Carnival of Space #168

Welcome to the Carnival of  Space #168 and WeirdSciences. If you are visiting the carnival of space for the first time and you have no idea what a carnival of space is, you can try to go to Universe Today page.  Now it’s time to start the carnival of space:-

• Congratulations to Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo for identifying the first known L5 Trojan asteroid of Neptune! This story is not just interesting because it is a first-of-its-kind discovery, but because of the tricky way that the astronomers went about searching for it, and because of the collateral benefits that their search will have for the New Horizons mission.

Emily Lakdawalla at Planetary Blog has explained about the discovery of  Trojan Asteroid[and yeah, Trojan Asteroid itself too] with animation showing how this excelling discovery was made.

• The moon is shrinking like a wrinkled apple..!!

What? You can’t believe..? Dr. Ian O’Neill of Discovery Space has a stunning article delving much into the topic with high resolution images of moon obtained from LRO.

• Interesting fact of the day: examining the fossil record suggests that mass extinctions on Earth occur approximately once every 26 million years (Myr). One possible explanation for this is a companion dwarf  star to the Sun on a 26 Myr orbit.

Emma at We Are All in The Gutter Blog, is seeking out the connections between mass exinction and so called Nemesis, a dwarf star based on a newly published research paper.

• Steve Nerlich at Cheap Astronomy investigates the likelihood of Robonaut 2  refusing to open the pod bay door after it’s deployed on the ISS.
• This is the light speed limit, which makes us too shy whenever we plan for a interstellar human mission. We can’t ignore the laws of special relativity, but we can still change the speed of  light.

Chris Dann of WeirdWarp Blog is elucidating whether it is plausible?

• Wayne Hall at Kentucky Space is telling that the second Kentucky Space-built plug-and-play micro-G research rack will be turned up on ISS  Monday.
• Jupiter’s moon IO is quite fascinating if you are talking about the possibility of exotic life. Jason Perry of Gish Bar Times, is exposing IO’s true colors based on datas obtained from Galileo. A well researched article!
• Our universe is very mysterious. Astronomers are constantly looking into the past. No matter where you look out into space you are seeing things as they were minutes, hours or millions of years ago. Even at 186,000 miles per second, it takes eight minutes for light to reach us from the Sun. It takes four and a half years for light to reach us from the next nearest star, and millions or billions of years to reach us from other galaxies. So astronomers spend a great deal of time looking into the past.

Mike Somonsen of  Simostronomy Blog is focusing over future surveys to solve the mystery of universe. Really, an excellent article..!!

• The extremely large telescope projects (24-42 meter telescopes and the LSST with several new tech advances, is the entry from Brian Wang of Next Big Future.
• The Laser Interferometer space antenna -LISA is a gravity wave observatory that would open an entirely new window in the universe. Using ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by the motion of the densest objects in the universe, LISA will detect the mergers of black holes with masses ranging from 10,000 to 10 million solar masses at cosmological distances, and will make a census of compact binary systems throughout the Milky Way. LISA’s measurements of black hole mass and spin will be important for understanding the significance of mergers in the building of galaxies. LISA also is expected to detect signals from stellarmass compact stellar remnants as they orbit and fall into massive black holes. Detection of such objects would provide exquisitely precise tests of Einstein’s theory of gravity. There may also be waves from unanticipated or exotic sources, such as backgrounds produced during the earliest moments of the universe or cusps associated with cosmic strings.
• Recently Hawking said that we should flee off into space if we want to ensure our survival. Won’t moon be a good choice? Moon has more water than previously thought!

Alen VerseFeld of The Urban Astronomer blog has a entry featuring stunning discoveries made by LRO missions.

A ceiling full of sky, a beautiful historical  ceiling with an astronomical theme by Ian Musgrave and Peta O’Donohue of Astroblogger blog.

• The rules for The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Design Build Fly (AIAA DBF) contest have been posted on the official website.

Daniel Sims of  Space Tweep Society Blog has a article providing more information about that contest. If you are interested in contest, please participate in it.

• Bruce Irving of FlyingSinger blog is talking about Apollo 13 mission.
• If, at first glance, the preceding account appears fanciful, it is because our thinking has not caught up with the engineering advances of the last few years. . .All the engines are either being developed or are programmed to be developed in the next few years. No new or exotic fuels are required. Indeed, our calculations reflect the sober degree of conservatism that should characterize a preliminary study. We believe that the feasibility has been shown. There remains now the intriguing task of doing the job.

David S.F. Portree of  BeyondApollo has a excellent article about Rosen and Schwenk’s moon mission.

Below are the two articles from Stuart Atkinson

• The Big Day! « The Kendal Solar System Scale Model 2
• Modern day science meets science fiction, head-on, as a well-known
  Time Lord visits a museum on Mars in the not-too-distant future, at a
  key moment in history.
• On August 21, 2009, two spacecrafts in orbit around the Moon performed what is called a bistatic experiment. Well, the very schematic diagram below shows what happened:
  

Pradeep Mohandas of Parallel Spirals blog has a article  First anniversary of the Chandrayaan-I – LRO Bistatic Experiment today ,explaining more about that.

• The latest encounter between the Great Red Spot and its lesser rival as pictured by an amateur astronomer in the UK.  The spectacle comes just weeks after astronomers reported that one of the giant gaseous planet’s prominent dark belts had disappeared.

See the article by Paul Sutherland of SKYMANIA blog.

Enjoy!!

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