Thornton to Retire: Astronaut Kathy Thornton has announced her retirement from the astronaut corps, effective June 1. The 43-year-old astronaut will join the engineering faculty at the University of Virginia and lead the Center for Science Education there. She flew on four shuttle missions, including the maiden flight of Endeavour, STS-49, in 1992 and the Hubble repair mission, STS-61, in 1993. On STS-61 she was one of four astronauts who performed the EVAs needed to restore the telescope to full capacity. On her last flight, STS-73 last year, she served as payload commander for the U.S. Microgravity Laboratory flight.

Radio Telescope Dedicated: The BIMA (Berkeley Illinois Maryland Association) radio telescope was formally dedicated at the beginning of June. The facility, located in northern California 240 km (160 mi.) northeast of San Francisco, consists of nine telescopes, each six mirrors in diameter, designed to look at millimeter-wavelength radio signals. Scientists had already been using the core telescopes of the array to do studies of the content of protoplanetary disks, amino acids in space, and the surfaces of red giant stars.

Galileo on Track for Ganymede: JPL released an optical navigation (OPNAV) frame of Ganymede taken by Galileo as it approached its first flyby with the largest moon in the solar system. The image lacked detail but told mission planners what they needed to know: the spacecraft was on course for Ganymede. "This navigation image is totally different from the pictures we'll be taking for scientific study of Ganymede when we get close to it later this month," reassured Galileo Project Scientist Dr. Torrence Johnson.

Fast Flybys: Hughes has been picked to build the latest European Astra satellite for radio and television broadcasts in Europe. Hughes now has an estimated 40 percent of all commercial satellites placed into orbit... In a move they may now be regretting, the Parisian insurance brokerage Cecar agreed on May 23 to organize third-party launch insurance for the Ariane-5... A report by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) has called for an extended mission for the Hubble Space Telescope, whose prime mission will end in 2005. A low-maintenance operations mode could be used to run the telescope at only a fifth of current costs... A comment by a NASA official that the living facilities aboard the Mir space station are similar to those at a Motel 6 has prompted a commercial by the motel chain. Spokesman Tom Bodett drew favorable similarities between the station and the motel chain's facilities, although he did note that while Motel 6 offered free local calls, on Mir "there aren't any locals to call... at least, none that we know about."

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