KC AstroNews Oct 2002

NEBRA DISK SPECIAL

• SPACE CONGRESS & SUMMIT
• SETI@home: 4 MILLION USERS
• ONCE IN A BLUE MOON
• WORLD BEYOND PLUTO
• ANCIENT NEBRA DISK DISCOVERED
• 3600 YEAR OLD STAR CHART
• ALTERNATIVE TO REPLACING SATELLITES

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Up This Month
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Look up!

The Orionid Meteor Shower will peak on Monday October 21.

Unfortunately, the Moon is almost full, so only the brightest Orionids will be visible.

The same night brings us the Hunter's Moon -- the first full Moon after the Harvest Moon.

Popular fall constellations include the Pegasus the horse and it's large square that looms high in the eastern evening sky. It's about the diameter of fist held at arm's length. Another autumn favorite at about the same height in the northeast is the W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia.

Three stars form the Summer Triangle, which despite its name hangs around until the beginning of winter: Vega, Deneb, and Altair.

Vega is the brightest star very high in the west, and it belong to the constellation Lyra (the lyre or harp).

Deneb, the star that forms the "tail" of Cygnus, the swan, appears near the zenith soon after dark. The name Deneb derives from an Arabic word that means "the tail." Deneb is a white supergiant star about 1,600 light-years from Earth.

Farther from the zenith toward the southwest is Altair, the eye of Agila the eagle.

Also don't forget the END OF DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME on the last weekend in October!! We all get a day with 25 hours - to make up for the day with only 23 hours in the Spring when daylight savings time begins.

SPACE CONGRESS & SUMMIT

The Space Policy Summit, a top level "private and frank" discussion of space policy over the past three days, was influenced by "the renewed emphasis on national and international security concerns," said organizers from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

The Space Policy Summit was held in connection with the World Space Congress which is held every 10 years.

There were three sessions at the Summit: commercial space activities, space exploration, and space applications. A fourth, closed door, session on international security space issues will be convened in 2003.

Space Policy Summit participants said the commercial satellite market is not strong enough to sustain current space launch systems or justify industry investment in new systems and technologies. "Government support is necessary for the foreseeable future to achieve national objectives in the security, civil, and commercial sectors," the AIAA said.

Security Concerns Shade World Space Congress:
http://ens-news.com/ens/oct2002/2002-10-14-01.asp

World Space Congress:
http://www.aiaa.org/WSC2002/

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ASTROTIP

ONCE IN A BLUE MOON

The time between two full Moons equals 29 and a half days. Approximately every three years there are two full Moons in one calendar month.

The second full Moon has been come to be known as a "blue Moon. So on average, there's a Blue Moon about every 33 months.

The most recent "blue Moon" occurred in November 2001. The next time two full Moons occur in the same month will be July 2004.

The term "blue Moon" has not always been used this way, however. The exact origin of the phrase has proven difficult to uncover. It does in fact refer to a rare blue coloring of the Moon caused by high-altitude dust particles. Most sources attribute this unusual event, occurring only "once in a blue Moon," as the true progenitor of the colorful phrase.

SETI@home: 4 MILLION USERS

How? The SETI@home screen saver is a scientific analytical software. It performs a mathematical operations on data you download from the SETI program.

SETI@home uses the largest telescope in the world, the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, to continuously scan the sky for radio signals.

No Internet distributed computing venture has been more successful than SETI@home. With more than a million years of computer time already spent, SETI@home is more powerful than any computer or computing network in existence. And all this power has been utilized to analyze data collected at the Arecibo Observatory in search of intelligent signals from beyond.

So far no signs of life. So if you want to help, maybe you can be the lucky one who finds ET!

Get SETI@home version 3.03:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu

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DISTANT DISCOVERIES

WORLD BEYOND PLUTO FOUND
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A new planet-like object has been found circling the Sun beyond Pluto.

It is about one-tenth the diameter of Earth and circles the Sun every 288 years.

This is the biggest find in the Solar System since Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto 72 years ago.

It's about the size of all the asteroids put together.

LARGE WORLD FOUND BEYOND PLUTO:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2306945.stm

ANCIENT NEBRA DISK DISCOVERED

This archaeological find has been heralded as "'The oldest concrete representation of the stars in the world."

The recent discovery of an astronomical artifact that is probably about 3600 years old just goes to show how little we really know about our our ancestors.

The location? Atop the Mittelberg, a 252m hill in the Ziegelroda Forest, 180km south-west of Berlin, in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. The place of discovery, on the mountain's summit, has been compared to the Stonehenge ritual site in Britain.

The artifact? Archaeologists are investigating a 32cm bronze-and-gold disc that maps 32 stars, including the Pleiades.

The stars are shown as they appear in reference to a local mountain on the horizon, the Brocken. The Brocken is fabled in northern European mythology as the place where witches gather for a coven every April 3

The artifact was discovered within a pit inside a Bronze Age ringwall. The ringwall was built in such a way that the sun seemed to disappear every equinox behind the Brocken.

