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ISS technical briefing
Mike Suffredini, NASA's program manager for the International Space Station, updates reporters on the technical aspects of implimenting the revised assembly sequence and configuration for the orbiting outpost in this teleconference held March 3.

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New ISS assembly plans
Leaders from the U.S., Russian, European, Japanese and Canadian space agencies hold this press conference at Kennedy Space Center on March 2 following meetings to approve a revised assembly sequence for the International Space Station using 16 space shuttle flights.

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Space shuttle update
A status report on the space shuttle program's efforts to fly the second post-Columbia test flight, including changes to the external fuel tank, is provided in this news conference from Kennedy Space Center on Feb. 28. The participants are Wayne Hale, shuttle program manager, Mike Leinbach, shuttle launch director, and Tim Wilson, external tank tiger team lead.

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To the relief of Iapetus
CASSINI PHOTO RELEASE
Posted: March 6, 2006


Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Download larger image version here

 
Sunlight strikes the terminator (the boundary between day and night) region on Saturn's moon Iapetus at nearly horizontal angles, making visible the vertical relief of many features.

This view is centered on terrain in the southern hemisphere of Iapetus (1,468 kilometers, or 912 miles across). Lit terrain visible here is on the moon's leading hemisphere. In this image, a large, central-peaked crater is notable at the boundary between the dark material in Cassini Regio and the brighter material on the trailing hemisphere.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (800,000 miles) from Iapetus and at a Sun-Iapetus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 67 degrees. Resolution in the original image was 8 kilometers (5 miles) per pixel. The image has been magnified by a factor of two and contrast-enhanced to aid visibility.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.