PLEASE NOTE:
*
CCNet, 10 September 1999
------------------------
(1) NASA'S BUDGET CUT BY $1 BILLION
FLORIDA TODAY, 9 September 1999
(2) PROFESSIONAL ASTEROID SEARCH RESTARTS IN AUSTRALIA
Michael Paine <mpaine@tpgi.com.au>
(3) VIOLENT BLAST OF RADIATION SPAWNED THE PLANETS
Andrew Yee <ayee@nova.astro.utoronto.ca>
(4) THANK GOD! WORLD'S OCEANS ARE DRYING UP. NO MORE WORRIES
ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING SEA-LEVEL RISE....
Andrew Yee <ayee@nova.astro.utoronto.ca>
=====================
(1) NASA'S BUDGET CUT BY $1 BILLION
From FLORIDA TODAY, 9 September 1999
http://www.flatoday.com/space/today/090999e.htm
NASA budget cut $1 billion by House; fate lies with Senate
By Larry Wheeler
WASHINGTON - Turning aside complaints from pro-space lawmakers,
the
House cut $1 billion from NASA's spending bill Thursday,
moving to the
Senate the thorny question of giving more money to the civilian
space
agency at the expense of veterans health care and low income
housing
programs.
Unless Republican leaders redraw the budget setting spending
levels for
the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, Senate appropriators might
have to
slice the annual bill for Veterans Affairs, the Department of
Housing and
Urban Development, and independent agencies even thinner than did
their House counterparts.
The Senate VA-HUD appropriations subcommittee has $89.9 billion
to
work with, $5.8 billion less than House appropriators had. The
spending
caps led the House to pass legislation Thursday 235 to 187 giving
NASA
$12.6 billion in fiscal 2000, $1 billion below this year's
spending level.
NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin warned that a cut that deep
would
force thousands of layoffs and lead to closing at least two of
the
agency's nine space centers.
Many pro-space lawmakers anticipate NASA will ultimately get the
money
back - possibly as part of a broad, 11th-hour spending deal
between
congressional leaders and the Clinton administration.
But at this point, it isn't clear how that could happen without
some
budgetary sleight of hand.
Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., and Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md.,
chairman and ranking Democrat of the Senate VA-HUD appropriations
subcommittee, were still negotiating Thursday over the shape of
the
$89.9 billion bill they must produce.
Mikulski, whose state is home to Goddard Space Flight Center, is
fiercely
opposed to the NASA cuts the House approved.
Debate on the House floor Thursday touched on NASA only briefly,
as
lawmakers marched through discussions and amendments on other
programs.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, withdrew an amendment that
would have
restored nearly $1 billion to NASA after Rep. James Walsh,
R-N.Y.,
invoked a parliamentary rule that effectively blocked her measure
without a vote.
"I hope to get NASA back to full funding soon," Jackson
Lee said.
The bill has the support of GOP leadership. "We have limited
funds but
we've done a pretty good job," said Walsh, chairman of the
House VA-HUD
subcommittee. "We had to reduce fairly badly NASA's budget.
Our choices
are difficult."
Once both chambers have passed a bill, members from Senate and
House
will meet in conference to work out their differences.
"The conference
will be fairly difficult," Walsh said. "We have
different priorities."
Also Thursday, the House International Relations Committee passed
legislation to withhold U.S. assistance to support Russia's
involvement
in the International Space Station unless the White House
certifies
Russian companies are not transferring missile and weapons
technology
to Iran.
The bill is something of an enigma: while past assistance has
come out
of NASA's budget, no funds have been specifically authorized or
appropriated for Russian participation in the space station.
Following the collapse of communist rule, Russia was invited to
participate in the space station project because the Clinton
administration said that country's involvement would save money
and
speed construction of the orbiting outpost.
Last year, NASA chief Goldin acknowledged the United States might
have
to pay Russia as much as $600 million to ensure it doesn't drop
out
of the station project. Lawmakers refused to endorse such
payments.
NASA made a $60 million payment to Russia this year after seeking
congressional approval to reprogram money intended for other
purposes.
