Updated 20010218-GS
The Mir Space Station, an Earth orbiting, 130 ton scientific laboratory and human habitat that has been making spaceflight history for over 15 years, will be brought crashing down into the southern Pacific ocean sometime between March 13 and 18, 2001. The target is an elipse from 500 to 1,000 miles long, about 2000 miles east of New Zealand.

An uncrewed Progress cargo ship carrying the fuel needed to safely deorbit Mir was launched on January 24 and successfully docked with the station on January 27. To bring the spacecraft down, the docked Progress cargo ship will fire its main engine and push Mir out of orbit.

The 15 year old spacecraft was intended to be operational for only 3 years. Safety, the complexity of operating Mir concurrently with operations on the International Space Station, and a lack of funding are cited as the reasons why Mir must be brought down. Most of the station is expected to burn up in the upper atmosphere, but experts believe that at least 21 tons of Mir will hit the ocean. It is expected to be a spectacular end.

There are efforts underway to charter a passenger airline to fly within sight of the re-entry for those who want to witness the spectacular end to the venerable old human space habitat.

Sources include:
Russian foreign ministry promises safe dumping of Mir - Jan. 26, 2001 from HoustonChronicle.com

INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION STATUS

Destiny Laboratory Module Successfully Installed as
Expedition 1 Nears an End

Updated 20010222-GS

Destiny Lab Installed
The crews of the ISS and the Space Shuttle Atlantis successfully installed the "Destiny Laboratory Module" during STS-98's ISS Assembly Flight 5A

The Destiny Module is the centerpiece of space station Alpha. The aluminum module is 8.5 meters long and 4.3 meters in diameter and consists of three cylindrical sections and two endcones with hatches that will be mated to other station components. Pressurized for human habitation and pressurized experiments, the module includes 24 payload racks that will occupy 13 locations especially designed to support experiments.

Of special interest to the station crew is a 50.9-centimeter diameter window on the wall of the center segment.

Expedition 1 Nears an End
U.S. Astronaut Bill Shepherd, Expedition 1 commander, Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gidzenko, and Russian Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev made history as the first crew of the International Space Station and perhaps the first crew to mark humanity's permanent presence beyond Earth.

The three-member crew launched for the International Space Station upon a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, on October 31, 2000.

They will return to Earth on or about March 20th with the completion of Space Shuttle Discovery's mission STS-102 to the International Space Station.

The first piece of the International Space Station to be launched was the Russian built "Zarya" (Sunrise) Control Module . Zarya was successfully launched by the Russians on November 20, 1998, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, not far from where Yuri Gagarin became the first human to be launched into space on April 12, 1961.

The International Space Station's on-orbit assembly began with the successful completion of Space Shuttle Endeavour's mission to connect the first two elements of the station. Mission STS-88, also known as Assembly Flight 2A, completed its mission to connect the U.S. built "Unity" module to the Russian built "Zarya" (Sunrise) Control Module in December, 1998.

Updated 2001022-GS

For the first time ever, two interplanetary spacecraft are studying the same outer planet at the same time. The Galileo spacecraft has been orbiting Jupiter since 1995. The Cassini spacecraft, on its way to Saturn, will pass near Jupiter in December to gain the gravitational assist it needs to reach Saturn. Cassini will arrive at Saturn in 2004. Its closest approach to Jupiter will occur on Dec. 30, 2000. Cassini began returning Jupiter pictures and data last week.

A new website has been established to cover the double spacecraft encounter with Jupiter. Called the Jupiter Millennium Flyby, the website is at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/jupiterflyby.

See the Galileo Mission Discovery Highlights at
www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/discovery.html

Model of Europa's Subsurface Structure

Updated: 11 October 2000 - by Gregory Smith

The first valley, Dao Vallis, runs diagonally from the upper left to the lower center of the image. Niger Vallis joins Dao Vallis just above the center of the frame. Harmakhis Vallis crosses the right half of the picture. Martian geologists believe that large outbursts of liquid water formed these valleys during great floods far back in martian time, millions to billions of years ago. The valleys are each about 1 km (0.6 miles) deep and range in width from about 40 km (25 miles) down to about 8 km (5 mi).

This picture is a composite of images obtained by the Mars Global Surveyor on September 13, 2000.
Reference:
mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/msss/camera/images/dao_oct_2000

Spacecraft Health:
"All subsystems report nominal health."
- MGS Mission Status Report,
Wednesday, September 27, 2000

On February 12, 2001, NEAR-Shoemaker, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous spacecraft which has been orbiting the asteroid 433 Eros since February 2000, descended to the surface of the asteroid for the first ever robotic landing on a small body.