Since the Mittelberg is near the German town of Nebra, the star map has been dubbed the "Nebra Disc."

Experts believe the map and site formed an observatory, which was used to set the calendar for planting and harvesting crops.

The nearby forest contains 1000 barrows or princely graves from the period. The identity of the Bronze Age people of Europe has been lost in the mists of time. They are not mentioned in ancient Greek or other Mediterranean sources. Only their hut sites, graves and treasures are left. It is impossible to guess the language they spoke.

SPOOKY FINDS:
http://www.itechnology.co.za/index.php?click_id=31&art_id=qw1032973740198B265

GERMANY'S SKY DISK:
http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~dfischer/mirror/243.html

HIMMELSSCHEIBE VON NEBRA (In German)
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,216379,00.html

FAR OUT FACTS

3600 YEAR OLD STAR CHART

A recent discovery in Germany has forced scientist to rewrite history.

Who would have ever believed that during the Bronze Age - three and a half millennia ago - highly adept astronomers existed, whose religion was intrinsically linked to the heaven's movements!

A bronze disc bearing gold leaf images of the sun, moon and stars was found at the site of a Bronze Age camp near the town of Nebra in east Germany.

The disc is valued at $10 million. It was uncovered by a group of people using metal detectors who had kept their discovery secret.

The artifacts were damaged during their plunder. The thieves hit the disc with a hammer, causing the outer rim to splinter. With the next blow, a star shot out from its astronomical position. In their hurry to secure their booty, the thieves managed to chip a large part from the main astronomical object.

The retrieval of the disc is the stuff of detective stories. It was offered first to the Berlin Museum for Pre-History and later to a Munich museum. Since the illegal nature of the goods was clear to professionals, a sale was never transacted.

When rumors emerged that the whole treasure was about to be offered on the international underground market, Harald Meller, the director of the Institute for Archaeological Research in Halle with the help of Saxony-Anhalt state officials stepped in, taking measures to rescue the collection.

The police set a trap for the group in February 2002 by luring its members to meet a "prospective buyer" in the Hilton hotel in Basle, Switzerland. During the bogus sales meeting Swiss police took the finders into custody.

The disc was then handed to the Institute for Archaeological Research in Halle where it has been studied and subjected to carbon data testing.

Archaeologists have unearthed more than 100 treasures in Nebra. Once the excavation of the site has been completed, a visitor's center will be established near the area. The forest where the site is located is considered one of the most important archaeological sites in Europe.

The archaeologists had kept the discovery a secret for most of this year to prevent more treasure hunters from searching the Nebra site.

Mr Meller said: "It is without doubt the earliest genuine depiction of the cosmos ever to have been discovered. It suggests that the site where it was found almost certainly functioned around 1600 BC as an astronomical observatory, like Stonehenge in Britain."

Harald Meller and his team are currently excavating the 750ft-high Mittelberg hill near Nebra where the disc was found. The site was originally thought to have been a simple Bronze Age camp, however the archaeologists are now convinced that it was used as an astronomical observatory and a temple in which the disc or discs played a central role.

"The find gives us a whole new puzzle to figure out. It depicts a journey through the heavenly bodies, examples of which are well known in ancient Egypt but not in the middle of Europe and not at this time," said Meller.

Gold star chart points way to German 'Stonehenge':
http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/10/06/wdisc06.xml

Celestial Bronze Age disc recovered:
http://www.faz.com/IN/INtemplates/eFAZ/archive.asp?doc={A281FBE3-A50C-4FB2-82A2-501A529C67B0}

ALTERNATIVE TO REPLACING SATELLITES

Walt Anderson, financier behind non-traditional space firms such as MirCorp and Rotary Rocket, is bankrolling a new company that intends to change the economics of the commercial satellite business.

Unlike some of Anderson’s other forays into space, the 48-year-old telecommunications entrepreneur said his singular goal this time around is "to be the guy who really commercializes space."

Anderson’s new venture, Orbital Recovery Corp., will give satellite operators an alternative to building and launching new satellites to replace ones that are about to run out of fuel.

The alternative is a small space tug designed to dock with a satellite that is running out of fuel and take over its station-keeping duties for up to 10 years.

In return for this satellite life-extension service, Orbital Recovery Corp. would charge a fee equivalent to one year of the satellite’s revenues, or about $50 million. Because the service would be fully insured, Anderson said, "we save the satellite or the customer pays nothing."

Anderson said 46 satellites are expected to hit the end of their useful service lives between 2004 and 2008 because of fuel depletion. Orbital Recovery’s plans to launch its first mission in 2004, two missions in 2005, and three missions per year thereafter.

Anderson said the service could eventually be of great interest to insurance underwriters who could hire Orbital Recovery rather than paying out a large claim on a stranded satellite.

At the core of Orbital Recovery Corp.’s business plan is development of a spacecraft small enough to take advantage of low-cost rides on expendable launchers as secondary payloads, yet large enough to contain a xenon ion propulsion system that could last as long as 10 years.
[Source: Brian Berger, Space News Staff Writer]

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My god! It's full of stars!