Nasa Notes
... Jim Timmons

"ARE WE THERE YET? ARE WE THERE YET?"-Cassini:  The Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft flies on to its approach to the ringed planet with normal operations. Routine calibrations and software checkouts continue to be performed. With two years to go before reaching its goal, Cassini recently passed its fifth anniversary since launch. A new Cassini-Huygens website is now up and can be found at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE - Stardust:  The folks at JPL will get a good chance to test many aspects of the Stardust craft when it passes within 2,000 miles of the asteroid Annefrank in November.  This encounter will be an engineering test as there are no scientific goals for this flyby. The meeting with Comet Wild-2 is just over a year away and the dust collectors that will gather dust from the comet will remain open as it passes the asteroid. The asteroid is about 2.5 miles across and is named for the girl that wrote her diary of her family's attempt to hide from the Nazis.

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A great overview of emission (or were they absorption?) lines!

Another highlight of the meeting was a "book report" from Becky Nordeen.  Becky just read Setting Sail for the Universe; Astronomers and their Discoveries, by Donald Fernie.  This is a collection of two dozen essays about astronomy written by college professor Fernie and originally published in American Scientist, a publication of the scientific society Sigma Xi. Subjects vary from Stonehenge to Sirius.  Becky's favorite story is how it turns out that Galileo actually was the first

observer of Neptune, sketching it with the other background stars while he was studying the  moons of Jupiter.  A researcher noticed that several of his sketches show one of the background stars moving.  He did some investigation and found that Neptune was in fact passing though the field at the time the sketches were made!  Galileo never realized he had observed a new outer planet!  The book is $17.50 at Amazon.Com (http://www.amazon.com/
exec/obidos/ASIN/0813530881/
ref%3Dnosim/music2u/104
-8080297-2426321), or you can get it for FREE at your local library (this is Becky's strong recommendation!)