The space shuttle Atlantis completed its sixth docking mission with the Russian space station Mir last month, transferring cargo and exchanging astronauts before returning to Earth May 24.
     Atlantis docked with Mir on schedule shortly after 10:30pm EDT Friday, May 16 (0230 UT May 17). The hatches between Atlantis and Mir opened about two hours later.
     The key purpose of the mission was to exchange American astronauts staying on the station and provide the Mir crew with key supplies. Astronaut Jerry Linenger, who had spent four months on Mir, traded places with Atlantis crewmember Michael Foale, who will remain on the station for his own four-month tour of duty.
     Atlantis also provided Mir with several tons of supplies and equipment. One of the first brought across was a replacement oxygen generator for the space station, to replace one which failed in March.
     "They've got the things they need to continue the mission and continue the repair work if it becomes necessary," said Frank Culbertson, manager of the Shuttle-Mir program at NASA.
     Mir commander Vasily Tsibliev used the docking to downplay any remaining problems on the 11-year-old station. "As you can see, I'm alive and healthy, smiling, so the condition of the station is the same," he said. "We practically have no problems."
     Atlantis, in turn, received over one-ton of experiment samples and other equipment for return to Earth. The items carted back to Earth by Atlantis included a broken oxygen generator and two broken radios, the lithium perchlorate "candle" which triggered a small fire on the station in February, and miscellaneous other equipment, including a guitar brought to the station on a previous mission.
     NASA, though, refused a Russian request to dump water from the space station through the shuttle's wastewater system. The cosmonauts on the station believed the water was too contaminated with coolant that leaked from the station's cooling system to safely drink, and wanted to flush that water out through a water dump on the shuttle.
     "It's a good idea. It just needs to be done in an orderly fashion," said Culbertson. "The plan just came up too late for us to do the dumping, but we'll probably be able to accommodate them on a future mission."
     Atlantis undocked from Mir on Wednesday, May 21, after spending five days attached. The shuttle returned to Earth on Saturday, May 24 at 9:28am EDT (1328 UT), one orbit late due to weather conditions at the Kennedy Space Center.
     Linenger showed few ill effects from spending four months in weightlessness. He walked off the shuttle after landing and stood up during a press conference later in the day, holding his 18-month-old son.
     "This was no different than a short-duration flight for me," he said. "Physically, I don't feel that heavy. It's amazing to me. I really thought it would be a lot tougher."
     The next shuttle mission is the reflight of April's shortened STS-83 mission, now dubbed STS-94. The shuttle Columbia is scheduled for launch on that mission around July 1.

New data from a NASA spacecraft appears to support a theory proposed a decade ago that house-sized chunks of ice hit the far upper atmosphere of the Earth at a high rate and may be linked to the formation of the Earth's oceans.
     Dr. Louis Frank, a researcher at the University of Iowa, used a camera on the Polar spacecraft to detect objects that streak towards the Earth and then burn up, hundreds to tens of thousands of kilometers above the surface.
     Observations of the events in both visible and ultraviolet wavelengths shows the objects to be mostly water. They are about the size of a small house, according to Frank, and reach the Earth at the rate of 5 to 30 per minute, or thousands per day.
     "They break up and are destroyed at 600 to 15,000 miles [970 to 24,200 km] above the Earth," Frank said, so that the objects were not a threat to the Earth or spacecraft in low Earth orbit. "In fact, this relatively gentle 'cosmic rain' -- which possibly contains simple organic compounds -- may well have nurtured the development of life on our planet."
     Frank first proposed this theory in the mid-1980s, when ultraviolet images of the Earth from another spacecraft, Dynamics Explorer 1, showed black "holes" in the Earth's atmosphere. Frank explained those holes as the absorption of the light by the icy objects. Other scientists dismissed the holes as instrumental errors.
     "These results certainly vindicate Lou Frank's earlier observations", said Dr. Thomas Donahue of the University of Michigan. "The Polar results definitely demonstrate that there are objects entering the Earth's upper atmosphere that contain a lot of water."
     A NASA official was not entirely convinced by Frank's results, though. "This is an intriguing result that requires further scientific investigation," said Dr. George Withbroe, the science director for the Sun-Earth Connection program at NASA.
     "We need to look closely at measurements from other sensors to find out if they see related signatures in the atmosphere, now that we have learned more about what to look for," he said.
     Left open by the announcement were questions why other evidence for these bodies, such as impacts on the Moon, had not been observed by other scientists.

