_                   
                                                         |_|                  
      V   V   SSSS   OOO   PPPP                 \__      |_|      __/         
      V   V  S      O   O  P   P                   --____/ \____--            
      V   V   SSS   O   O  PPPP                    _ _ _ --- _ _ _            
       V V       S  O   O  P                      |_|_|_|  @|_|_|_|           
        V    SSSS    OOO   P                             o-o                  
                                                          /                   
      ***  N    E    W    S  ***                        <)                    

HALCA STATUS

Today marks the sixth anniversary of HALCA's launch from the Kagoshima Space Centre! HALCA continues to be monitored during daily tracking passes. Plans for recovery are being finalized, and will start by using the Reaction Wheels to regain attitude control of the spacecraft. (Last issue noted that HALCA is in a similar situation to that "between December 1999 and February 2002", which should of course have been February 2000!)

NRAO "LAUNCH LUNCH"

The NRAO Space VLBI Project enjoyed a "VSOP Launch Lunch" on February 4th, at the world-famous El Sombrero restaurant in Socorro. Eighteen recent and less-recent project members were able to attend. The party was held to commemorate the VLBA's contributions to the VSOP mission, in observations, correlation, and analysis, and to celebrate the sixth anniversary of HALCA's launch. We did deviate slightly from the exact anniversary so as to match a VLBA maintenance day and thus maximize the opportunities for operational staff to attend. Not entirely coincidentally, we also released our very last VSOP correlation later that afternoon, for w421A5. We had agreed to accept a reassignment of this 14-station run from Mitaka due to a mismatch between dual-polar recordings and the tape-translation system.

Our celebration was dampened somewhat by occurring immediately after a nationwide memorial for the astronauts who perished in the space shuttle Columbia a few days earlier. Indeed, the AOC had a special connection to Columbia: the NRAO flag in our lobby had been carried into space on Columbia less than a year ago by astronaut John Grunsfeld, a former VLA user, on a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope.

We reminisced about the many years we spent developing the VLBA's Space VLBI capabilities -- including the "Kitt Peak in Space" test, the never-used wide-fringe-rate filter, the strike we called in response to delayed funding, and the "qualification" of ground radio telescopes -- and the many more years of successful participation in the VSOP mission. We received greetings at our commemoration from the VSOP team at ISAS, and wished them well in return with their continued mission operations. We had just learned, in VSOP News No. 143, that Halca had experienced another loss of attitude control, and hope for a quick recovery. - - - J.D. Romney

MUSICAL NOTES

Richard Schilizzi, the recently appointed Director of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) is visiting Japan this week and will give a seminar at NAOJ, Mitaka, on Friday. The first Director of the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe, we note that Richard, an opera buff, has moved from JIVE (a type of swing music) to SKA (a type of reggae music), and wonder whether he may next become associated with the Radio Observatory of Central Kenya...

                Editors: Phil Edwards and Hirax Hirabayashi