Jeff has been involved in aerospace journalism since the mid 1990s. Prior to joining Aviation Week, Jeff served as managing editor of Launchspace magazine and the International Space Industry Report. He has been the editor and chief of Aviation Week's Aerospace Daily & Defense Report since 2007 and has been a regular contributor to Aviation Week magazine. He received his B.A. from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
Saturn’s bizarre moon Enceladus is a little more mysterious, after the recent Cassini flyby found it to be remarkably like a comet in its internal chemistry. As shown in this heat map, the March flyby also found that the so-called tiger stripes around the south pole are some 200 deg. F warmer than the rest of the moon (although still a frigid -135F). The tiger stripes—essentially fissures in the frozen surface—are the source of the spectacular geysers of water and ice that spew so far into space that they actually feed the nearby E-ring around Saturn.
China’s second unmanned lunar mission, Chang’e 2, will be an orbiter, not a rover as implied earlier by Chinese reports. Planned for launch in 2009-10, it will carry somewhat different instrumentation than Chang’e 1, but will make no attempt to land, according to Ye Peijiam, who helped design the first spacecraft, which is still operating in lunar orbit. The initial Chinese Moon landing attempt will not be made until about 2012 with a rover that could be followed by a sample-return mission as early as 2017. Both vehicles will be powered in part by nuclear generators.
Northrop Grumman has proposed a demonstration to the U.S. Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center in which U.S. military users would be able to tap Israel’s new TecSar/Polaris 1 imaging radar satellite for a period this summer. Under the proposal, U.S. users would submit imagery requests that would then be sent through the Israeli ground station in Tel Aviv.
