PASADENA, Calif. March 21, 2001 (AP) - Fifteen months after the Mars Polar Lander vanished, Defense Department imaging experts have spotted what may be a trace of the spacecraft on the surface of the Red Planet, a NASA official said.

Experts at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency have spent months poring over high-resolution images of the region where the Polar Lander was to have set down.

In at least one image, as few as three lighter picture elements - or pixels - stand out against a dark background, suggesting the presence of the $165 million probe, said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's office of space science.

However, neither of the agencies can yet confirm whether the pixels show up in other images of the same area, making the discovery still inconclusive.

"If you find a few bright pixels in the right alignment, that's interesting, but unless you find them in different pictures of the same location, it's not so interesting," Weiler said Tuesday.

NIMA presented its findings to NASA last month. Since then, the two federal agencies have gone back and forth on what exactly the images show.

"It could be a while before the agencies agree," said Don Savage, a NASA spokesman. NIMA officials could not be reached for comment late Tuesday.

The Polar Lander was launched Jan. 3, 1999. All radio contact was lost Dec. 3 as the spacecraft approached the red planet.

In the months following its disappearance, NASA pressed its orbiting Mars Global Surveyor into the search for the lost probe. NASA used the orbiter's high resolution camera to image as much of the region where the Polar Lander vanished. Analysis of those images is continuing.

"You're really trying to pull a needle out of the haystack here," Weiler said.

A NASA team that investigated the loss of the Mars Polar Lander concluded a rocket engine shut off prematurely during landing, leaving the spacecraft to plummet about 130 feet to almost certain destruction on the Martian surface.

An official at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, which built the Polar Lander for NASA, said any discovery could force a rethinking of why the probe failed.

"If there's new data, we'd go back and relook at our understanding of what happened and try to understand for sure, because all we have known is guesswork," said Noel Hinners, the company's vice president of flight systems in Denver.

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On the Net:

http://www.nasa.gov

"She tried to bite the necks of three people within a few minutes," police spokesman Hansjoerg Draeger said on Thursday. "She screamed out that she was a vampire and was thirsty."

The 21-year-old woman, identified only as Laura E., was put under psychiatric observation after she also tried to bite her fingers off, police said.

She first tried to bite the neck of a 20-year-old woman at a doctor's surgery, however the victim managed to escape.

She then went into a fast-food restaurant and bit the neck of a 40-year-old waiter.

Police said she then ran out onto the street where she first cut the neck of an 88-year-old pensioner with a piece of broken glass and then bit the elderly woman's ear.

Two police officers called to the scene managed to detain her, but she repeatedly bit their hands and arms.

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California Institute of Technology Space Radiation Laboratory - http://www.srl.caltech.edu

EPA (Environmental Protection Agency on diethyl phthalate: http://www.epa.gov/ngispgm3/iris/subst/0226.htm

Some more very scary looking stuff about diethyl phthalate that we don't pretend to understand: http://www.speclab.com/compound/c84662.htm

Admittedly snake-bit by earlier failed missions, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has spent about $12 million on additional reviews to cut down on the possibility of failure. The total cost of the unmanned orbital mission is $297 million.

The Odyssey, named in honor of the book and movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," is the first in a retooled exploration strategy for this planet following the 1999 losses of the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander.

The Mars Polar Lander smashed to the surface after a false signal caused its engines shut off before it landed. Two associated probes supposedly designed to crash and burrow into the planet's surface simply disappeared.

The Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in the planet's atmosphere after an embarrassing misunderstanding over English and metric measurements.

"Our long-term quest is to understand Mars as a planet, its climate and geological history," Ed Weiler, head of NASA's office of space science, said at a news briefing.

To do this, Odyssey will carry a suite of scientific instruments including a thermal emission imaging system, a gamma ray spectrometer and an experiment to check the Martian radiation environment.