Copyright 1999, Floriday Today
============
(2) PROFESSIONAL ASTEROID SEARCH RESTARTS IN AUSTRALIA
From Michael Paine <mpaine@tpgi.com.au>
10 Sept 1999
from Michael Paine
The Planetary Society Australian Volunteers
http://www1.tpgi.com.au/users/tps-seti/
After a three year break a professional search for
Earth-threatening
asteroids will soon begin again in Australia. The project is a
collaboration between astronomers at the University of Arizona
and
the Australian National University. It involves refurbishing a
telescope at Siding Spring in New South Wales and providing a
very
sensitive electronic detector array, computer pointing control
and
automatic detection software.
The project will help to fill a huge gap in our ability to detect
asteroids which might collide with the Earth. Until now the only
professional searches were in the Northern Hemisphere - the
southern
half of the sky was not covered. Early detection of a potentially
threatening asteroids is essential if mankind is to have
sufficient
time to mitigate the threat. Even the moderate rocket power we
have
available today would be sufficient to deflect an asteroid away
from a
collision, provided that the action can be taken over decades and
the
asteroid is given a little nudge during each orbit around the
Sun.
In 1996 the Australian government cancelled the Spaceguard
Australia
program, also based at Siding Spring. Between 1990 and 1996 the
project
was responsible for about one third of all Near Earth Object
detections
and demonstrated the importance of a Southern Hemisphere search
effort.
Astronomer Rob McNaught, who is managing the new project, was a
member
of that successful team.
Although the ANU/UA project is a welcome development renewed
government
funding for an additional telescope will be required if the goals
of
the international Spaceguard Survey are to be achieved. That goal
is to
discover, within a decade, 90% of Earth-approaching asteroids
with a
diameter of 1 km or more. A collision by an asteroid of this size
would
be a grave threat to our civilisation and the death toll would
likely be
in the hundreds of millions.
Links
For a copy of the joint ANU/UA press release see NASA NEO News:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news066.html
Australian Spaceguard Survey
http://www1.tpgi.com.au/users/tps-seti/spacegd.html
(numerous links and
news items)
Australian Proposal
http://www1.tpgi.com.au/users/tps-seti/sg_prop.html
============
(3) VIOLENT BLAST OF RADIATION SPAWNED THE PLANETS
From Andrew Yee <ayee@nova.astro.utoronto.ca>
New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com
UK Contact:
Claire Bowles, claire.bowles@rbi.co.uk,
44-171-331-2751
US Contact:
New Scientist Washington office, newscidc@idt.net, 202-452-1178
EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE: September 8, 1999, 2 p.m. EDT
A violent blast of radiation spawned the planets
THE formation of the Solar System was hurried along by a nearby
gamma-
ray burst, two astrophysicists in Ireland suspect. Rather than
aborting
the birth of planets, the flood of energy may have melted
primordial
dust grains, seeded the formation of meteorites and helped form
the
rocky planets, including Earth.
For over a century, astronomers have tried to understand what
made
clumps of dust circling the young Sun melt into chondrules-rocky
beads rich in iron and silicon minerals that make up the bulk of
stony
meteorites. Suggestions included shock waves and gigantic flashes
of
lightning.
Now Brian McBreen and Lorraine Hanlon of University College
Dublin
suggest that all the chondrules in the Solar System formed in a
matter
of minutes 4.5 billion years ago when a gamma-ray burst-one of
the
most powerful explosions in the Universe-seared the dust and gas
circling the Sun with intense X-rays and gamma rays. Astronomers
aren't sure what causes gamma-ray bursts, but they may occur when
supermassive stars explode at the end of their lives (New
Scientist,
3 April, p 5).
In a paper that will appear in a future issue of Astronomy and
Astrophysics, McBreen and Hanlon calculate that a gamma-ray burst
within 300 light years would have flooded the dusty disc circling
the
young Sun with enough energy to fuse up to 100 Earth masses of
material
into droplets that cooled into chondrules. These, and the dust
from which
they formed, are rich in iron, which would have soaked up X-rays
and
gamma rays very efficiently. "It explains the key role
played by iron,
which dominates the X-ray and gamma-ray absorption," says
McBreen.
If the theory is right, it makes the Solar System more unique
than many
scientists would like. McBreen and Hanlon believe that only one
Sun-like
star in a thousand would have been close enough to a gamma-ray
burst
to form chondrules. Because they also think that the dense
chondrules
settle quickly into the plane of a protoplanetary disc and speed
the
formation of planets, their theory implies that solar systems
such as
ours are rare.
