spacetoday.net: News briefs: January 10

Posted: Fri, Jan 11, 2002, 1:03 PM ET (1803 GMT)

South Korea is planning its first military satellite for launch in 2005, AFP reported this week. The Koreasat-5 spacecraft will be used for both military and civilian communications purposes. Since South Korea has no domestic launch capability, the spacecraft will likely be launched on an American or other booster.
An American military communications satellite is ready for launch early next week. Milstar 2-F3 satellite is scheduled for launch on the afternoon of Tuesday, January 15, on a Titan 4B booster from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Barring delays or an earlier unscheduled launch, the launch will be the first of 2002 worldwide.
Johns Hopkins University astronomers announced Thursday that they have determined the "color of the universe": a shade of bluish green. They found this color by analyzing spectra from over 200,000 galaxies surveyed by an Australian research effort. The color would be what one would see if all the light from those galaxies were combined into a single source. This universal color will change over time, as stars populations change: it was bluer early in the universe's history, because of the dominance of short-lived but bright blue giant stars, and will turn redder over time as longer-lived red dwarfs dominate.