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 * * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - July 2, 2004 * * *

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Welcome to S&T's Weekly News Bulletin. Images, the full text of stories
abridged here, and other enhancements are available on our Web site,
SkyandTelescope.com, at the URLs provided below. (If the links don't work,
just manually type the URLs into your Web browser.) Clear skies!

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CASSINI'S PICTURE-PERFECT ARRIVAL

Scientists, engineers, and space enthusiasts alike had much to celebrate
this week: the Cassini orbiter, with its Huygens probe riding piggyback,
is safely orbiting Saturn. In the process, the craft's cameras captured
the closest-ever look at the planet's icy rings. The procedure went just
as planned, says Cassini flight director Julie Webster (Jet Propulsion
Laboratory). The spacecraft "couldn't have performed any better."

Saturn orbit insertion, or SOI in NASA parlance, was hardly a simple
task....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1291_1.asp

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SATURN'S MAGNETIC MYSTERIES

The first 61 pictures relayed by the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft after
reaching Saturn show that there is much scientists don't understand about
the planet's dazzling rings. But no less surprising were early returns
from Saturn's vast magnetosphere, the invisible bubble of magnetic fields,
electric currents, and trapped radiation far larger than the ringed planet
itself....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1292_1.asp

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ASTRO NEWS BRIEFS

Happy Anniversary, FUSE

June 24th marked the fifth birthday for the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic
Explorer (FUSE). Since the craft launched in 1999 FUSE astronomers have
used the satellite's four far-ultraviolet telescopes to produce
revolutionary science. Some of the highlights include the first-ever
observations of molecular nitrogen outside the solar system, an analysis
of the molecular hydrogen in the Martian atmosphere, and the discovery of
a hot gas halo surrounding the Milky Way.

A New Step for SETI{at}home

A half million amateur hunters for alien civilizations are currently
running the SETI{at}home software -- which uses your computer's idle time to
sift through cosmic noise from the Arecibo radio telescope for faint,
artificial signals among the stars. Launched five years ago, SETI{at}home is
now broadening its scope to become a platform for other "distributed
computing" projects, such as those that use volunteers' computers to
crunch data in molecular biology, climate modeling, and mathematics. The
new software is named BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network
Computing. It will give SETI{at}home itself the flexibility to run additional
searches using other radio telescopes and analysis strategies. Current
SETI{at}home users will eventually need to switch to BOINC.

The change will also resolve an embarrassment that has dogged SETI{at}home
for all its life: the project has attracted so many volunteers that most
of them are given needless duplicate make-work. BOINC will steer excess
volunteers toward other projects instead.

Phoebe Came in from the Cold

Still ecstatic from Cassini's close flyby of Saturn's moon Phoebe on June
11th, mission scientists have started poring over other data obtained by
the spacecraft. New insight into the battered moon's character has come
from a determination of its average density: at 1.6 grams per cubic
centimeter, Phoebe must be a mixture of rock and ice in roughly equal
amounts. Spectra from Cassini's Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer
(VIMS) also show the surface to be a patchwork of water ice, frozen carbon
dioxide, possibly clays, and unidentified organic compounds. Other large
satellites in Saturn's system, such as Mimas, Tethys, and Rhea, also have
compositions dominated by water ice, but VIMS team leader Robert H. Brown
notes that only Phoebe shows a carbon-dioxide signature. Consequently it
is definitely not a captured asteroid but instead is more akin to the
cometary bodies that now populate the distant Kuiper Belt.

Amateur Occultation Data Reveal Double Asteroid

Only four observers, all using video recorders, saw asteroid 302 Clarissa
pass in front of a 10th-magnitude star on the night of June 24th. But that
was enough to reveal at least two surprises, reports David Dunham, head of
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