The main structure of the craft is about the size of a subcompact car, but its solar panels have a wingspan of about 19 feet (5.8 meters). It weighs about 1,600 pounds (725 kg) and will travel 286 million miles (460 million km) to get to Mars, arriving in October.

The thermal imaging system will look for hot spots on the planet where gas or water might be escaping, Weiler said. He dubbed these possible features as "Martian Yellowstones," after the geysers in the U.S. national park of that name.

The gamma ray spectrometer will seek to determine by looking what the mineral composition of the upper layer of the Martian surface, down to perhaps a depth of 3 feet (1 meter).

The radiation experiment is meant to check the dangers to possible human explorers, although no human mission to Mars is even in the early planning stages at NASA, Weiler said.

FIRST FIND THE WATER

"Before we can even contemplate human missions to Mars, we really have to understand Mars as a planet," Weiler said. "We have to understand what the radiation environment is and if there is water."

The importance of water on Mars has been central to NASA's pursuit of the planet, since earlier missions have determined that liquid water once existed there. Water is seen as a prerequisite for life, and as Weiler noted, is a key factor in easing any human mission.

Any human voyagers to Mars would have to travel light, so they would be able to bring little water with them.

"I'm not saying necessarily drinking water, but water has a lot of other uses," Weiler said. "It's conveniently made of hydrogen and oxygen. Oxygen is pretty good stuff to breathe, hydrogen is pretty good stuff to use as fuel."

The current strategy of looking for water and "interesting spots" where water might exist could lead eventually to human missions, but the timing of those would be up to the economy, the administration and Congress, Weiler said.

The next step in the progression of Mars exploration would be a mission to collect samples and return them to Earth, and NASA Mars program director Scott Hubbard said that was currently envisioned for a mission to be launched in 2014, though that might be pushed forward to 2011.

The Odyssey is the first of six planned missions to Mars. A pair of rovers that will land on the planet is set for launch in 2003; and a scientific orbiter will be launched in 2005.

By 2007 and beyond, there would be a series of "smart lander" craft that would be able to sense whether it was close to its target, and in the seconds before landing would be able to steer away from hazards to set down safely.

More information about 2001 Mars Odyssey is available online at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov

By Deborah Zabarenko

WASHINGTON March 22, 2001 (Reuters) - When you look at a starry sky, what you see is only 5 percent of the Milky Way's matter. Scientists said on Thursday they have found a bit of the other 95 percent in old, cool, faded stars called white dwarfs.

This unseen matter, known as dark matter, has been theorized for decades, but research published in the current edition of the journal Science is the first time that dark matter has been directly detected.

"Dark matter is probably the largest constituent of the universe and we are seeing it for the first time," said researcher Ben Oppenheimer of the University of California-Berkeley.

"Simply knowing our place in the universe and understanding the structure of the universe is an important issue," Oppenheimer said in a telephone interview. "Our relation to the universe certainly depends on what's in it."


And the Earth and all its contents, including every person on the planet, are dark matter too, he said. Dark matter is anything that is not luminous enough to be seen from across the galaxy.

Astronomers have long known that the luminous material in stars and other bright objects in our galaxy was not enough to account for how fast the stars and solar systems were moving in the cosmos.

In cosmic terms, gravity is the force that moves things around, and without sufficient mass, there cannot be enough gravity to go as fast as they are in the Milky Way galaxy, Oppenheimer said.

There has to be something else with enough mass to move things along, and that is what scientists call dark matter. This mysterious form of matter could include absolutely dark phenomena, like black holes, and some simply dim objects like white dwarfs, he said.

In the Milky Way, there are lots of white dwarfs -- dense, old stars at the end of their lives that no longer make energy through nuclear fusion, as our Sun does.

These white dwarfs are in the flat disk of the galaxy, the giant S-shape where Earth resides, as well as in the galactic halo, a sphere that completely contains the galaxy's disk.