The mission operations team sent commands to NEAR and guided the robotic spacecraft to a 4-miles-per-hour touchdown on a rock and powder strewn plain on the asteroid. The spacecraft gently landed on the surface of Asteroid 433 Eros at 3:02 p.m. EST, February 12, 2001, "after a journey of 2 billion miles, and a full year in orbit, around the large space rock."
"We put the first priority on getting high-resolution images of the surface and the second on putting the spacecraft down safely - and we got both," said NEAR Mission Director Dr. Robert Farquhar.
"It essentially confirmed that all the mathematical models we proposed for a controlled descent would work," said Dr. Bobby Williams, NEAR navigation team leader at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NEAR News Archive 14 February 2001
Two days after touchdown, NEAR Shoemaker is still in communication with the NEAR team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, MD. The mission has been extended for up to 10 days in order to gather further data about the surface and subsurface composition of the asteroid.
The NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft spent the last year in a close-orbit study of asteroid 433 Eros, a near-Earth asteroid that is currently 196 million miles from Earth. NEAR-Shoemaker collected 10 times more data than originally planned and completed all its science goals before its descent to the asteroid.

The low gravity of the small (21 miles in length) body prompts questions as to the disintegration of the boulders on its surface and the downhill movement of the finer material to lower areas. Scientists also hope to learn more about the patterns of grooves and ridges in the "saddle" area, a six-mile wide flat lower area with patches of boulders.

by Gregory Smith and Marion Campbell

For the first time ever, two interplanetary spacecraft are studying the same outer planet at the same time. The Galileo spacecraft has been orbiting Jupiter since 1995. The Cassini spacecraft, on its way to Saturn, will pass near Jupiter in December to gain the gravitational assist it needs to reach Saturn. Cassini will arrive at Saturn in 2004. Its closest approach to Jupiter will occur on Dec. 30, 2000. Cassini began returning Jupiter pictures and data last week. During Cassini's Jupiter flyby Cassini will make coordinated measurements of Jupiter with the Galileo spacecraft.

The Cassini spacecraft will arrive on orbit around Saturn in 2004. Cassini will study the great ringed planet, its moons and ring system for at least four years. It will also deliver a scientific probe called Huygens which will parachute to the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

The Japanese "Nozomi" Mars probe was successfully launched on July 3, 1998 from the Kagoshima space center in Japan. Unfortunately, the spacecraft used more propellant than planned in a course correction maneuver on 21 December 1998 after a 20 December Earth flyby left the craft with "insufficient acceleration". The good news is: Nozomi will reach Mars. The bad news: the arrival of Nozomi at Mars has been delayed four years from its originally scheduled rendezvous in 1999. The spacecraft will continue in a heliocentric orbit until it encounters Mars in December of 2003.

Nozomi is the first Japanese space mission to Mars. It is also the first non-U.S. or Russian space flight to another body in the solar system.

A Mars orbiting aeronomy mission, Nozomi is designed to study the martian upper atmosphere and its interaction with the solar wind. Instruments on the spacecraft will measure the structure, composition and dynamics of the ionosphere, aeronomy effects of the solar wind, the escape of atmospheric constituents, the structure of the magnetosphere, and dust in the upper atmosphere and in orbit around Mars. The mission will also be returning images of Mars' surface and the martian moons Phobos and Deimos.

The nominal mission is planned for one Martian year (approximately two Earth years). An extended mission may allow operation of the mission well beyond the original two years.

On June 21, after more than 7 months of dormancy, Deep Space 1's ion propulsion system is again powering the spacecraft on its way toward a rendevous with Comet Borrelly.

After completing its primary mission, Deep Space 1's Star Tracker failed, leaving the spacecraft unable to navigate through space. Engineers rescued the spacecraft by developing a means to navigate DS1 by using its camera rather than the faulty Star Tracker.

With DS1 is again operable, its mission has been extended to encounter Comet Borrelly in September 2001.

Deep Space One is the first deep space mission of NASA's New Millennium Program. Deep Space 1 is a New Millennium Program (NMP) demonstration project to validate advanced technologies while returning science data. Deep Space 1's mission was to test important, high-risk technologies in order to reduce the cost and risk of future science missions; "DS1 took the risks so that future missions would not have to." - Dr. Mark Raymond's Mission Log

"There were four Deep Space Network tracking passes in the past week. All subsystems onboard the spacecraft are performing normally."
Source: Stardust Status Report, 3 November 2000

Also noted in the November 3rd Stardust Status Report; astronomers with the University of Hawaii have provided Stardust's science team with data from observations of Comet Wild-2 taken in 1997 - 1998 by a large optical telescope on Mauna Kea. The data will provide improved estimates of the amount of dust around Comet Wild-2. This information will help to determine the optimal flyby distance for dust collection and spacecraft safety when the spacecraft rendevous with the comet in January 2004.

The dust samples will be brought to Earth for analysis in January 2006.

The primary goal of the Stardust mission is to collect dust and volatile samples of Comet Wild 2 and samples of interstellar dust grains, and return the samples to Earth for analysis. The spacecraft will also send back images of the comet, counts of comet particles striking the spacecraft and conduct real-time analysis of the compositions of the particles and volatiles. Stardust will use a unique substance called aerogel to capture and preserve the cometary and interstellar materials for return to Earth. Stardust will be the first space mission ever to return extraterrestrial material from beyond the orbit of the Moon. Stardust is also the first U.S. mission dedicated solely to cometary research.