NASA announced a new schedule for the assembly of the International Space Station (ISS) on May 15 which pushed the launch of the first element of the station back to mid-1998 but keeps the Russian-built Service Module in the program.
     Under the new schedule, the first station module, the Russian-built Functional Energy Block module (FGB from its Russian acronym), will be launched on a Proton rocket in June 1998. It will be followed by the first space shuttle assembly flight, STS-88, which will deliver docking Node 1 to the station in July.
     The Russian-built Service Module is now scheduled for launch in December 1998, eight months behind the old schedule. NASA kept the module, delays in whose construction forced the delay in the whole program, after the module passed a key design review.
     "The recent completion of a major Russian general designers review for the Service Module, in which I participated, and full Russian funding of the work, gives us high confidence that the Service Module can meet a revised launch date of December 1998," ISS program manager Randy Brinkley said.
     Despite the eight-month delay in the beginning of the station assembly, beginning of full-fledged research missions is scheduled to begin in August 1999, just four months behind schedule. Two shuttle missions added to the assembly schedule and some modifications to the FGB module allowed managers to speed up the schedule.
     NASA will also continue plans to develop an Interim Control Module (ICM) for possible station use. The module, based on designs from the Naval Research Laboratory, would have been used as a temporary replacement for the Service Module. NASA will retain the module for possible future use in conjunction with the FGB or Service Module.
     A week later NASA and Russian officials settled any dispute over the commander of the initial three-man crew of the station. American William Shepherd will command the crew, which includes Russians Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko. Russian officials had originally reacted negatively to plans to make Shepherd commander over the Russians.
     "We are not working for an American commander, we are working for the space program," Krikalev said.
     Also settled was the language question. English will be the official language for station operations but crews will be trained in both English and Russian.

When the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft lands on Mars next month, it will encounter a planet colder and cloudier than the one explored by the Viking spacecraft 21 years ago, planetary scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope announced May 20.
     "We're finding a Mars that's colder, clearer, cloudier," said Todd Clancy of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "The planet's weather apparently has a flip-side to it."
     The difference is related to dust storms, whose presence can raise temperatures by more than 20 degrees Celsius (up to 40 degrees Fahrenheit) in a few days. However, there are far fewer dust storms visible on the planet now than in the mid-1970s, during the Viking missions.
     Knowledge of the atmosphere is important not only for gaining a better understanding of the planet but for more practical reasons. The Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which will arrive at Mars in September, will use aerobraking in the Martian atmosphere to slow down and enter orbit. Dust storms can change the atmospheric density at the aerobraking altitude of 100 km (60 miles) by a factor of ten.
     Hubble has also provided evidence that dust storms can make major changes to the appearance of the Martian surface. Cerebus, a dark feature about the size of California, had been seen by observers since early this century. However, in the most recent Hubble images, only a few dark areas remain, the remainder apparently having been covered up by brighter sand.
     NASA plans to use additional Hubble observations of Mars, along with instruments on the two spacecraft, to provide more information on the Martian atmosphere and to make any decisions on modifying the flight paths of either spacecraft when the arrive at the planet.