The white dwarfs in the halo move even faster than those in the disk and there are so many of them that they must account for at least 3 percent of the halo's dark matter, or about 10 billion white dwarfs, Oppenheimer said.

To directly detect these dim white dwarfs, Oppenheimer and his fellow researchers analyzed digitized photographic plates from a sky survey to find objects that were opaque enough and were moving across the sky at the right speed to be white dwarfs.

The oldest of the white dwarfs may be as old as the galaxy, or from 10 billion to 13 billion years old, only a few billion years after the theoretical Big Bang.

Last year, she returned to the city that spawned a movement — and her stardom — for a gallery showing of her work, priced between $1,100 and $8,700. Her paintings include portraits of musicians she knew years ago: Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix.

The gallery showed Slick's work for about six weeks and sold about $50,000 worth of her art, said Artrock gallery owner Phil Cushway. Her paintings of Garcia and white rabbits were among the most popular pieces. (Slick wrote the '60s hit "White Rabbit.'')

"People just go crazy over Grace,'' Cushway said. "It was just an amazing response.''

Her studio is the dining room of her Malibu, Calif., home. "It's the usual nutty-looking slob artist arrangement,'' she said. She works about a week on each painting.

Slick, 61, has made it through two failed marriages and from Jefferson Airplane to Starship to her own short-lived solo career. She made a brief excursion into pop with Starship in the 1980s, then quit the music business a decade ago.

1. How do you want people to see you now?

Slick: Unstoppable lunatic. It's pretty much what I see in the mirror.

2. Why lunatic?

Slick: The reason I put `lunatic' there is because if you base my life against most people's lives, obviously there's a screw loose there somewhere, but I wouldn't have it any other way. When you get old you don't regret what you did, you regret what you didn't do.

3. Are you romantically involved with anyone at the moment?

Slick: No.

4. What are you most proud of?

Slick: My persistence. I don't usually give up.

5. When has persistence been the most useful for you?

Slick: With everything. It comes in with art, it comes in with relationships, it comes in with physical disabilities. You just don't stop. Unstoppable lunatic.

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Artrock Gallery on the web - http://www.artrock.com

Judge Vieri Volterra released Kenneth Waters on personal recognizance pending a possible retrial.

Waters praised the efforts of his sister Betty Ann, a former high school dropout who put herself through law school to work on his case and found the evidence that led to his release.

"I think it's absolutely amazing that she's dedicated her life to this," Waters said. "It's been 19 years. My whole family suffered unbelievably."

Waters had a tearful reunion with his mother and nine brothers and sisters in a Middlesex Superior Court hallway.

"It's a great day. It's a great day," said Waters' mother, Elizabeth O'Connor.

"It's great to be free," Waters said after emerging from the court probation office and embracing his family.

Prosecutors said they were reviewing the entire case, which had included allegations by two of Waters' ex-girlfriends that he had admitted to the murder and an allegation that he sold some of the victim's jewelry five or six weeks later.

In a statement, prosecutors said their decision not to oppose Waters' motion for a new trial "does not constitute a finding ... regarding Mr. Waters' culpability or lack thereof."

Waters was convicted of beating and stabbing to death Katharina Brow of Ayer in 1980. His attorney at the time argued Waters was in court on the morning of the slaying to face a charge of assaulting a police officer, but authorities were unable to verify the alibi.

Waters was convicted of first-degree murder and armed robbery and sentenced to life in prison in May 1983.

Betty Ann Waters worked on the case for years, and eventually learned that a box of evidence with her brother's name on it was sitting in a courthouse basement. The box contained the knife used in the slaying and pieces of cloth with blood samples on them.

She enlisted the help of the Innocence Project, a New York-based group that helps inmates challenge convictions based on new DNA evidence. The material was tested, and the Middlesex County District Attorney's Office announced Tuesday that the DNA collected from the evidence she found did not match her brother's.

Prosecutors said Thursday they will decide whether to pursue a new trial based on "a full and thorough" review of all the evidence presented in the original case.

