Asteroid Will Miss, Not Hit Mars This Month

Bad news for disaster voyeurs: The asteroid that was previously believed to have a decent chance of hitting Mars later this month will almost certainly miss the strike zone after all.
As recently as last month, astronomers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Near Earth Object program (the same folks who are trying to identify space rocks likely to hit us) had said there was at least a 1-in-25 chance of 2007 WD5 smashing into the Martian landscape on Jan. 30.
However, astronomers now have collected more data from four separate observatories, and the updated tracking figures put the chance of impact at just .01 percent, or 1 in 10,000.
Granted, optimists who play the lottery every week might want to keep their eyes trained on the sky. But for the rest of us, that means the true chances of impact are pretty close to nil.
This kind of surging odds, followed by collapsing probability, is typical for such near-miss situations, the JPL researchers say. Every object has a region of uncertainty associated with it, due in part to imprecise measurements. As uncertainty narrows, but a planet (or other impact point) is still within the uncertainty region, the odds of impact climb dramatically.
Finally uncertainty falls to the point where the planet is no longer in the danger zone, and odds collapse. A similar situation happened in early analyses of 99942 Apophis, which was believed in late 2004 to have a 2.9 percent chance of hitting Earth in 2029, but is not now believed to present a danger.
Had the asteroid actually hit the planet, it could have created a crater nearly a kilometer across, and thrown significant dust into the atmosphere. The resulting effects could have helped give scientists new information about conditions on Mars, as well as shed light on what might happen (or might have happened) in the case of a similar collision with Earth.

NASA Sets February 7 As Atlantis’s Launch Date

NASA officials announced that February 7 is the new launch date of the space shuttle Atlantis.
Atlantis, which will carry the European space laboratory Columbus to the International Space Station, had been set for takeoff December 6 but was eventually delayed until indefinitely after several scrapped launches blamed on the failing fuel sensors.
Known as Engine Cut-Off (ECO) sensors, the instruments sit on the bottom of Atlantis' 15-story external tank and serve as liquid hydrogen fuel gauges that ensure a shuttle's three main engines shut down before their hydrogen supply runs dry after liftoff.
Last week, John Shannon, deputy manager for the Space Shuttle Program, said that the launch schedule depends on test results and modifications to a fuel sensor system connector on the external fuel tank Atlantis will use for launch on its STS-122 mission.
Atlantis will carry the European-developed Columbus laboratory and attach it to the International Space Station.
Columbus is about 23 feet long and 15 feet wide, allowing it to hold 10 "racks" of experiments, each approximately the size of a phone booth. Five NASA racks will be added to the laboratory once it is in orbit. Each rack provides independent controls for power and cooling, as well as communication links to earthbound controllers and researchers. These links will allow scientists all over Europe to participate in their own experiments in space from several user centers and, in some cases, even from their own work locations.
The reschedule of Atlantis’s mission will affect also the launch of STS-123. Initially the mission STS-123 on space shuttle Endeavour should deliver the pressurized section of the Kibo (Hope) Japanese Experiment Logistics Module (ELM-PS) was scheduled for February. But now, on NASA website STS123’s launch date is listed as “Under Review”