spacetoday.net: News briefs: December 20

Posted: Fri, Dec 21, 2001, 10:30 AM ET (1530 GMT)

The NASA Advisory Council announced Thursday that it concurred with the conclusions and recommendations about the International Space Station program made last month by an independent panel. The Council released a set of goals designed to get the ISS program on track; those goals were closely aligned with the independent panel's recommendations. The Council's report was criticized by one member of Congress, Rep. Ralph Hall (D-TX), who said that the report did nothing to address issues such as the need to increase the station's crew size.
Astronomers who published a paper earlier this year claiming to have found planet-sized bodies in interstellar space in a globular cluster have retracted their discovery, Wired News reported. In a follow-up paper to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers said that the bodies they thought they had discovered in the cluster M22 through a technique known as gravitational microlensing were in fact cosmic-ray hits on the telescope that coincided with a star.
The European Space Agency has named José Achache as its new director of earth observation, the agency announced Thursday. Achache, a geophysicist most recently employed as deputy director-general for science at the French space agency CNES, will begin his four-year term early next year.