SpaceViews Event Horizon

No Contact with EarlyBird: Engineers have failed to make contact with EarlyBird 1, the commercial remote sensing satellite launched on a Russian rocket on Christmas Eve. No signals have been received from the spacecraft since December 28, due to "an anomalous undervoltage condition", according to a statement. On January 13, EarthWatch, the company that owns EarlyBird, said its engineers were commanding the spacecraft to turn off all noncritical systems in the hope that the satellite will build up enough battery power for normal two-way communications to resume. EarthWatch officials "anticipate requiring several days to accomplish this objective."

Greenland Meteor: The search continued for any remnants of a meteor seen over Greenland on the morning of December 9. Search crews looking in the arctic ice that covers nearly all the island have not turned up any evidence of a meteorite remnant from the event, which was seen by many Greenlanders and recorded on video. However, there have been no reports of a seismic detection of the impact and a report of a cloud formation caused by the impact was later found to be erroneous. For more information turn to http://www.astro.ku.dk/~holger/ .

Commercial Lunar Sample Return: The resurgence in interest in the Moon prompted by Lunar Prospector may help support one company's efforts to go one step beyond that mission. Applied Space Resources, Inc., a Long Island-based company, has announced plans for Lunar Retriever, a mission that would land on the Moon and return with lunar samples as early as September 2000, the 30th anniversary of the Luna 16 sample return mission. Company officials believe the value of lunar samples returned to Earth could more than pay for the estimated $100 million cost of the mission. "We consider our Lunar Sample Return Mission an important demonstration of the value of space resources," said company vice president Beth Elliott.

Laser Warning: The United States and Russia may soon start sharing information about any future tests of lasers in space. The news comes after Russia protested the American test of the MIRACL laser in October, when the laser was fired at an old American military satellite. While American commercial operators were warned about the test, Russian officials were left out, something both countries want to avoid in the future.

In Brief: A consortium of countries are considering building a giant radio telescope in Australia. Representatives from ten countries, including the U.S., China, Japan, India, and several European nations, met last month in Australia to consider constructing a radiotelescope one kilometer square that would be capable to detect faint signals from the early universe... Wallops Island, Virginia, became on January 12 the third commercial spaceport in the U.S. licensed by the FAA. A first commercial launch, using Athena or Taurus rockets, is planned for 1999. Sites at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg Air Force Base were the first two commercial launch sites... Automobile magazine publisher Edmonds announced January 14 that a CD-ROM with 285 megabytes of files from its Web site, with information and reviews on cars and trucks, would be delivered to Mir as reading material for the crew. That sounds great and all, but if they wanted to do something constructive and fix up the station, why not send up "Car Talk"'s Click and Clack?