Carnival of Space #337

Welcome to the Carnival of Space #337!

Every week, a different blogger hosts articles submitted by other ‘carnival’ members:

“The Carnival is a weekly round-up of space stories from around the internet. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you too can join the Carnival of Space. Email carnivalofspace at gmail dot com to host, share a story you wrote, and to get to know other space bloggers.”
~Brie Allen | Tranquility Base

For the coming week, check back periodically as we add articles from bloggers participating in the Carnival of Space #337 until the CoS #338 publication date.  Click on the links to read the full articles.

Learn about the other Carnivals on the ES CoS page.

This week’s Carnival…

Destellos desde Vega: Despertar tras la noche lunar
Fran Sevilla | Vega 0.0

Yutu rover has waked up after two weeks of inactivity. New images are sent from the moon surface. This article is written in Spanish.

HTE Visits the Marshall Public Library (IL)
Nancy Claypool | Here. There. Everywhere.

December 2013: We had a really nice response and gave tours to several school classes (entire grades!) and tonight a 4-H Club. Everyone who tours it was very impressed. Equally impressive are our local “tour guides”. They really added a lot to the exhibit! It’s been exciting to see people come to the library for this exhibit, since we normally do things more along the lines of…

What is this mystery rock that ‘appeared’ near the Opportunity rover on Mars?
Paul Scott Anderson | The Meridiani Journal

There is another little Martian mystery that has people talking this week – the odd appearance a few days ago of a small rock a few feet away from the Opportunity rover, it was announced yesterday during the Opportunity: 10 Years on Mars event at NASA…

Extend ISS to 2050 as Stepping Stone to Future Deep Space Voyages – Orbital VP/Astronaut tells Universe Today
Ken Kremer | Universe Today

WALLOPS ISLAND, VA – Just days ago, the Obama Administration approved NASA’s request to extend the lifetime of the International Space Station (ISS) to at least 2024. Ultimately this will serve as a stepping stone to exciting deep space voyages in future…

Nearby Brown Dwarf System May Harbor Closest Exoplanet to Earth
Shannon Hall | Universe Today

In 2012 astronomers announced the discovery of an Earth-like planet circling our nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri B, a mere 4.3 light-years away. But with such a discovery comes heated debate. A second group of astronomers was unable to confirm the exoplanet’s presence, keeping the argument unresolved to…

John Dobson, Inventor of the Popular Dobsonian Telescope, Dead at 98
Bob King | Universe Today

The cosmos lost a good soul Wednesday. John Dobson, famous as the creator of the simple, low-cost Dobsonian telescope, passed away on Jan. 15, 2014. His obituary appeared on the website of the Sidewalk Astronomers…

Quark Matter in the Asteroids of our Solar System: Evidence for a Game-Changing Space Resource
Brian Wang | Next Big Future

Small Very Fast Rotating (VFR) asteroids (bodies with rotation periods as short as 25 sec) are consistent with a population of strange asteroids [with quark dark matter] with core masses of order 10^10 – 10^11 kg.. Those would then be sources of millions of tons of antimatter for future…

Fast Electric Space Sail Uranus Entry Probe Mission
Brian Wang | Next Big Future

The solar wind electric sail is a novel propellantless space propulsion concept. According to numerical estimates, the electric sail can produce a large total impulse per propulsion system mass. Here we consider using a 0.5 Newton electric sail for boosting a 550 kg spacecraft to Uranus in less than 6 years. The spacecraft is a stack consisting of the electric sail module which is jettisoned at Saturn distance, a carrier module and a probe for Uranus atmospheric entry. The carrier module has a chemical propulsion ability for orbital corrections and it uses its antenna for picking up the probe’s…

Finding Patterns
Kim Arcand & Megan Watzke | Chandra A-Ray Observatory

One of our favorite games to play with our kids is trying to find recognizable objects in clouds as they pass by on a sunny day. One cloud might look like an elephant, the next, a pirate ship.

The phenomenon where our brains find seemingly significant patterns in images or sounds has an actual name: pareidolia. For example, we might think we see a human on the face of the Moon, a lizard on Mars (see below) or recognize words when we play a recording in reverse. Even Leonardo da Vinci – a man of many talents – suggested that artists could use pareidolia as a creative exercise for…

Deep Impact: a Retrospective
Allen Versfeld | Urban Astronomer

Deep Impact at the moment of collision with Comet Tempel 1Back in January 2005, NASA launched the Deep Impact spacecraft on a trajectory to study comets. Four months later, on July 4, as it approached comet Tempel 1, it fired a 370kg impactor from a distance of 864,000 km – more than that double the distance from the Earth to the Moon. 24 hours later, the impactor collided with the comet at a speed of over 10 kilometers per second, carving out a crater with the force of 4.8 tons of TNT. As cometary material blasted into vapour, the instruments on board Deep Impact recorded and analysed the resulting flash of light to determine exactly what comet Tempel 1 is made from. This done, Deep Impact’s mission was complete. But since the spacecraft was still in good working order and had plenty remaining fuel, NASA decided to…

Looking at (and through) the Pleiades
Brian Ventrudo | One Minute Astronomer

The Pleiades, a small dipper-shaped cluster of young stars in the constellation Taurus, is one of a handful of celestial objects, along with the Moon and Saturn, that can turn casual observers into lifelong stargazers. A network of new and mostly icy-blue stars wrapped in faint nebulosity set against a sparse background of black sky, the cluster is visually stunning in binoculars or a wide-field telescope. Even for those who care little for stars, the Pleiades rivet the attention like…

First Contact
Steve Shurtleff | Photos to Space

When we teach children about space some wonderful and amazing things happen. But who does the learning, the kids or the teachers? Steve Shurtleff at Photos To Space finds out when he makes First Contact.

Watch for Carnival of Space #338, next week!