Sunday, February 2, 2014

Carnival of Space #339

Hi all and welcome aboard the 339th edition of Carnival of Space. We will start this edition by honoring the 17 astronauts who have given their life to the American space program. On January 27 1967 during a training for the first Apollo mission, less than a month before the planned launch, a fire in the crew cabin took the life of  Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger B. Chaffee. The challenger disaster occurred on January 28 1986 just 73 seconds after launch, taking the lives of Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Greg Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe. On February 1 2003 the Columbia disaster at the end of STS-107 mission, and in which Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, Michael P. Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, Laurel Clark and the Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon died.
Dedicate a few moments in memory of these men and women in the official NASA day of  remembrance page.

Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia Astronauts. Credit: NASA


Back again to this week articles. We will start with our closest neighbor, the moon.
Dr. Paul Spudis shares his memories and knowledge as one of the investigators and researchers in Clementine missions. A comprehensive article about the mission can be found in Dr Spudis's blog. A summarized version can be found in Air&Space magazine.

The next item from CosmoQuest shows that even spaceships, orbiters, landers and such like to have some company from time to time. Read about the latest spacecraft imaging  another spacecraft, LRO take a snap of LADEE.

Another useful article from CosmoQuest. What are some great mobile apps for doing and learning astronomy? Here's a list with a link to our recent Hangout on the subject. I already downloaded few of these great apps.

The Synergy principal is true everywhere and also in space - three are better than one. The Urban Astronomer tells us about the Frontier Fields program - an ambitious attempt to combine the power of NASA's three flagship space telescopes (Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer) to peer deeper into the universe than ever before and learn about the structure of the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang.

From Discovery News we learn about vast rivers of Hydrogen flow into galaxies.

What's new on Mars? Meridian Journal discuss two new photographs from Curiosity: Dingo Gap and the ‘Firepit’.

The last three articles are from NextBigFuture: Elon Musk thinks there are five innovations that will change our lives in the decades ahead:

  • The Internet, an astonishing invention by which people can access knowledge from anywhere.
  • The transition to the sustainable production and consumption of energy.
  • The extension of human life to other planets, depending on how rapidly we progress in developing space transport and how we live - if we manage to survive -- by then.
  • Reading and writing genetic code
  • AI - artificial intelligence.
Make yourself some free time and watch the videos of Elon Musk.

The discovery of water on Ceres arise many more plausible places for astrobiology research: Unlocking the solar system by unlocking water in the asteroids.


And back to the moon on a future missions to find exact location of water on the moon during 2018.

That's all for this, thank to all our contributors and readers. As always hosting the CoS is a pleasure.