Dec 11 2000
From The Space Library
Space Shuttle Endeavour landed at KSC in Cape Canaveral, Florida, after completing the 11-day Mission STS-97 at the ISS, where the crew had installed and deployed the station's new solar array. Shortly before touchdown, the ISS sailed above KSC, a "reminder of the pressure" on NASA to support more flights to the ISS as the station's assembly accelerated. Shuttle Program Manager Ronald D. Dittemore remarked that the successful mission of Endeavour to the ISS was "a good way to end this year a very successful five missions."
A team of three high school students from the North Carolina School for Science and Mathematics in Durham won first place in the Siemens-Westinghouse Science and Technology Competition. The team won for discovering the first evidence of a neutron star in the nearby supernova remnant IC443, using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) Observatory. The students had located a point-like source of x-rays embedded in a supernova and had determined that the central object was most likely a pulsar, a young and rapidly rotating neutron star. Bryan M. Gaensler, a pulsar expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had reviewed the team's paper, remarked that the students had produced "a really solid scientific finding."
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