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...been increasingly pierced by the spacecraft's radar. And this summer Cassini will make an unusually high orbit above Saturn's massive B ring, promising unique images of the ring, spread like an immense halo around the planet. The ship will also have the rare opportunity to observe the sun cross the plane of the ring from south to north, literally shedding light on the B ring's complex particle structure. "We want to know what a particle would look like if you could pick one up and hold it in your hand," Spilker says, "and we can do that...
...mention cooling to the researchers behind the Phoenix Mars Lander. Their ship will have just six months to sample and study the water ice at the Martian north pole before -200°F (-130°C) winter temperatures hit the region. "We last until the sun goes down. Then we freeze to death," says principal investigator Peter Smith, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Before it does, Phoenix Lander will probably offer a first look at actual Martian water ice rather than the dry water scars of millenniums past. To do that, the lander will...
Less glamorous but more sweeping than the half-year Phoenix mission was the long-running Ulysses mission, which took the first full measure of the sun's polar regions. If it swirls, floats or emanates near the sun, Ulysses studied it. The spacecraft discovered that the sun's magnetic field determines the regions that produce the solar wind, and ruffled more than a few scientists' feathers when it showed that a hot corona produces the fastest solar winds--exactly the opposite of prevailing theories...
Ulysses also tracked interstellar dust particles all the way from the sun to Earth, and in so doing helped map the planet's magnetic fields. The big surprise came when Ulysses stumbled on the tails of two comets and found that those feathery streams were more than 93 million miles (150 million km) in length. That's about the distance from the sun to Earth. "Totally unexpected," JPL project scientist Ed Smith says simply...
...Meanwhile, little if anything is being done to appease angry Florida Democrats - whose enthusiastic support the party will need if the Florida sun is going to shine on its candidate in the general election. But either way, Florida isn't likely to be the butt of national jokes when this is all over. The new derisive puns may well fall instead on Dean and the DNC - starting with Dem-witted...