Apr 6 2000
From The Space Library
Soyuz successfully docked with the unoccupied Mir space station. At the last minute, cosmonauts Sergei V. Zalyotin and Alexander Y. Kaleri docked Soyuz manually, because Russian space officials feared the autopilot was about to malfunction. The cosmonauts planned to concentrate on plugging a small air leak and conducting several scientific experiments during a spacewalk.
In two Nature articles, research teams announced that through independent research they had discovered the same result: the Ulysses spacecraft had passed through the longest comet tail ever discovered. Although the Ulysses vehicle had made its unintended discovery in 1996, when it passed through the tail of Comet Hyakutake, scientists had taken four years to confirm the discovery. The scientists concluded that Ulysses had discovered a comet tail approximately 300 million miles (483 million kilometers) long. "The discovery was made quite by accident, a bit like finding a needle in a haystack when you weren't even looking for it in the first place," was how one project member described the fortunate discovery. Ulysses, a joint mission of NASA and the European Space Agency, had launched in 1990 to study solar winds and rays, not comets. However, the spacecraft had picked up some unusual readings during its mission, which turned out to be signs of Hyakutake's tail, extending much farther than previously estimated.
NASA announced that follow-up studies had determined that the distant mass known as TMR- 1 C, discovered in 1997, was probably not a protoplanet a, young, still-forming precursor of one of the giant planets. In 1998 astronomer Susan Terebey of the Extrasolar Research Corporation had published findings suggesting that the body was a protoplanet several times larger than Jupiter. Terebey's research had received widespread attention. However, although NASA had released the images of TMR-1C captured by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), NASA had urged scientists to obtain further verification before identifying the body as a protoplanet. After observing the body over several months, astronomers had concluded that TMR-1 C was a bright star, rather than a planet. Reflective dust had likely increased the brightness of the star, located approximately 135 billion miles (217 billion kilometers) from Earth, making it appear to be a planet. After her initial high-profile announcement, Terebey had continued to study the star using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and had amended her own hypothesis, reporting, "the new data do not lend weight to the protoplanet interpretation and the results remain consistent with the explanation that TMR-1C may be a background star." Most newspapers gave as much coverage to the news of the changing assessment as they had given to the original discovery.
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