The U. S. Astronaut Hall of Fame decided on May 21 to reverse a decision made earlier in the month and allow Roger Chaffee, who died in the Apollo 1 pad fire before ever flying in space, to be admitted to the hall with the other Apollo astronauts.
     The decision ended a firestorm of controversy which started in early May, when the board of directors of the Hall decided to uphold the then-current policy of admitting only those men who had actually flown in space. That decision prompted board member Betty Grissom, widow of Apollo 1 commander Gus Grissom, to resign from the board in protest.
     "I just felt it was a slap in the face to the whole crew of Apollo 1," Grissom told Reuters. "For 30 years, NASA and the astronaut corps have tried to pretend that fire never happened."
     The reversal of the board's decision was the result of a compromise engineered by Apollo astronaut Gene Cernan. Cernan argued that Chaffee be inducted for his "significant contribution" to the space program, noting that the investigation and modifications resulting from the fire made future Apollo flights safer.
     Left unresolved was the status of future astronauts who died before flying in space, such as Challenger astronauts Greg Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, and Mike Smith, who were all on their first flights when the shuttle exploded 73 seconds after launch. That decision will be left to an independent panel, who will make decisions on all future inductions.
     The Apollo program astronauts will be inducted into the Hall of Fame, located just outside the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in October, after an expansion of the facility is completed.

An American Delta II and a Russian Proton each launched communications satellites into orbit last month, but a Russian-Ukranian Zenit booster exploded shortly after launch May 27.
     The first stage of the Zenit-2 apparently shut down unexpectedly 48 seconds after launch, a Russian spokesperson reported. The rocket was at an altitude of 15 km (9 miles) when the shutdown took place. The rocket crashed to Earth 25 km (15 miles) from the launch site at Baikonur, Kazakhstan. No injuries were reported.
     The rocket was carrying a satellite for the Russian military, most likely for signals intelligence. An investigation into the crash was started by Russian Military Space Forces, and the Zenit-2 booster was grounded until the investigation was complete.
     Russian officials admitted that two-stage booster has now crashed seven times in only 28 flights since its introduction in 1985, one of the worst records for operational boosters in current use. An upgraded three-stage version of the Zenit is planned for use in the international Sea Launch consortium, led by Boeing.
     A Delta II launched a Norwegian communications satellite from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday evening, May 20. The launch of the Thor II satellite was the first Delta II launch from the Cape since the January explosion of a Delta II rocket only 13 seconds after launch. that launch failure was traced to a cracked casing in one of the strap-on solid rocket boosters. The May 20 launch had been delayed for two days due to weather.
     A Proton launched an American television broadcast satellite into orbit from Baikonur on May 24. The Telstar 5 satellite will be used by ABC, Fox, PBS, and other networks to distribute programming. The launch was the first Proton launch since the November 1996 launch of the Mars 96 spacecraft, which ended in failure when a booster stage failed to fire.

The Spaceport Florida Authority opened a refurbished launch pad at Cape Canaveral May 29 that will be available for commercial launches, while earlier in the week announcing plans for a second launch site to be used for short-notice missions.
     Complex 46 at the Cape Canaveral Air Station was a former launch site for tests of the Navy's Trident 2 ballistic missile. The facility, refurbished for $8 million, will be available for commercial launches of small rockets for $300,000 a launch.
     The first launch from the site is scheduled for this September, when a Lockheed Martin Launch Vehicle 2 (LMLV-2) will launch NASA's Lunar Prospector spacecraft. Another LMLV-2 launch is scheduled for 1998. Orbital Sciences Corporation, Alliant Techsystems, and the U. S. Air Force have also expressed interest in using the facility.
     Ed O'Connor, executive director of the Spaceport Florida Authority, announced plans May 25 for a second pad that would be used for "quick response" launches that would be available within six hours of "receiving a phone call."
     O'Connor, speaking at the International Space Development Conference in Orlando, said the site would be configured for use by three "different but popular" launchers that would be needed for time-sensitive flights, such as monitoring of astronomical events or replacement of malfunctioning satellites.

