In Brief:

January 19, 2000
Web posted at: 1:20 p.m. EST (1820 GMT)

(Reuters) -- A satellite orbiting Mars will continue a visual search for signs of the Mars Polar Lander until early February , NASA said Tuesday, one day after the space agency abandoned efforts to make radio contact with the $165 million lander.

Richard Cook, the Mars lander project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said in a statement that the Mars Global Surveyor will continue taking pictures of the landing site near the martian south pole in hopes of spotting the lander or its parachute.

NASA scientists said that attempts to communicate with the lander ended Monday. The $165 million spacecraft disappeared on December 3 as it started its descent to the surface of the red planet. It was to search the barren polar surface for water.

BALTIMORE, Maryland (CNN) -- The planetary dust disk around the star Beta Pictoris is dynamically "ringing like a bell," according to astronomers investigating NASA Hubble Space Telescope images. The "clapper" is the gravitational wallop of a star that passed near Beta Pictoris some 100,000 years ago.

Astronomers associated with the Space Telescope Scientist Institute are continuing their detective work, searching for the intruder star among 186 suspects near Beta Pictoris.

The findings, presented to the American Astronomical Society, show that a close encounter with a neighboring star can severely disrupt the evolution and appearance of thin disks, nurseries of planetary systems. Similar fly-bys of our solar system long ago may have reshuffled the comets that now populate the Oort cloud and Kuiper belt.

Discovered in 1983, the dust disk around Beta Pictoris, long suspected to harbor a planetary system, has puzzled astronomers because it contains more dust grains than comparable systems. Also, the dust spreads over a huge 65-billion-mile-diameter area. Yet one side of the disk is 20 percent longer and thinner than the other side.

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