Carnival of Space #67: Planets, Rockets, Books and Olympic Torches

Welcome to episode 67 of the Carnival of Space! I'm delighted to have a chance to host this roundup of interesting new blog posts on space and astronomy for the first time, and there's a lot to write about.

This blog, if you haven't visited before, is focused on the work of college students who are involved in astronomy and/or space exploration. The collection of postings described here don't relate directly to students, but they should be of interest to anybody, students included, who is fascinated by the stars and planets and by humanity's efforts to move out toward them. Welcome aboard!

For starters, there are a lot of interesting posts this week on the past, present and future of the human space program.

There's a fascinating bit of space history on David Portree's Altair VI blog, recalling the thoughts of a top space engineer during the heady days of the Apollo program in the 1960s. It casts an interesting light on what could have, should have happened after the first moon landings, and the squandered opportunities that could have been carried forward with minimal extra investment.

Bringing us up the present and near future, Political Action for Space takes a look at Congressional candidate Pete Olson's views about the space program's future and the retirement of the space shuttle, and encourages everyone to grill their own local representatives on their views.  Next Big Future looks at one of the specific issues that needs to be faced as we move toward having people go farther and spend more time in space: how to deal with radiation problems. And 21st Century Waves looks at the future of our space program and lunar exploration plans in terms of the economic impact of exploration, and has some interesting thoughts on Mike Griffin and NASA's plans.

Moving from the big picture to a close look at details of space travel, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel takes a close look at how liquids behave in space, complete with some intetresting video clips, on Starts With a Bang.

There's also a lot of postings this week on the latest in planetary news. Cassini recently made an amazingly close pass of Saturn's moon Enceladus and returned some lovely and enigmatic images. There's a nice description of the technical challenge of such a close flyby on Catholic Sensibility, and a collection of some of the puzzling pictures on Meridiani Journal. And Emily Lakdawalla does her usual thorough job of analyzing the pictures one by one on her Planetary Society Weblog, always a must-see blog for all news planetary.

Meanwhile, the summer's glut of new findings from Mars continues. In Cumbrian Sky, Stuart Atkinson has some nice reflections on Phoenix's exploration there, and how it's going in a different direction that the Mars rovers but nevertheless exciting. Dave Mosher talks about the new perchlorate discovery in his Space Disco. And then there's the discovery of clay minerals, which raises questions about the possibility of past life there, mentioned in a post on Meridiani Journal.

Some thoughts on a different way of looking at the debate over the definition of a planet, focusing on the time parameter instead of on current status, is on the Lounge of the Lab Lemming. And a nice recap of the history of the century-ago impact over Tunguska, Siberia is on A Mars Odyssey.

Moving farther out into the cosmos, a couple of posts this week look at a newly-discovered celestial oddity called Hanny's Voorwerp. A Babe in the Universe describes how the strange galactic object was discovered by a schoolteacher as part of a massive online search of new sky images. And Centauri Dreams takes this odd object as a starting point for looking at some of the possible implications for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. And Chris Lintott's Universe looks at the way this strange discovery has been covered in the popular press.

For those who would rather actually look at the sky than sit and ponder about it, some offerings include a guidebook to the constellation Saggitarius and its many denizens, on Visual Astronomy. And moving in from the gigantic to the infinitesimal, Ian O'Neill muses on the Higgs Boson and what is going to be found at the new Large Hadron Collider in his AstroEngine blog.

There's some really fun summer reading, for kids on up to adults, in  Out of the Cradle, which has a wonderful roundup of books about women and girls involved in space travel and astronomy. It's a great collection to inspire girls to realize that space really is not just an interest for boys, and for women who've already figured that out and just want some fun reading material.

I suppose you thought that this week's wall-to-wall news coverage of the Beijing Olympics is one area that really has nothing to do with our topics of space and astronomy, right? Wrong! Two different posts this week make the connection. CollectSpace has a description of the whole bunch of astronauts, cosmonauts and taikonauts who took part in the Olympic torch relay. And Kentucky Space's Jeff Manber reflects at length on the commentary about the Chinese space program in the Olympic coverage, and other thoughts about that whole program. Who knew?

Finally, some interesting philosophical musings on humanity's destiny and the meaning of life, and how our ambitions in exploring the planets fit into these larger themes, triggered by the reading of a couple of science fiction novels, in this post on Music of the Spheres.

(Photos: Top, Apollo 11 image from the moon; Middle, Enceladus image, courtesy of NASA; Bottom, Hanny's Voorwerp, from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.)

Comments

[Nancy Houser]

Thank you for the nice write-up, David. Your Carnival of Space #67 looks wonderful and has lots of excellent information for everyone.

[Stu]

Great Carnival, David! Thanks for including my Phoenix article!

(BTW, it's 'Atkinson' not 'Atkins' :-) )

[gaetano marano]

hi David
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[Emily]

Great Carnival, David!

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