Volume 6, Number 2     March/April 1998

 Advanced Technologies

Licensing Expands the Use of Solar System Data ata of our solar system are only a key stroke away for space mission planners, navigators, schools, businesses, archaeologists, historians and backyard stargazers with the recently licensed and published Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Ephemeris compact disc through a contract with Willmann-Bell, Inc. The compact disc contains three different JPL planetary and lunar ephemerides (tables of data listing the positions of planets, moons and related celestial bodies). The data provide the coordinates of the Sun, the Moon and the nine planets, within 25 meters of any planet, for any time between February 23, 3000 BC, to May 6, 3000 AD. The JPL Ephemeris is considered the standard. In the early 1960's, JPL assumed the task of navigating U.S. spacecraft to the Moon and planets and initiated a program for developing a highly accurate ephemeris. The program still exists today and continues to be improved as newer and more accurate observational data become available. With the JPL Ephemeris, the amount of user involvement can vary considerably, from gaining simple access to the Internet's "Horizon" system, to finding the direction and phase of the Moon, to using the compact disc to compute radar range and study eclipses. The JPL Ephemeris can be used in schools and businesses. It provides convenient access for the U.S. Department of Defense, weather forecasters, consulting firms and deep space or satellite manufacturers. Historians and archaeologists need the highest accuracy available for the dating of key events (eclipses, planetary alignments, and so on) over the previous 5,000 years, as do those in spacecraft mission planning, spacecraft navigating, telescopic predicting (where to point a telescope/antenna or how long to wait until the radar echo returns) and studies of relativity, gravitation and dynamics. The JPL Ephemeris program has recently been used for several JPL missions, including Galileo, Pathfinder and Cassini. To meet the navigational needs of missions taking spacecraft throughout the solar system, JPL developed highly sophisticated software and voluminous data tables that can predict the position of planets with a great degree of accuracy for any time, past, present or future. One celestial data table in particular, DE200/LE200, has been adopted by most national almanac offices to form the basis of their national ephemerides—in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and Russia. Willmann-Bell worked with JPL's astrophysicist, Dr. Myles Standish. The compact discs are being sold for $24.95 by Willmann-Bell (http://willbell.com) via a contract with JPL. For the more casual user, JPL's interactive web site and telnet service, "Horizons," provides a wide variety of astronomical information (visit the site at http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/). For more information, contact Alice Wessen at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Call (818) 354-4930, Fax: (818) 393-4093, E-mail: Alice.S.Wessen@jpl.nasa.gov Please mention you read about it in Innovation.

The JPL Ephemeris compact disc, commercially available now, accurately lists the Sun, Moon and planets' positions between February 23, 3000 BC, to May 6, 3000 AD. Next Generation Internet Testing Begins isco Systems, Inc., of San Jose, California, has signed a memorandum of understanding with NASA to test and demonstrate Next Generation Internet (NGI) hardware and software that could bring Internet speeds of 100 to 1,000 times faster than today's speeds as early as 2002. The software and hardware research and development is a collaboration between NASA's Ames Research Center and five other federal agencies. Ames is leading NASA's portion of a federal project to develop the NGI. The principal federal agencies involved include the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. "We want to guarantee levels of service that will eliminate slowdowns and network stagnation that users sometimes have to endure now while waiting for Internet images, movies and other services," Christine Falsetti, NGI Project Manager at Ames, said. According to Falsetti, NASA and other federal agencies will conduct research and development that could interconnect "core sites" with high-speed lines. "Technical advances will spin off from NGI, and industry will put improvements into the 'old' Internet to make it work better and faster," Falsetti said. For more information, contact Kenneth Ford at Ames Research Center. Call (650) 604-3786. Please mention you read about it in Innovation.