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NEWS • MISSION UPDATE SPACE SHORTS MRO approaches Mars Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, NASA’s most ambitious Mars spacecraft, should reach its orbit this month, ready for mapping of the surface and atmosphere, looking out especially for signs of water and ice. It carries a powerful camera, able to pick out boulders the size of a small desk, plus radar to seek out subsurface ice and water, and a mineral mapper. A weather camera will cover the whole planet each day, and an IR sounder will track atmospheric temperatures and the movement of water vapour. MRO’s fast data-transmission capability will support future surface missions such as the Phoenix Mars Scout and the Mars Science Laboratory. http://www.nasa.gov/mro Dawn cancelled The spacecraft Dawn, built and almost ready for its launch to observe asteroids Vesta and Ceres, will not be taking off. The mission has been cancelled as part of NASA’s budget problems. NASA is focusing on the International Space Station and the preparation of the Crew Exploration Vehicle. Dawn was to have been launched in June this year as the ninth mission of NASA’s Discovery programme. New Horizons NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft was launched successfully in January, and should reach Pluto in 2015. New Horizons set off as the fastest spacecraft yet launched, and will need a gravity assist from Jupiter to send it on its way. If successful at Pluto, there is the chance for further exploration of more distant and unknown objects in the Kuiper Belt beyond, in an extended mission. IMAGE fades The successful IMAGE orbiter, NASA’s Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration satellite, stopped working in December 2005, apparently because of a power failure. IMAGE had a successful six-year life, following a two-year primary mission, providing images that allowed researchers to track the global structure and dynamics of the Earth’s inner magnetosphere as it responded to energy from the solar wind. http://www.image.gsfc.nasa.gov 2.8 Mission update There’s continuing activity and more discoveries from the likes of Spitzer, XMM-Newton, FUSE and Swift, but it’s not all good news for space missions. Discs like Kuiper Belt on steroids The Spitzer Space Telescope has found supersize discs of dust around huge stars, raising the possibility that, even in the hostile environment around such massive hot stars, planets could be forming. Spitzer detected enormous amounts of dust around two hypergiant stars, R 66 and R 126, in the Large Magellanic Cloud. They are 30 and 70 times the mass of the Sun, respectively. If such a star were located at the Sun’s position in our solar system, all the inner planets, including Earth, would fit comfortably within its circumference. Their discs are equally outsize, reaching as far as around 60 times the orbit of Pluto. The discs contain silicates and that around R 66 showed signs of dust clumping in the form of silicate crystals and larger dust grains. Such clumping can be a significant step in the construction of planets. Dusty discs around stars – like our Kuiper Belt – are thought to represent the start or finish of the planetforming process. If the latter, these huge discs are the equivalent of our Kuiper Belt on a tremendous scale. But such dusty discs also hold out hope that planet-forming processes are robust. They suggest that planets could form even around tremendously hot stars with powerful stellar winds. Joel Kastner of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York is first author of a paper describing the research in the 10 February issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer Pulsar winds illuminated ESA’s XMM-Newton spacecraft has shown astronomers what happens when a pulsar meets a ring of gas around a neighbouring star. The rare passage illuminated the sky in gamma- and X-rays, allowing astronomers a better understanding of the mysterious origin and content of “pulsar winds” and “pulsar nebulae”, such as the colourful Crab and 1: This 50cm wide laser beam, emitted from the VLT in Chile, forms an artificial guide star when it hits sodium atoms 90km above the Earth. Vela pulsars. The analysis is based on new observations from XMMNewton and archived data. The team observed the radio pulsar PSR B1259-63 orbiting a bright “Be” star named SS 2883. Lead author Masha Chernyakova, of the Integral Science Data Centre, Versoix, Switzerland, said: “Here we had the rare opportunity to see pulsar wind clashing with stellar wind. It is analogous to smashing something open to see what’s inside.” The results are published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMK6HMVGJ E_index_0.html Artificial star aids adaptive optics Adaptive optics at the European Southern Observatory took a major step forward in January with the initiation of the first laser guide star in the southern hemisphere. The artificial star is formed by a 50 cm wide, yellow laser beam meeting a layer of sodium atoms at an altitude of 90 km. The atoms glow to produce a faint artificial star that will allow adaptive optics systems to measure and correct the blurring effect of atmospheric turbulence. Other adaptive optics systems use a bright star to correct for atmospheric effects, but this limits observations to parts of the sky that are near bright stars. ESO’s artificial star means that astronomers are no longer limited in this way. The high-power laser beam originates from a launching telescope on Yepun, the fourth 8.2 m Unit Telescope of the Very Large Telescope, based at Cerro Paranal, Chile (figure 1). Five years of collaborative work by scientists and engineers from ESO A&G • April 2006 • Vol. 47