----- Original Message -----
From: Larry Kellogg
Sent: Monday, October 21, 2002 2:01 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: COMET ORBITER SHIPPED TO SOUTH AMERICAN LAUNCH SITE
Good day.
Ron Baalke posted the news clip below about Rosetta being shipped to
the South American Launch Site to his list - sorry if you are on it -
if not maybe you would be interested. - LRK -
«Start of snippet» http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/email.html
Receive the latest news on Near-Earth objects via email, including
news on asteroids, comets, meteor showers and meteorites. Also,
notification of any significant updates to our website will be sent
out on this list.
Here is how to subscribe to the Near-Earth Objects mailing list:
Send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include the following
text in the body of the message:
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SNIP
«End of snippet»
Would have been nice to look out from the Moon and track from there
as well. - LRK -
«Start of snippet» http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/
J002E3: An Update
October 9, 2002
Steve Chesley and Paul Chodas NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office
We have new results since our September 19 report on the distant
Earth satellite J002E3. Evidence
continues to accumulate that J002E3 is the lost S-IVB third stage
from the Saturn V rocket used to
launch the Apollo 12 lunar landing mission in November 1969.
SNIP
«End of snippet»
Other ESA Missions. - LRK -
«Start of snippet» http://sci.esa.int/home/ourmissions/index.cfm
Homepage > ESA Science missions > Our Missions
«End of snippet»
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One note from myself. Have moved my home web page from
Mindspring.com to Covad.net and will be a little more active on it.
Have lifted a long list of links from the Lunar Prospector web site
and checking if the links are still good. (Need to get Netscape on
the new home computer and check for different browser presentations
as well.)
http://home.covad.net/~lkellogg/links.html
http://lunar.arc.nasa.gov/resources/tool.htm
If you want to see more information on going to the Moon, let me
know. From the Moon, looking out, what would you like to see? Maybe
the Helium 3 mining site or a some radar telescopes looking for Near
Earth Objects. How about the Solar Electric station at the South
Pole on top of Malapert Mountain? I guess what I am looking for is
what would you want to see us doing on the Moon and how would you
like to participate? Would you like to explore the Moon?
My thought is, if enough people around the world would like to be
there, if not physically, at least electronically, we could go there
on the web. I would like to learn how to do that now. Later we
could do it for real. At the moment the marker is
http://home.covad.net/~lkellogg/index.html and we can change that as
needed should you all care to go with me. (The dream may take more
than 10 meg of space. :-)
Thanks for Looking Up. May we be able to look back again soon.
«Start of snippet» http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?7316
The Blue Marble from Apollo 17
Credit:
Image courtesy NASA Johnson Space Center Gateway to Astronaut
Photography of Earth Satellite:
Apollo
Image Date: 12-07-1972
VE Record ID: 7316
Description:
This classic photograph of the Earth was taken on December 7, 1972.
The original caption is reprinted below:
View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the
moon. This translunar coast photograph extends from the Mediterranean
Sea area to the Antarctica south polar ice cap. This is the first
time the Apollo trajectory made it possible to photograph the south
polar ice cap. Note the
cloud cover in the Southern Hemisphere. Almost the entire coastline
of Africa is clearly visible. The Arabian Peninsula can be seen at
the northeastern edge of Africa. The large island off the coast of
Africa is the Malagasy Republic. The Asian mainland is on the horizon
toward the northeast.
«End of snippet»
Have a great week.
Larry
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Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 09:39:56 -0700 (PDT)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Rosetta Shipped To South American Launch Site
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov
Contact: JPL/Guy Webster (818) 354-6278
Southwest Research Institute/Maria Martinez (210) 522-3305
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 21, 2002
COMET ORBITER SHIPPED TO SOUTH AMERICAN LAUNCH SITE
Twenty instruments on the European Space Agency's comet-
chasing Rosetta spacecraft, including three from NASA, are in
final tests for launch early next year.
Launch from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana, on
the northeastern coast of South America, is scheduled for a
19-day window beginning Jan. 13, 2003. Shipment to Kourou
last month from the European Space Research and Technology
Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, followed more than 10
months of rigorous testing. "With the move from Europe to
Kourou, we have now entered the most exciting phase of the
Rosetta program so far -- the launch campaign," said Claude
Berner, Rosetta's payload and assembly, integration and
verification manager.