If the case is retried, "We'll just have to go battle them again," said Waters' brother David O'Connor, 44, of Providence, R.I.

"You can just only imagine what he went through, but he dealt with it, he never gave up hope," O'Connor said.

PASADENA, Calif. March 14, 2001 (AP) — The world's two largest telescopes have been linked to create an optical instrument powerful enough to pinpoint planets orbiting other suns, NASA said Wednesday.

Astronomers first gathered starlight from the linked 33-foot telescopes late Monday at the W.M. Keck Observatory atop the dormant Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii, National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials said.

Using a process called interferometry, the twin telescopes first captured light from HD61294, a faint star in the constellation Lynx. The starlight was then shuttled across a 275-foot gap between the telescopes and combined in a way to mimic the light-gathering action of a single, larger telescope.

Anne Kinney, director of NASA's astronomical search for origins program, which includes the Keck Interferometer, called it "a fabulous technical advancement for science.''

"This will open the possibility of obtaining images with much greater clarity than ever before,'' she said, equating the device to a single 85-meter (279-foot) telescope.

The Keck Interferometer will be tested through summer, with limited science operations to begin this fall.

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On the Net:

W.M. Keck Observatory: http://www2.keck.hawaii.edu:3636

BERLIN March 20, 2001 (Reuters) - Space, the final frontier, is rapidly becoming one big trash dump, experts warned at a conference in Germany on Tuesday.

Thousands of rocket launches since the dawn of the Space Age in 1957 have left a growing amount of orbiting debris that may badly hamper future launches into space.

"The problem is very serious," said Sergei Kulik, head of the international division of the Russian Aviation and Space Agency. "If we continue to waste a lot of garbage in space...the outlook is very dangerous," he told Reuters

"In the middle of this century the contamination may be so big that a kind of a cascade effect could appear, a collision between the space debris particles creating more and more (collisions)," he said, adding that could eventually mean "there will be no possibility of flying in space at all."

Kulik is one of about 200 experts who are meeting at the European Space Agency's operation center in Darmstadt, Germany this week to address the problem of space debris.

The largest object humanity has put into space, the 140-ton Russian Mir space station, is due to crash to Earth on Friday after 15 years in orbit, with much of it burning up as it enters the atmosphere. Kulik said Russia had made careful plans to avoid leaving behind any orbiting debris.

According to the European Space Agency, scientists can identify about 8,500 man-made objects now orbiting the Earth, only about 600 of which are operational satellites or spacecraft.

If one counts tiny bits of metal and debris, the total number of orbiting trash items rises to between 100,000 and 150,000, the agency estimates. Computer simulations of the problem show the Earth surrounded by debris ranging from bolts and straps to enormous fuel tanks.

EVER GROWING PROBLEM

Just last week American astronaut Jim Voss inadvertently added to the growing amount of orbiting trash when he dropped a foot-restraint system during a spacewalk. NASA decided to move the International Space Station to dodge the object, which now orbits the Earth at speeds of about five miles per second.

"Until recently it was not a problem because there were not so many powers very active in space," said Bess Reijnen, a Dutch professor of international space law, who is also attending the meeting in Germany.

"But now in 40 years of space flight, there have been about 4,000 launchings and they continue to create debris, especially in the near-Earth orbit, that is up to about 2,000 kilometers above sea level."

No human has ever been harmed by space debris, but part of the U.S. space station Skylab killed a cow in Australia when it fell to Earth in 1979. The most serious debris collision in space came in 1996 when a French spy satellite hit a fragment of a French Ariane rocket.

Experts say cleaning up the debris is extremely difficult if at all possible, so the focus should be on stemming its growth in the future.

"Technically, it has become clear that some code of conduct or protocol or legal regulation should be set up," Reijnen said. "Here at this conference the political willingness to do such a thing is increasing."

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European Space Agency home page - http://www.esa.int