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Edition 13 - 31 March 1999
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# Deployed Antenna Sending Streams Of New Mars Images #

31 March 1999

A steady stream of new data from Mars, including high- resolution
images, will begin arriving next week at Earth receiving stations
following yesterday's deployment of the Mars Global Surveyor's
high-power communications antenna. 

"Having a deployed, steerable high-gain antenna is like switching from
a garden hose to a fire hose in terms of data return from the
spacecraft," said Joseph Beerer, flight operations manager for Mars
Global Surveyor at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

"Up until now, we have been using the high-gain antenna in its stowed
position, so periodically during the first three weeks of our mapping
mission, we had to stop collecting science data and turn the entire
spacecraft to transmit data to Earth," Beerer explained. "Now that the
high-gain antenna is deployed and steerable, we have the ability to
simultaneously study Mars and communicate with Earth." 

The antenna was deployed at about midnight EST, Sunday, March 28. It
had been stowed since launch in November 1996 to reduce its chances of
being contaminated by exhaust from the spacecraft's main engine, which
was fired periodically throughout the mission. The spacecraft entered
orbit around Mars in September 1997 and used a technique called
aerobraking to gradually lower the spacecraft's altitude to the
desired orbit for mapping. The mapping mission began March 9;
full-scale mapping begins April 4. 

Because engineers were uncertain that a device intended to dampen the
force of the deployment would work correctly, engineers used the
antenna in its stowed configuration for the first three weeks of
mapping. This allowed the team to meet the mission's minimum science
objectives before risking the antenna deployment. 

Last night, the dish-shaped high-gain antenna, 5 feet in diameter, was
deployed on a 6.6-foot-long boom and was pushed outward from the
spacecraft by a powerful spring. The suspect dampening device worked
as it should have, cushioning the force of the spring and limiting the
speed of the deployment, similar to the automatic closer on a screen
door. With the antenna successfully deployed, Mars Global Surveyor
will return a nearly constant stream of observations of Mars for the
next two years. 

Information from the science instruments is recorded 24 hours a day on
solid state recorders on board the spacecraft. Once a day, during a
10-hour tracking pass over a Deep Space Network antenna, the data are
transmitted to Earth. In addition, every third day a second tracking
pass is used to transmit data "live" at a very high rate directly to
Earth without being put on the recorder. These data, which will
contain high-resolution images of Mars, will be transmitted at rates
between 40,000 and 80,000 bits per second. 

Mars Global Surveyor is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for
NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. Lockheed Martin
Astronautics of Denver developed and operates the spacecraft. The Jet
Propulsion Laboratory is a division of the California Institute of
Technology. 

ScienceDaily

Further information about the mission is available on the Internet at:


http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/index.html 

Editor's Note: The original news release can be found at 

ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/pressrel/1999/99-048.txt 


# Penn Researchers Develop Gene Therapy Technique That Reverses Muscle
Membrane Weakness In Muscular Dystrophy Variant  #

31 March 1999

Personal note: I have a personal interest in this matter since I got a
muscular disease type Duchenne, that's why I thought I'd put this
article in my e-zine :)

(Philadelphia, PA) - Previous gene therapy approaches to treat
muscular dystrophy have been hampered by an inability to successfully
place the therapeutic genetic material into deficient muscle cells.
Now, for the first time, using a naturally-occurring hamster model of
limb girdle muscular dystrophy (LGMD), researchers at the University
of Pennsylvania Health System have developed a technique that
successfully produces widespread transfer of corrective genetic
material into muscle cells throughout an entire limb. In so doing, the
research team also found evidence for a cascade of events that
eventually results in cellular destabilization - a process which
manifests as muscle weakness in patients with this and other forms of
muscular dystrophy. 

The rest of the article can be found at the following url:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/03/990331063544.htm


# Instant messages, instant profits?  #

Instant messaging is already changing the face of community and
communications -- but can it make money?

By Matthew Broersma, ZDNN

28 March 1999

Instant messaging, introduced in a consumer-friendly form only two
years ago, has become a near-instant phenomenon, gathering tens of
millions of users and spawning what online startups like to call
"communities." Now online businesses of all kinds, from investment
banks to Web portals, are scrambling to find the next step: How to use
instant messaging to make or save money -- or both. 

"People are communicative beasts," said analyst Paul Hagen of
Forrester Research, summing up the technology's appeal. "We have been
limited up until now in how we can communicate. This is just another
avenue for people to group together."

The rest of the article can be found at the following url:

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2232121,00.html

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