27 March 2008

Carnival of Space #47

Posted by Ryan Anderson

Welcome to the Martian Chronicles, a blog written by three graduate students at Cornell University who are involved in exploring Mars! This blog is where we share our experiences and excitement about the red planet and space exploration in general. Our focus is Mars, but if something else catches our attention, it will probably show up here too. To learn more about us, check the Authors page. To learn more about Mars and to see our recent posts (including posts about the recent MER budget scare), check the main page.

We are very pleased to be the hosts of the 47th Carnival of Space! It’s been a hectic week on Mars, but space bloggers have kept on blogging through all the drama, and we have some great entries to share.

I’ll begin here at the Martian Chronicles with Melissa’s latest post in which she shares a glimpse of the science that was almost lost in the Rover budget scare, and has an awesome graphic to go with it.

Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog has a neat animation of the Spirit rover scuttling around home plate, as seen from space. She also links to, if I may say so myself, a really excellent blog about Mars.

Stuart Atkinson at Cumbrian Sky reflects on 30 years of looking at Mars and how it has transformed from a blurry orange globe to a real place, where we can count individual boulders, look at pictures from the surface that are reminiscent of Earth, and imagine ourselves walking there.

Brian Wang at Next Big Future discusses the Fermi paradox (if the universe is so big and old, why haven’t we been visited by aliens?) and takes us on a pictorial tour of the oceans of our solar system.

Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams also has water on the brain and muses about the possible ocean inside Titan and how to define a habitable zone.

Darnell Clayton at Colonyworlds is more concerned about how we’re going to create our own, portable habitable zones in space. He gives us the low-down on inflatable space stations and how they could be spun to simulate gravity.

Speaking of space stations, Amanda Bauer at Astropixie tells about this week’s triple flyby, and explains why we don’t see the ISS more often.

Of course, some people don’t worry so much about carrying large cargo into space and would rather just have a sweet ride. Those people will be interested in Clark Lindsey’s posts at HobbySpace. He shares loads of links about the XCOR Lynx project: a shiny new suborbital spaceship!

Ethan Siegel at Starts With a Bang writes about nothing less than the brightest thing ever seen, as does L. Riofrio at A Babe in the Universe in the post Blast From the Past.

Speaking of things that happened a log time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Ed Minchau at SpaceFeeds provides us with a space video in three parts. It’s about some whiny kid with a glow in the dark sword and a tall guy who dresses in black and has asthma. There’s also a space station that looks like Mimas, and Harrison Ford gets stuck in a trash compactor. All in all a quality film.

To get a better view of what’s happening that far away, you need a good telescope. Bruce Irving at Music of the Spheres tells about the James Webb Space Telescope and how hard it is to do origami with a telescope mirror.

Back here in our own galaxy, Tyler Nordgren has a great article about watching the whole Milky Way galaxy rise in the dark skies over Big Bend National Park in his “Stars Above, Earth Below” blog at the Planetary Society.

Ian O’Neill at AstroEngine.com will blow your mind with the sheer number of Cool Science Things that he managed to tie together into one post: How to Build a Laser with a Black Hole.

And finally, Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy shows off his shiny new asteroid. Of course technically, as an asteroid, it is quite old and has quite a low albedo.