"Forming chondrules really is a long-standing problem, so if
this
mechanism accounts for them, that would be pretty
fantastic," says
Alan Boss, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution in
Washington
DC. Still, he is reluctant to rely on an unlikely event as a
crucial factor
in the formation of the Solar System, and wonders whether the
idea can
explain other features of chondrules, such as their size and
abundance.
"I don't think you'd want to invoke it unless it takes care
of everything,"
he says.
Specialists in meteorites are intrigued by McBreen's idea.
"Chondrule
formation remains a thorny subject, so it's good to see a new
idea in
the area," says Ian Wright, a meteoriticist at the Open
University in
London. He notes that most of the researchers studying meteorites
believe chondrules did not form all at once, although the case is
not
closed. "It will certainly cause debate, and it's an
interesting idea
that can be tested in our labs."
Author: Robert Adler
New Scientist issue 11th September 99
=============
(4) THANK GOD! WORLD OCEANS ARE DRYING UP (NO MORE WORRIES
ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING SEA-LEVEL RISE....)
From Andrew Yee <ayee@nova.astro.utoronto.ca>
New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com
UK Contact:
Claire Bowles, claire.bowles@rbi.co.uk,
44-171-331-2751
US Contact:
New Scientist Washington office, newscidc@idt.net, 202-452-1178
The world's oceans seem to be draining away
Within a billion years, our planet could be as dry and barren as
Mars,
claim geologists in Tokyo. They have calculated that the oceans
are
leaking water into the Earth's mantle five times as fast as it is
being
replenished.
Geoscientists believe that a huge reservoir of water is bound up
in
minerals in the transition zone between the upper and lower
mantles,
about 400 kilometres below the Earth's surface (New Scientist, 30
August 1997, p 22). Water enters the mantle at subduction zones,
where
oceanic crustal plates dive under continental plates. It returns
to the
surface at volcanic hot spots and mid-ocean ridges, where molten
rock
from the upper mantle is pushed up through the Earth's crust.
Most researchers have assumed that these flows are roughly in
balance.
But when Shigenori Maruyama and his colleagues at the Tokyo
Institute
of Technology tried to provide some hard numbers, they came to a
very
different conclusion. Each year, they say, about 1.12 billion
tonnes of
ocean water seeps into the mantle's transition zone. Yet they can
only
account for 0.23 billion tonnes moving in the opposite direction.
"The
world's oceans will dry up (sic!) within a billion years,"
says
Maruyama. "Earth's surface will look very much like the
surface
of Mars (sic!), where a similar process seems to have taken
place."
Maruyama bases his calculations on estimates of the volume of
rock
being subducted and the volume leaving the mantle, and
experiments
showing how much water is absorbed by the minerals, primarily
lawsonite, formed in subduction zones at about 100 kilometres
below
the surface.
As they travel deeper, these minerals become unstable and release
the
water into hydrous dense silicates, which enter the transition
zone. But
this happens only if the temperature increases relatively slowly
with
depth -- otherwise the water would be released at a shallower
depth and
return to the surface. "In the early part of Earth's history
the temperature
gradient in the subduction zones was far too high," says
Maruyama. "But
around 750 million years ago the subduction zones cooled to the
point
where the process could begin."
Since then, Maruyama estimates, the leakage will have caused sea
level
to drop by around 600 metres. This trend would largely be
obscured in the
geological record by shorter-term variations in sea level.
Maruyama will present his findings at a meeting of the American
Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December. But his team's
work is
already making waves. "The general idea appears quite
plausible," says
Raymond Jeanloz of the University of California at Berkeley. The
difficulty,
he says, is being sure you've accounted for all the mantle's
inputs and
outputs.
Maruyama believes that his figures for water loss from the oceans
are
conservative. But he admits that there are uncertainties about
the exact
amount of water emerging from mid-ocean ridges.
Even if Maruyama's calculations are spot on, however, the process
will
not counter the short-term problem of sea level rises caused by
global
warming. And a billion years from now, the Earth will probably
have
bigger problems than leaky oceans. By that time the Sun will be
expanding,
making life uncomfortably hot for whoever -- or whatever -- is
still
living on the planet.
Author: Peter Hadfield, Tokyo
New Scientist issue 11th September 99
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