_                   
                                                         |_|                  
      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  ***                        <)                    

HALCA STATUS

HALCA celebrated its fourth birthday, on February 12th, by maneuvering from an AO4 General Observing Time observation to a VSOP Survey Program source. For the last year, all HALCA maneuver's have taken place during Kagoshima Space Center tracking passes so that the rotation rates of the three function- ing reaction wheels can be closely monitored. However, having reached the grand age of four (perhaps one satellite year is equivalent to 20 human years?) it was decided HALCA was old enough to look after itself, and so from last week maneuvers have been undertaken outside KSC passes. HALCA has generally been in good health over the last 12 months, with no down-time due to on-board problems. And with NASA confirming its intention to continue funding US mission elements until February 2002, we look forward to another trouble-free year of VSOP observing.

AO5

Thanks to all those who submitted proposals in response to the fifth Announcement of Opportunity. The proposals are now in the hands of the Science Review Committee, and proposers will be notified next month on the outcome of the review. The deadline for AO6 proposals will be Friday 1st June.

RECENT PUBLICATION: MEETING OF THEORY AND SPACE VLBI OBSERVATIONS

As Space VLBI missions like VSOP and its successors zoom in closer and closer to the central black hole engine that powers the jets, another international collaboration involving Japanese astrophysicists and VSOP scientists is working the problem from the other end --- the theory of how jets form and propagate from accretion disks around black holes. The cover article of the January 5 issue of Science, by D. Meier, S. Koide, and Y. Uchida, describes computer simulations of how magnetohydrodynamic processes near rotating and non-rotating black holes can turn a disk-shaped inflow of plasma into a high- speed collimated, sometimes helical, outflow. The most important unresolved question is: do jets form and collimate efficiently very near the black hole? Or do they develop slowly over many hundreds of Schwarzschild radii, emerging initially as a broad wind from the black hole system and only collimating after prolonged squeezing by the jet internal magnetic field and interstellar medium pressure? Very high resolution observations at 43 GHz by advanced Space VLBI missions such as VSOP2 will be able to image the jet formation region of several active galactic nuclei and help answer this question.

TWO SAD ACCIDENTS

The US Navy submarine Greeneville, astonishingly steered by civilians, had a careless exercise and hit the Japanese training ship Ehime Maru near Honolulu and nine Japanese including students are still missing. It is reported that no rescue was tried from the submarine side. In the recent case of a man falling from the platform onto the train tracks in Tokyo, two men (one Korean, one Japanese) jumped down to try and rescue him, only for all three to be hit by a train and killed.

                Editors: Phil Edwards and Hirax Hirabayashi