Bowling Ball Dropped From Airplane Simulates Meteor Impact  

On Feb. 13, a single-engine Cessna flew low over the Utah desert toward the Bonneville Seabase at 80 knots. Pilot Patrick Wiggins checked his altimeter. As planned, he was just 820 feet (250 meters) above the surface. The mission's bombardier, Ann House, readied a 14-pound (6.5-kilogram) bowling ball in her lap and opened the right-side window. This was a test to see if she could safely manage getting the ball out the window. Wiggins is a volunteer "solar system ambassador" for NASA, working to spread good words about astronomy and the space program. But his colleagues -- other amateur astronomers and meteorite hunters with the Salt Lake Astronomical Society -- say he's involved in the current project more

Crew to Study Extreme Climates

An international team of scientists from NASA and other research institutions has embarked on a three-week expedition of discovery that will take them from the lush, dense rain forests of Central America to the frigid isolation of Antarctica. The team's savvy tour guide is an all-weather imaging tool, the Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (AirSAR), developed and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena (CA). Carried aboard a NASA DC-8 Airborne Science laboratory, AirSAR can penetrate clouds and also collect data at night. Its high resolution sensors operate at multiple wavelengths and polarizations.