A new commercial space bill that would improve the regulatory environment for commercial space operations was introduced in the U. S. House of Representatives May 22, and its sponsors hope that they can build on the partial success of a similar measure last year.
     H.R. 1702, the Commercial Space Act of 1997, was introduced by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), chair of the House Science Committee. The aim of the bill is to improve the regulatory framework for commercial space operations to make it easier for companies to get the approval necessary for launches, including future private operations of reusable launch vehicles.
     The bill also includes provisions to require NASA to examine commercial uses of the International Space Station and require the agency to use private vendors for its future space transportation needs.
     "If we expect, or accept, that government will do for us in space what the American people did for themselves in developing this country, then we will have lost the vision of our Founding Fathers," Sensenbrenner said.
     The legislation is similar to another bill passed by the House last year. That bill reached the Senate but was not called for a vote when at least two members of the Senate, including Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-SC), blocked consideration of it just before the Senate adjourned. Hollings promised, however, to hold hearings in the future on similar legislation.
     Sensenbrenner and other supporters of H.R. 1702 hope to pass the bill through the Science Committee in June and bring the measure to a vote of the full House before the July 4 recess.

NASA and Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC) announced May 21 that they had completed a systems design "freeze" of the X-34, a technology demonstrator for future reusable launch vehicles, clearing the way for the assembly of the vehicle.
     The design freeze means the main systems on the vehicle, including structures, guidance, thermal protection systems, propulsions, and more, have been satisfactorily designed, clearing the way for OSC to start building the components for these systems and assembling the vehicle.
     The first flight of the X-34 is scheduled to take place from White Sands in late 1998. Up to 25 test flights, including some from Florida, are scheduled through late 1999 to test the new technologies incorporated into the vehicle.
     The winged X-34 will be carried aloft by a L-1011 airliner, like OSC's Pegasus launcher. When released, its engine, powered by liquid oxygen and kerosene, will propel the X-34 up to Mach 8 before returning to the ground for an automated landing on a runway.
     The X-34 will test some key technologies needed for the X-33 program and future reusable launch vehicles. These include use of composite materials in structures, subsonic flight through rain, and automated landing in moderate crosswinds.

More Mars Life Dispute: A new paper published in the British science journal Nature provides new evidence against the possible existence of ancient life in Martian meteorite ALH 84001. A team at the University of Hawaii led by Edward Scott believes that carbonates found in the meteorite, which were explained as evidence for life, may have in fact been formed by heat from an impact. The origin of the carbonates has been a key issue of contention in the Mars life debate, with papers both supporting and opposing biological origins for the carbonates published. Scott, though, told UPI, "The search for ancient Martian life must go on, but it shouldn't be focused on the carbonates in meteorite ALH84001."

Japan, U.S. Space Cooperation: NASA and ISAS, Japan's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, agreed May 14 to cooperate on a Japanese mission to visit an asteroid. The mission, dubbed MUSES-C, will be launched by Japan in early 2002 and land on the asteroid Nereus in September 2003. The spacecraft will study the asteroid, using its own instruments and a tiny microrover, weighing less than 1 kg (2.2 lbs.) supplied by NASA. The spacecraft will return samples of the asteroid to Earth via a special recovery capsule in January 2006. In addition to the rover, NASA will provide assistance with development and testing of the capsule's heat shield, navigation and tracking support, and scientists to serve as co-investigators for the mission.

Things That Go Boom in the Night: Scientists working for the National Science Foundation have concluded that a peculiar, loud explosion heard in the Australian outback in September 1993 was just a meteorite, and not evidence of terrorist activity. The explosion seemed to be located near a ranch owned by Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese cult linked to the gassing of the Tokyo subway system in 1995 that injured thousands of morning commuters. The cult was reported interested in developing nuclear weapons and was mining uranium in the area. However, seismic data recorded during the event are better explained by a small iron meteorite crashing to Earth. The meteorite explanation also fits well with reports of a bright streak seen in the sky at the time of the explosion.

In Brief: Apollo 13 astronaut Jack Swigert is the latest figure to join the ranks of those honored in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall. Swigert, who was elected to Congress in 1982 but died of cancer shortly before being sworn in, is depicted in a white space suit with the Apollo 13 crew patch. Colorado placed the statue in the hall as one of two statues permitted each state... Testing of chemicals used in rocket motors on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido may have indirectly caused the deaths of nearly 500 chickens. A Japanese paper reported that test explosions of the chemicals may have scared the chickens, located in nearby coops, to death. Tests have been suspended while the exact cause of the mass poultricide is investigated...