On 12 February, the NEAR spacecraft broke out of its orbit 5 km above the asteroid Eros to head on a collision course for the asteroid's surface. Throughout NEAR's descent, the spacecraft's Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI) took pictures of the approaching surface. The online movie MSI Final Descent captures this final phase of the NEAR mission.
Because of street lights and other forms of artificial light, about one fifth of Earth's population can't see the Milky Way unaided. The University of Padua's Pierantonio Cinzano and his collaborators reached this sobering conclusion by calculating, for any spot on the globe, the overhead brightness of the night sky due to artificial light. Their calculations, which are based on remotely sensed data, are available in the form of the online atlas The Night Sky in the World.
From the US Department of Energy's Computer Incident Advisory Center comes Hoaxbusters, a Web site devoted to combating the pernicious problem of hoax e-mail. Among the actual e-mails documented on the site is the chilling but false "Flesh Eating Bananas Hoax," which you can find under the Urban Myths category.
To suggest topics or sites for Web Watch, please e-mail us at ptwww@aip.org.
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