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* * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - January 21, 2005 * * *
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Welcome to S&T's Weekly News Bulletin. Images, the full text of stories
abridged here, and other enhancements are available on our Web site,
SkyandTelescope.com, at the URLs provided below. (If the links don't work, just
manually type the URLs into your Web browser.) Clear skies!
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WILD, WEIRD TITAN REVEALS MORE SECRETS
Saturn's big moon Titan is turning out to be the most Earthlike world in the
solar system -- except that it is utterly, weirdly, wildly different from
Earth.
Early Friday morning scientists from the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA
held a press conference in Paris to describe the latest findings they have
teased out of the data sent back by ESA's Huygens probe on Titan. On January
14th Huygens parachuted through the big moon's thick, cloudy atmosphere down to
a soft landing on a muddy, pebbly floodplain overlooked by icy headlands.
Huygens succeeded beyond all expectations, continuing to transmit for several
hours before succumbing to Titan's extreme cold....
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1447_1.asp
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OPPORTUNITY FINDS AN IRON METEORITE
On December 21, 2004, the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity arrived at its own
discarded heat shield, enabling engineers to study the effects of atmospheric
entry up close so they can design better landing systems for future missions.
But rover images of the shield revealed something else interesting just a few
meters away: a pitted, metallic-looking rock the size of a basketball.
Opportunity's handlers immediately speculated that the rock was a meteorite.
Tests conducted earlier this week with Opportunity's spectrometers prove that
this hunch was correct. The so-called "Heat Shield Rock" is indeed a meteorite
composed mostly of iron and nickel. It is the first meteorite discovered on
another planet....
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1446_1.asp
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DAVID LUNT (1942-2005)
David Lunt, founder and principal optical designer of Coronado Technology Group
in Tucson, Arizona, died on January 16th after a 22-month battle with cancer.
He was 62 years old.
Coronado burst on the scene in the late 1990s with a new line of affordable,
convenient hydrogen-alpha solar filters. These narrowband filters enable users
of small telescopes to observe the Sun's chromosphere, the thin, active layer
above the photosphere, or visible "surface." Seen in hydrogen-alpha light, the
Sun appears alive, with ruby-red prominences jutting from the limb, dark
filaments crossing the disk, and bright flares erupting around sunspots....
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1444_1.asp
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STANDING ON THE SURFACE OF TITAN
January 14th was a day of high drama in space, the type unseen in Europe for
decades. After its 7.5-year interplanetary journey, the Huygens spacecraft
finally reached its objective: the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan. And it
was worth the long wait, as each of the probe's half-dozen instruments worked
as planned or even better. Less than 24 hours after Huygens's historic descent,
tired but elated mission scientists were already sharing their findings about
water ice and methane on the moon's surface, haze in its atmosphere, possible
drainage channels, and much more....
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1443_1.asp
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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY
* Full Moon on Tuesday, January 25th.
* Saturn (magnitude -0.3, in Gemini) shines brightly in the east after
nightfall, to the lower right of Pollux and Castor and farther to the upper
left of Procyon.
* The Sun has been particularly active this past week. As of Friday, January
21st, a severe geomagnetic storm was in progress. Sky watchers at all latitudes
should be alert for auroras.
For more details, see This Week's Sky at a Glance and Planet Roundup:
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/observing/ataglance
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Copyright 2005 Sky Publishing Corp. S&T's Weekly News Bulletin is provided as a
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| Stuart Goldman sgoldman@SkyandTelescope.com |
* Associate Editor StuartGoldman@aol.com *
| Sky & Telescope |
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