NASA is funding three research instruments and a key
part of a fourth for the collaborative mission. NASA also
provides one of the Rosetta's interdisciplinary scientists,
Dr. Paul Weissman, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif., and operational support from JPL's Deep
Space Network of ground-based antennas. "Rosetta is an
ambitious mission with great international cooperation," said
JPL's Dr. Claudia Alexander, project scientist for the U.S.
role in the mission. "We're eager to get it launched."
Rosetta will fly for nearly nine years, passing by two
asteroids, by Earth twice and by Mars before reaching its
destination, comet Wirtanen, in November 2011. At that
point, the comet will be about four times as far from the Sun
as Earth is. Then, as Rosetta orbits Wirtanen at distances as
close as one kilometer (0.6 mile), the orbiter's instruments
will examine how the comet changes while it moves closer to
the Sun during the following 20 months. Rosetta will also
drop a lander onto the surface of Wirtanen's icy nucleus. The
NASA instruments will examine Wirtanen from the orbiter.
International teams of scientists expect to see dramatic
changes as the comet approaches the Sun. Gases and dust
escaping from the surface of a comet form a cloud-like "coma"
around the nucleus and a tail pointing away from the Sun.
Rosetta carries more instruments than any other
spacecraft in history. The orbiter's payload includes a
camera to study surface details, a microscope to analyze dust
grains coming off the nucleus, spectrometers to examine
surface and coma materials in various wavelengths, and an
experiment to probe the comet's interior with radio waves.
With all instruments installed, the spacecraft was put
through its paces during testing at the European Space
Research and Technology Centre. It was placed in a large
vacuum chamber while the instruments were tested in heat and
cold simulating the extremes the spacecraft will experience
when it is closest to the Sun and when it will be almost as
distant as Jupiter. Vibration and acoustic tests demonstrated
that the whole spacecraft can survive a launch environment.
Another set of tests checked whether any instruments cause
electromagnetic interference with any others. Verification of
many essential functions included commanding the spacecraft
from the European Space Operations Centre in Germany, just as
it will be in orbit. At Kourou, each instrument will again be
tested by itself and with the other instruments before
engineers can finally declare everything "green" for launch.
JPL supplied the Microwave Instrument for Rosetta
Orbiter, the first of its type for any interplanetary
mission. This instrument can reveal the abundances of
selected gases, their temperatures, the speed at which
they're coming off the nucleus, and the temperature of the
nucleus. Scientists will use it to monitor changes in how
vapors are released from the nucleus as the coma and tail
grow. They will be studying water, carbon monoxide, ammonia
and methanol gases, four of the most abundant gases from
comets. JPL's Dr. Samuel Gulkis is principal investigator.
The Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio,
Texas, supplied two NASA instruments for Rosetta. One is
named Alice. It is the first in a new generation of
miniaturized ultraviolet spectrometers and is capable of
analyzing the composition both of gases released by the comet
and of the comet's surface. One goal of scientists using it
will be to learn about the temperatures at which the comet
formed and evolved by determining its abundances of noble
gases, such as helium, neon and argon. Principal
investigator for the ultraviolet instrument is Dr. Alan Stern
of the institute's Space Studies Department in Boulder, Colo.
Dr. James Burch, of the institute's Instrumentation and
Space Research Division, San Antonio, is principal
investigator for Rosetta's Ion and Electron Spectrometer.
This device will measure the environment of charged particles
surrounding comet Wirtanen. It will also study the
interaction between that environment and the solar wind of
charged particles speeding outward from the Sun.
Key electronics for a fourth instrument, the Rosetta
Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis, have been
supplied by the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center,
Palo Alto, Calif. This instrument will examine gases
surrounding the comet.
Information is available about Rosetta at
http://sci.esa.int/rosetta and about the microwave instrument
at http://mirowww.jpl.nasa.gov . JPL, a division of the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the
microwave instrument for NASA's Office of Space Science,
Washington, D.C.
# # # # #
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WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK
==========================================================
--
Larry R. Kellogg
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Projects/SFDivision/index.html
http://lunar.arc.nasa.gov/resources/news.htm
http://home.covad.net/~lkellogg/index.html
