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* * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - March 12, 2004 * * *

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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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GLOVES COME OFF IN FIGHT TO SAVE HUBBLE

Both houses of Congress are now battling NASA and the Bush administration
over the future of the Hubble Space Telescope. During a Senate hearing on
the space agency's proposed 2005 budget Thursday, Christopher "Kit" Bond
(R-Missouri) and Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland) called for two independent
reviews of NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe's January 16th decision to stop
servicing the orbiting observatory....

All this activity follows weeks of anticipation while Admiral Harold
Gehman, former chair of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB),
deliberated on whether O'Keefe's cancellation of future Hubble servicing
is justified purely on the grounds of safety, as the NASA administrator
has argued. O'Keefe agreed to solicit a "second opinion" from Gehman in
late January at Mikulski's urging. In a letter to Mikulski dated March 5th
and released to the public yesterday, Gehman averred that all shuttle
flights are dangerous and that a mission to Hubble "may be slightly more
risky" than ones to the International Space Station, where the crew of a
shuttle damaged during launch could seek safe haven. But whereas O'Keefe
has maintained that this is reason enough to stop servicing Hubble, Gehman
wrote, "I suggest only a deep and rich study of the entire gain/risk
equation can answer the question of whether an extension of the life of
the wonderful Hubble telescope is worth the risks involved...."

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1209_1.asp

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ASTRONOMERS, JOURNALISTS GLIMPSE UNIVERSE'S PAST, HUBBLE'S FUTURE

The deepest image yet taken of outer space shared the stage Tuesday with
what may be the deepest crisis yet for fans of the Hubble Space Telescope.
The deepest image yet taken of outer space shared the stage Tuesday with
what may be the deepest crisis yet for fans of the Hubble Space Telescope.

At the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland,
astronomers and journalists were treated to their first views of the
Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) -- stunning images from Hubble's ACS and
NICMOS cameras that may portray the most distant galaxies yet captured.
The galaxy-studded ACS image was unveiled not only by STScI director
Steven Beckwith, who commissioned it, but also by US Senator Barbara
Mikulski (D-Maryland), who vowed to fight for the orbiting observatory....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1207_1.asp

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OPPORTUNITY CATCHES MARTIAN MOON TRANSITS

On Earth, we lucked out. The disks of the Sun and Moon appear almost
identical in size, giving eclipse chasers the glorious spectacle of seeing
the Sun's corona during total solar eclipses. But with average diameters
of about 22 and 13 kilometers respectively, Mars's two moons, Phobos and
Deimos, are far too small to block the Sun's entire disk as seen from the
red planet's surface.

On March 4th, Opportunity's Panoramic Camera (Pancam) caught Deimos
crossing the face of the Sun; it shows up as the black spot moving from
the lower left to the bottom of the Sun's disk.... Three days later, the
same camera caught Phobos taking a bite out of the Sun as it passed in
front....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1204_1.asp

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ASTRO NEWS BRIEFS

Rosetta To Visit Two Asteroids

Now that the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft is on its way to
periodic comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, mission planners have selected a
pair of main-belt asteroids that the craft will visit during its 10-year
cruise through interplanetary space. On September 5, 2008, Rosetta is to
fly past 2867 Steins, a small body just a few kilometers across, and
nearly two years later, on July 10, 2010, it reaches much larger 21
Lutetia, nearly 100 km in diameter. Both flybys will be close enough
(1,700 and 3,000 km, respectively) to acquire both exquisitely detailed
photography and determinations of each asteroid's mass and density. ESA
managers expect Rosetta to orbit Churyumov-Gerasimenko for 17 months
beginning in August 2014, during which time it will dispatch an
instrumented craft to land on the comet's nucleus.

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1189_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* Last-quarter Moon on Saturday, March 13.
* Venus (magnitude -4.3, in Aries) is the brilliant white "Evening Star"
blazing in the west during twilight and much of the evening.
* Late in the week, try looking for Mercury (magnitude -1) about 30
minutes after sunset, far below Venus and perhaps a bit to the right.

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

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