Sky & Telescope's News Bulletin - Dec 5

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* * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - December 5, 2003 * * *

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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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HUBBLE IN LIMBO

Can you imagine shutting down the Hubble Space Telescope even if it were still
working perfectly? Six months ago NASA was thinking of doing just that in 2010.
Such a move would save up to $200 million dollars a year, enabling the
cash-strapped agency to keep Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space
Telescope, on track for a planned launch in 2011. NASA has since stopped
threatening to turn off the world's most famous telescope, but Hubble is far
from out of danger of coming to a premature end....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1117_1.asp

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EJECTING THE KUIPER BELT

It's been a little more than a decade since astronomers confirmed the existence
of the Kuiper Belt -- the ancient disk of planetesimals circling the Sun
outside the orbit of Neptune. In that time astronomers have found more than 700
icy, asteroid-size objects in the classical Kuiper Belt and have learned that
it has a sharp outer edge around 50 astronomical units from the Sun. There seem
to be no objects larger than 200 kilometers in diameter beyond that boundary.

But it remains unclear how the Kuiper Belt came to be. A new study published in
the November 27th Nature by Harold F. Levison (Southwest Research Institute,
Boulder) and Alessandro Morbidelli (Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur) sheds some
light on the mystery. Their work suggests that Kuiper Belt objects formed
inside the present orbit of Neptune and that the planet itself gradually pushed
them outward....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1115_1.asp

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ASTRO NEWS BRIEFS

Mars Satellite Damaged

Satellites orbiting Earth generally made it through the late-October solar
storms just fine, but Mars Odyssey orbiting the red planet took a bad hit. A
coronal mass ejection from the Sun knocked out Mars Odyssey's Mars Radiation
Environment Experiment (MARIE). Controllers at NASA have been trying to nurse
the instrument back to life since October 28th without success. MARIE was
designed to characterize the radiation that future astronauts will face in
interplanetary space and on the Martian surface. "Even if the instrument
provides no additional data in the future, it has been a great success at
characterizing the radiation environment that a crewed mission to Mars would
need to anticipate," said Jeffrey Plaut, project scientist for Mars Odyssey, in
a press statement. Efforts to revive MARIE are continuing. Mars Odyssey's
mapping cameras and other instruments were unaffected.

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1116_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* Full Moon on December 8th.
* On December 8th, Mercury is at greatest elongation, 21 degrees east of the
Sun. Look for it very low in the southwest in early twilight, to the lower
right of brighter Venus.
* The Geminid meteor shower peaks on night of December 13th.

For details, see This Week's Sky at a Glance and Planet Roundup:

http://SkyandTelescope.com/observing/ataglance/

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Copyright 2003 Sky Publishing Corp. S&T's Weekly News Bulletin is provided as a
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*-----------------------------------------------------*
| Stuart Goldman |
* Associate Editor *
| Sky & Telescope |
* 49 Bay State Rd. Sky & Telescope: The Essential *
| Cambridge, MA 02138 Magazine of Astronomy |
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