_                   
                                                         |_|                  
      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  ***                        <)                    

COSPAR

The 32nd COSPAR Scientific Assembly will be held in Nagoya next week. A total of 2500 papers were submitted to the 76 symposia that make up the meeting. Symposium E1.3, "VSOP Results and the Future of Space VLBI", will be held on Friday 17th and the morning of Saturday 18th July. During the Assembly, a series of four interdisciplinary lectures will be given over four successive mornings before the start of the parallel sessions. VSOP Project Scientist, Hirax Hirabayashi, was selected to give one of these lectures. "A Gigantic Radio Telescope for Revealing the Radio Universe" will be presented on Friday morning at 8:30, preceding the E1.3 Symposium. The program for E1.3 can be viewed at /astro/halca/vsop/general/cospar.html.en . Papers presented at the Assembly will appear in Advances in Space Research.

Taking advantage of the international gathering, VSOP International Science Council (VISC) and Inter-Agency Consultative Group (IACG) Panel-3 (Space VLBI) meetings will also be help in Nagoya and, the following week at ISAS, the VSOP Scientific Review Committee will convene.

VSOP STANDARD ACKNOWLEDGMENT

If you are preparing a scientific paper which uses data from the VSOP mission, please include the following text in the Acknowledgments: "We gratefully acknowledge the VSOP Project, which is led by the Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in cooperation with many organizations and radio telescopes around the world."

PLANET-B LAUNCH

On July 3 at 18:12 UT, ISAS launched the Planet-B satellite on the second launch of the M-V rocket (HALCA being the first launch with the M-V). Planet-B, renamed "Nozomi" after its successful launch, is the first Japanese mission to Mars, where its primary goal is to study the Martian atmosphere and its interaction with the solar wind. Nozomi will orbit the Earth for 5.5 months, before using the lunar swing-by technique to start its journey to Mars, where it will arrive in October 1999. Nozomi weighed in at 540 kg at launch, over half of which was fuel. Fourteen grams of the mass budget was taken up by twenty aluminum plates, which bear the handwritten names of over 270,000 people, submitted in response to a nationwide campaign by ISAS. Most VSOG members are among those making the trip to Mars!

 
                Editors: Phil Edwards and Hirax Hirabayashi