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Pastimes : Astronomy - any star lovers out there? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lurqer who wrote (94)	1/25/2001 11:11:32 PM
From: Jon Khymn	Respond to of 180

Thanks lurqer for that links on Blackhole and Superstrings. Blackhole, I SEEM to understand the theory but that superstring stuff... Someday, perhaps after taking more math classes, I may be it will get through my dense skull... I'll read them over the weekend, thanks again.

To: lurqer who wrote (94)	2/12/2001 8:17:13 PM
From: Jon Khymn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 180

Landing on Eros, pretty exciting stuff! And what a timing... just before the Valentine's day...Eros in the air.... dailynews.yahoo.com **************** Monday February 12 6:23 PM ET NEAR Bounces to Historic Landing on Asteroid Eros Photos Reuters Photo By Deborah Zabarenko LAUREL, Md. (Reuters) - Space probe NEAR Shoemaker (news - web sites) came to a bouncing landing on asteroid Eros on Monday, the first time any craft has landed on this kind of space rock. Against tremendous odds, the unmanned craft kept sending signals even after it touched down on the cosmic object, 196 million miles from Earth. It probably bounced at least once, possibly as high as 100 yards before it came to a stop, astronomers said. ``Are we on the surface?'' mission director Robert Farquhar called to colleagues in the control room in suburban Washington during the voyage's last moments. ``We haven't lost the signal yet ... It looks to me like it might have touched down and come back up again, but we'll see.'' Minutes later, Farquhar faced a camera in the control room and jubilantly declared, ``I'm happy to report that the NEAR spacecraft has touched down on the surface of Eros. We are still getting some signals, so evidently it's still transmitting from the surface itself. ``The pictures are still coming in,'' he said. ``This is the first time that any spacecraft has landed on a small body.'' Ed Weiler, the head of space science at NASA (news - web sites), said the mission would give space voyagers practice for future landings on asteroids and even on comets. Asteroids and comets are primordial bodies that could give clues to the very beginning of the solar system. Farquhar and other scientists had given the craft less than a 1 percent chance of being able to send signals back to Earth, after it reached the asteroid's boulder-strewn surface. Just as Farquhar and his colleagues planned, the craft's terminal velocity -- the speed it was going when it came to rest on the asteroid -- was about 3.5 miles an hour, the speed a pedestrian might walk on Earth. But with gravity about one-thousandth that of Earth, bouncing was always a possibility. Icing On The Cake NASA chief Daniel Goldin, who was in the control room at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, called the continued signals from the surface of Eros ``the topping on the cake'' of a mission that has already been characterized as a total success. Referring to the current space shuttle mission that is building the orbiting International Space Station (news - web sites), Goldin said he called shuttle controllers from the NEAR control headquarters and urged them to tell shuttle astronauts that ``we just landed on an asteroid.'' ``Ultimately we're going to make science fiction reality and some of the science fiction movies of a few years ago, of people virtually landing on comets and asteroids, we came one day closer to that happening,'' Goldin told reporters. The first touchdown -- some NASA officials dubbed it a controlled crash -- took place almost exactly on schedule at 3:02 p.m. EST. But it will take years for astronomers to analyze all the data provided by this bus-sized $223 million robotic craft. NEAR was never meant to land -- it orbited the 21-mile-long asteroid for a year, taking some 160,000 images and beaming them back to Earth. But it was at the end of its expected life and had satisfied all its objectives, so Farquhar and others decided a landing attempt could provide some ``bonus science.'' Photos Reuters Photo To get the solar-powered ship out of its orbit, thrusters were fired around 10.31 a.m. EST to send it toward the asteroid. Four subsequent braking burns slowed the craft to a soft landing. Because it takes 17.5 minutes for light to travel from the craft to Earth, scientists had little information at the time of touchdown, except that the craft was still functioning. Controlled Crash Weiler hesitated to even call the event a landing; without landing gear on the craft, he maintained, NEAR could only end in a controlled crash. ``We cannot measure NEAR's success by whether we hear it or not after it lands, because we do not expect to hear it,'' Weiler had said in a conversation with reporters. The most scientists should hope for is a faint signal that the craft is still ``alive,'' Weiler said before touchdown. The spacecraft's camera was expected to go out of focus at about 100 to 500 yards, Weiler said. Farquhar said later that the last image transmitted to Earth was taken at 120 yards, with a resolution of less than half an inch. While the craft is still sending signals back to Earth, it will not be able to transmit pictures. If it is being powered by its solar panels, it could stay ``alive'' for weeks. Farquhar said they might even be able to make it hop up off the surface again. NEAR Shoemaker -- short for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous and in honor of the late astronomer Gene Shoemaker -- could have been flattened on impact if maneuvers went awry. But even if that had occurred, the mission had accomplished its objectives of getting a close look at Eros. It took NEAR about four years to travel a 2 billion-mile, looping route to Eros, named for the Greek god of love. At a cost of $223 million, the mission is considered a model for the cheaper, faster space flights envisioned by NASA. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration rated the mission a success for the data it collected about Eros, a so-called near-Earth asteroid that has the potential to collide with the planet in 1.5 million years or so. If Eros ever did hit Earth, the results would be catastrophic; indeed, a much smaller space rock is thought to have been responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Astronomers are also interested in the composition of this rock because it is probably a remnant from the formation of the rocky inner planets of our solar system some 4.5 billion years ago. Email this story - View most popular \| Printer-friendly format