrong orbit.
Two cosmonauts aboard the Mir space station took a short spacewalk Friday, December 8, to prepare the station for the addition of another module.
Cosmonauts Sergei Avdeyev and Yuri Gidzenko spent 36 minutes outside the space station, making preparations for the arrival of the Priroda science module, scheduled for launch in March. No problems were reported with the spacewalk.
German cosmonaut Thomas Reiter remained inside Mir during the spacewalk. He is scheduled to take a spacewalk, his second of the mission, early next year.
The three-man crew will remain aboard the station until the end of February, when they are replaced by a relief crew. The space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to make its third docking with Mir in late March, about two weeks after the launch of the Priroda module.
A Russian satellite that was believed to be part of the Soviet lunar program crashed to Earth in the Pacific ocean southeast of Hawaii Sunday, December 10, according to Russian reports.
The satellite, Kosmos-398, is believed to have broken up during re-entry, with pieces as heavy as 200 kg (440 lbs) surviving reentry. Any debris hit the Pacific Ocean 2,100 km (1,300 mi) southeast of Hawaii and out of harm's way.
Kosmos-398 was launched February 26, 1971, on a Soyuz-L booster from Baikonur Cosmodrome. According to Russian officials, the spacecraft completed its mission on March 1 of that year and had been registered as "space trash" since that time. Western observers believe the spacecraft may have been a test of a lunar orbiter as part of the Soviet Union's lunar program.
Western officials originally expressed concern about the reentry, fearing that the spacecraft contained nuclear fuel that could disperse fallout during reentry. However, Russian officials reported the spacecraft was powered by a battery, not by a nuclear reactor.
U.S. President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres signed an agreement Monday, December 11, paving the way for joint space missions between the two countries, including flying Israeli astronauts on the International Space Station.
The agreement, signed by the two leaders during a meeting in Washington, called for a series of joint space experiments in hydrology and environmental science, two areas of specific interest to Israel.
"These experiments will take place in unmanned space vehicles, in the shuttle program and in the international space station," Clinton said during a joint press conference with Peres.
Currently one Israeli, Dr. Eran Schenker, is training to be an astronaut. The Israeli doctor, currently at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, began training as a mission specialist earlier this year, but is unlikely to fly on the shuttle before 1999. Schenker's training is being paid by the Israeli government.
A National Research Council committee gave its approval of the International Space Station program, but cited several areas of improvement in a report released this week.
The NRC Committee on Space Station found no major problems with the space station. "Our overall reaction is that the ISS program has made enormous progress and is on course," the committee announced in its report.
The committee did recommend some changes and had some reservations about the project. The committee recommended that NASA develop contingency plans should one or more launches fail during the assembly phase of the station. Forty-four launches are required to assemble the station, with an additional 29 to place people and equipment aboard it.
The committee, led by former Martin Marietta president Thomas Young, also recommended minor changes in the station's solar power system. It also recommended that NASA carefully plan how astronauts will be selected for station duty, and how to best use their time in orbit.
Officials from the Australian and Japanese governments signed agreements this week to test a model of a Japanese reusable launch vehicle at the Woomera test range in Australia.
The Automatic Landing Flight Experiment (ALFLEX) will involve more than 20 landings of a 750-kg (1,650-lb) test vehicle at the Woomera Airfield starting in April.
The one-third-scale vehicle will be dropped from a helicopter at an altitude of 1,500 m (5,000 ft.) and will glide to a landing. On-board computers will control the rudder, elevons, and brakes of the glider and guide it to a fast landing.
ALFLEX is an early part of the Japanese H-2 Orbital Plane Experiment (HOPE), a project to develop an unmanned reusable launch vehicle. "It is envisaged that this unmanned vehicle could be a highly cost effective method of delivering payloads into space, including the ferrying of materials to a proposed Japanese module on the International Space Station," according to Australian Senator Chris Schacht, the official responsible for the Australian space program.
According to reports this week in the British media, including the BBC and Reuters, a British amateur astronomer discovered a new planet earlier this month. The only problem is that they were wrong.
Several British media outlets reported that George Sallit, a 43-year-old amateur astronomer, had discovered a planet 640 million kilometers (400 million miles) from Earth. According to a Reuters report, the planet had been given the designation "Sallit One" by the International Astronomical Union.
However, the same reports stated that the "planet" was only 32 km (20 mi) in diameter. Such objects are classified as asteroids or minor planets, instead of full-fledged planets. Moreover, asteroids are discovered virtually every day.
According to an astronomer with the IAU's Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the object had been observed only one night, and that any estimates of its size or distance were "imaginary." Moreover, he stated, over 20,000 unclassified objects had been observed on one night only so far this year.
Sallit himself backed away from the planet discovery, blaming the reports on an over-eager BBC reporter. In a posting to the Usenet newsgroup sci.astro.amateur, he even disclaimed a report in the story that his wife provides him tea while he observes. "I don't drink tea!!!" he said.
American and Dutch astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have found a new black hole, the third one confirmed by the five-year-old telescope.
The astronomers, Laura Ferrarese and Holland Ford from Johns Hopkins University and Walter Jaffe of Leiden University, found the black hold in the galaxy NGC 4261, 100 million light years from the Earth in the constellation Virgo.
They discovered the blank hole by measuring the speed of gas swirling in the center of the galaxy. Those measurements led to a mass of 1.2 billon solar masses for an object no larger than the solar system, making it a likely candidate for a black hole.
The astronomers, though, were puzzled by the location of the black hole, some 20 light years from the center of the galaxy instead of at the exact center, as expected. They were unable to find a way to move the black hole from the center, and suggest it may be self propelled, using jets of hot gas in the vicinity of the back hole.
One Small Step for Litigation: Hallmark Cards announced Friday that it had settled a lawsuit with Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong over the use of his likeness in a Christmas ornament last year. Armstrong had claimed that his name and likeness was used without his permission on the ornament, which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. The size of the settlement was undisclosed but said by one source to be "substantial." Armstrong plans to donate the settlement from the Kansas City-based company, minus legal fees, to Purdue University, his alma mater.
Space for America: The American Astronautical Society, the National Space Society, and more than 20 other organizations plan to release a statement covering a vision of America's space program this week. The document, called "Space for America: Meeting the Needs in the 21st Century" calls for a strong American space program in the next century, with an emphasis on affordable space transportation, "vigorous" economic activity in Earth orbit, and broad international cooperation, among other goals. A document that covers the plan in greater detail will be released in the near future.
American Wins Cosmic Art Contest: American artist Elisabeth Carroll Smith won a space art competition run by a Swiss organization which included judging by the crew aboard the Mir space station. Smith beat out nine other finalists for her painting "When Dreams Are Born." She won an Omega watch that flew on Mir for one year and is estimated to be worth $10,000. The contest, which included participants from Europe, North America, and the Middle East, was run by the OURS Foundation, a Swiss organization devoted to bringing together space technology and art. The judging of the finalists was done by the three-man crew aboard the Mir space station.
