The 105th Carnival of Space

May 31, 2009

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to the 105th Carnival of Space on Discovery Space!

Thank you Fraser for letting me host this fantastic event once again! Also, a huge thank you to David Gamey over at Mang's Bat Page for the outstanding 104th Carnival he hosted last week.

I'm Ian O'Neill, and you may be forgiven in being a little confused. Isn't Space Disco Dave Mosher's gig?

Actually, it used to be, but Astroengine.com carried out an aggressive take-over to overthrow Disco Dave, and won! I now have two blogs. Plus I'll be continuing my writing for the Universe Today when I'm not pillaging other sites. You can never have enough space blogs in my opinion...

Only kidding, Dave has actually moved on to a brand new gig, managing web development for an exciting non-profit foundation. You can follow Dave over at his personal site, DaveMosher.com, where he'll be updating his progress. So I'm hoping to continue in Dave's excellent footsteps producing exciting space content for Discovery Space.

One of the greatest perks of this new job is that I get to work with such a talented and driven team of space writers, so using my Carnival of Space host bias rights, here's the 105th Carnival of Space, starting with my ace team of Discovery Space bloggers: Irene, Jennifer, and Ray.

Let the Carnival commence!

Ray Villard at Cosmic Ray addresses a situation we've all been wondering about: What is NASA playing at with all these mission naming competitions? I think Ray sums the whole sorry situation up really well when he says, "Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Curiosity has landed." Doesn't sound particularly exciting, does it.

Jennifer Ouellette at Twisted Physics reports on some solar action earlier this month. As we all know, the sun has been having a snooze for longer than predicted, but a small coronal mass ejection was released regardless. What's that all about? Fortunately, the twin spacecraft from the Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) mission tracked the CME, helping us understand what's really going on with our nearest star.

Irene Klotz at Free Space has some exciting news from the International Space Station: astronauts can safely drink their urine! Ewww. Oh, it's okay, the urine has been recycled. The end product is actually purified water from the revolutionary waste water recycler. Looking at the pictures of happy astronauts drinking from water bags in microgravity, it looks like that stuff tastes good! Go on then, I'll take a sip.

For my entry to the Carnival, I discuss the delays facing Elon Musk's space start-up company SpaceX. Like with most things in life, we get hindered by red tape and legalities. It would appear the much anticipated test launch of the awesome Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral won't happen this summer due to Air Force safety regulation paperwork. Oh well, I think we can wait until fall for the space commercialization revolution...

Now that you've met my team, here's all the entries, in no particular order, but all are equally awesome (I should know, I read them all - an afternoon very well-spent if you ask me):

Dr. Bruce Cordell at 21st Century Waves ponders the exciting possibilities for the future manned exploration of Mercury. Mercury? Are you sure? Surely you mean Mars don't you, Bruce? Actually, it turns out that Mercury is "scientific jackpot" but in need of better public relations. Who would have thought it?

Stuart the 'Rover Hugger' at Cumbrian Sky gives a heart-warming account about his love for our robotic space explorers. I agree, they are awesome. It's also amazing to think these robots open up their own Twitter accounts to tell us how cold it is on Mars. Now that is progress!

My buddy Ethan Siegel over at Starts With A Bang! tackles the UFO-Tunguska-comet-collision hilarity with great finesse. In the post, Ethan quotes the late great Carl Sagan, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." In this case, I don't think a few charred rocks and an eccentric Russian guy called Yuri is particularly "extraordinary".

Now it's time for a mini-Russian lesson with Bruce Irving at Music of the Spheres. "Фобос-грунт" means "Phobos-Grunt" (or Phobos-soil), which can only mean this entry is about the planned Mars moon mission in 2009. I find this mission fascinating; why would you travel all the way to Mars just to land on one of its small moons? Actually there's a very good reason...

Louise Riofrio, our Babe in the Universe, gives us an account of the early Apollo missions and why Charles Schulz's Snoopy became a mission mascot. It turns out that Snoopy never landed on the Moon (Apollo 10 was the pinnacle of his space mascot career), but there's a new dog on the block, ready to continue where Snoopy left off...

Over at the Chandra Blog, the Virtual Astronomy Metadata Project (VAMP - best acronym I've seen all week) is described. It turns out that after astronomical images from observatories such as Chandra, Hubble and Spitzer are prepared for the public online domain, information identifying the image is stripped from the meta data. This leaves just an image with nothing else. Not very useful is it. The answer? VAMP...

Brian Wang at Next Big Future investigates a novel system called the Rotating Space Elevator (RSE). What is it? I'm baffled by the details, but it sure sounds like a nifty idea. Moving under the influence of only inertia and gravity, the RSE can carry loads upwards. Somehow. There's some loops and oscillations involved somewhere. I think. I'll hand the details over to Brian before I start sounding silly... oh, too late.

Paul Gilster over at Centauri Dreams talks about growing interstellar probes. Travelling from one star to the next is no easy task, but could the power of DNA nanotechnology help out? If our probe could travel to a neighboring star and build the equipment it needs for its mission from local materials, the probe can be designed to be much lighter, therefore getting to its destination far quicker. Sounds like a simple plan to me.

Interstellar travel is also on the mind of my friend and co-author, Greg Fish at World of Wierd Things. He discusses the pros and cons of warp drives. Can travelling faster than the speed of light really be done? Or will it remain as sci-fi fodder? Actually, if we are being realistic, warp drives will be an absolute necessity. "Without it, exploring even 1% of the galaxy would take eons," says Greg. It's fortunate we now have physicists working out how this could be achieved...

Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy takes on sneaky creationist disinformation. Not content with making very public attacks against biological evolution, creationists are now targeting astronomy with their horribly twisted views about how the Universe works. Fortunately, we have Phil to give creationism the smack-down it so rightly deserves. Enjoy!

Speaking of Creationist craziness, The Space Writer Carolyn Collins Petersen asks a very important question, "Would you Ask Your Banker to Do Your Brain Surgery?" When you think about it, that is basically what is going on at the moment. "Creationist Loonies" (or CLoonies) are trying to repackage their smattering of science understanding and redressing their faith as scientific fact. That isn't the way science works, but it looks like some people didn't get the memo...

Steve Nerlich at Cheap Astronomy provides the Carnival with the only podcast, so start up your audio player and play Part 2 of the short history of the Big Bang and evolution of the cosmos. This episode is called "When the Dust Settled". It's a fascinating journey after the first few seconds of the birth of our Universe 13.73 billion years ago. If you want a high quality rundown about the real evolution of our cosmos (and not that pretend stuff Phil and Carolyn were discussing in the previous entries), this is a great place to start.

Mike Simonsen at Simostronomy received a curious email titled "DOUBLE QUASAR SDSS J153636.22+044127.0". What does that mean? Two quasars for the price of one? To variable star hunter Mike, it means quite a lot. After Mike talks through what a quasar actually is and how this "double quasar" was discovered, we can begin to understand what the cryptic "SDSS J153636.22+044127.0" really means...

Rounding off the Carnival with a Martian flavor, it's time to fly over to Paul Scott Anderson's article on The Meridiani Journal. Paul gives a really nice round-up of our current understanding about the presence of water on the Mars surface. There's ice, vapor and thanks to Phoenix, there might even be liquid water brines. All we need to look for now are frogs and tadpoles and the search for life will be complete!

Goodbye for another week!

I hope you enjoyed this week's Carnival of Space, I sure had fun writing it. If you don't see your entry, never fear, drop me a comment below and I'll try to get it online ASAP.

Until next time, goodbye and happy space blogging!