Evidence of a hot population in the SMC/LMC bridge detected by the very wide field camera of spacelab-1

Deep 66° field photographs of the sky have been taken by the SL - 1 Very Wide Field Camera (experiment 1-ES-022) at 1650, 1930 and 2530 Å, with a limiting magnitude of 9.3 at 1930 Å. A 1,2 × 2,4Kpc ultraviolet extension of the Shapley's wing of the small Magellanic Cloud is revealed.     

The International Space Station: a pathway to the future

Nearly six years after the launch of the first International Space Station element, and four years after its initial occupation, the United States and our 6 international partners have made great strides in operating this impressive Earth orbiting research facility. This past year we have done so in the face of the adversity of operating without the benefit of the Space Shuttle. In his January 14, 2004, speech announcing a new vision for America's space program, President Bush affirmed the United States' commitment to completing construction of the International Space Station by 2010. The President also stated that we would focus our future research aboard the Station on the long-term effects of space travel on human biology. This research will help enable human crews to venture through the vast voids of space for months at a time. In addition, ISS affords a unique opportunity to serve as an engineering test bed for hardware and operations critical to the exploration tasks. NASA looks forward to working with our partners on International Space Station research that will help open up new pathways for future exploration and discovery beyond low Earth orbit. This paper provides an overview of the International Space Station Program focusing on a review of the events of the past year, as well as plans for next year and the future.     

A direct fusion drive for rocket propulsion

The Direct Fusion Drive (DFD), a compact, anuetronic fusion engine, will enable more challenging exploration missions in the solar system. The engine proposed here uses a deuterium–helium-3 reaction to produce fusion energy by employing a novel field-reversed configuration (FRC) for magnetic confinement. The FRC has a simple linear solenoid coil geometry yet generates higher plasma pressure, hence higher fusion power density, for a given magnetic field strength than other magnetic-confinement plasma devices. Waste heat generated from the plasma?s Bremsstrahlung and synchrotron radiation is recycled to maintain the fusion temperature. The charged reaction products, augmented by additional propellant, are exhausted through a magnetic nozzle. A 1 MW DFD is presented in the context of a mission to deploy the James Webb Space Telescope (6200 kg) from GPS orbit to a Sun–Earth L2 halo orbit in 37 days using just 353 kg of propellant and about half a kilogram of ³He. The engine is designed to produce 40 N of thrust with an exhaust velocity of 56.5 km/s and has a specific power of 0.18 kW/kg.     

Observed Aspects of Reconnection in Solar Eruptions

The observed magnetic field configuration and signatures of reconnection in the large solar magnetic eruptions that make major flares and coronal mass ejections and in the much smaller magnetic eruptions that make X-ray jets are illustrated with cartoons and representative observed eruptions. The main reconnection signatures considered are the imaged bright emission from the heated plasma on reconnected field lines. In any of these eruptions, large or small, the magnetic field that drives the eruption and/or that drives the buildup to the eruption is initially a closed bipolar arcade. From the form and configuration of the magnetic field in and around the driving arcade and from the development of the reconnection signatures in coordination with the eruption, we infer that (1) at the onset of reconnection the reconnection current sheet is small compared to the driving arcade, and (2) the current sheet can grow to the size of the driving arcade only after reconnection starts and the unleashed erupting field dynamically forces the current sheet to grow much larger, building it up faster than the reconnection can tear it down. We conjecture that the fundamental reason the quasi-static pre-eruption field is prohibited from having a large current sheet is that the magnetic pressure is much greater than the plasma pressure in the chromosphere and low corona in eruptive solar magnetic fields.     

Dynamo Models for Planets Other Than Earth

Observations from planetary spacecraft missions have demonstrated a spectrum of dynamo behaviour in planets. From currently active dynamos, to remanent crustal fields from past dynamo action, to no observed magnetization, the planets and moons in our solar system offer magnetic clues to their interior structure and evolution. Here we review numerical dynamo simulations for planets other than Earth. For the terrestrial planets and satellites, we discuss specific magnetic field oddities that dynamo models attempt to explain. For the giant planets, we discuss both non-magnetic and magnetic convection models and their ability to reproduce observations of surface zonal flows and magnetic field morphology. Future improvements to numerical models and new missions to collect planetary magnetic data will continue to improve our understanding of the magnetic field generation process inside planets.     

Theodor Meyer—Lost pioneer of gas dynamics

Theodor Meyer's 1908 doctoral dissertation, with Ludwig Prandtl (1875–1953) as his advisor, introduced much of what has now become basic gas dynamics: not only the Prandtl–Meyer expansion but also the oblique-shock-wave theory as well. It is arguably the most influential dissertation in all of fluid dynamics. Yet no biography or even a photograph of Meyer has been available in the intervening century. This biography provides some insight into his character and covers his education, dissertation, World War I combat service and long career as an engineer and a teacher of math and physics.     

The x-ray cluster baryon crisis

Nucleosynthesis in the standard hot big bang cosmology offers a successful account of the production of the light nuclides during the early evolution of the Universe. Consistency among the predicted and observed abundances of D,³He,⁴He and⁷Li leads to restrictive lower and upper bounds to the present density of nucleons. In particular, the upper bound ensures that nucleons cannot account for more than a small fraction (<0.06h ₅₀ ^–2 ) of the mass in a critical density (Einstein-de Sitter) Universe. In contrast, x-ray observations of rich clusters of galaxies suggest strongly that baryons (in hot gas) contribute a significant fraction of the total cluster mass (0.2h ₅₀ ^–3/2 ). If, indeed, clusters do provide a fair sample of the mass in the Universe, this crisis forces us to consider other ways of mitigating it, including the politically incorrect possibility that <1. The options, including magnetic or turbulent pressure, clumping and non-zero space curvature and/or cosmological constant, are discussed.