Carnival of Space #425

Welcome, come in to the 425th Carnival of Space!  The carnival is a community of space science and astronomy writers and bloggers, who submit their best work each week for your benefit. I’m Susie Murph, part of the team at Universe Today and now, on to this week’s stories!

First off, we head over to Spaceflight Insider to learn about NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and how it is giving us amazing data on how the Earth affects the Moon’s gravity. There are some awesome images of ridges in the Moon’s crust caused by the pull of the Earth.

Next, we visit The Solstice Blog to learn about the unbelievable heroism of Vladimir Komarov, who was the first cosmonaut to go on multiple space missions, and tragically, was the first man to die due to space flight.

Then we head over to Planetaria, for the gift that keeps on giving – the New Horizons mission to Pluto! This week’s amazing images include glaciers, mountains and icy hazes. We look forward to the new discoveries every week!

The Next Big Future brings us the next couple of news stories. First, we have an update on the booming market of Cubesats, and their potential benefits. Then we learn about a new ion drive system, invented in Australia, that is 153% more fuel efficient than NASA’s best. We next learn some details on antimatter triggered fusion bombs, and how they might affect nuclear proliferation. Then, we find out that SpaceX’s Falcon heavy rocket will be capable of sending a Dragon2 capsule to Europa!

Our next stop in the carnival is the Chandra XRay Observatory, where we delve into the mysteries of black holes. First we examine our Milky Way’s own black hole, and study how the passage of a extended dusty object through the accretion disk affects the emissions. Next, we see once again that the object does appear to have caused xray flares in the black hole, leading to the hypothesis that the object may have been a star or pair of stars.

Then we visit Everyday Spacer, to find out even more reasons that we should watch “The Martian,” opening Oct. 2, including how we should all be doing more science activities in everyday life.

Finally, we return to Universe Today to prepare for an amazing ‘Super-Harvest-Blood-Moon Total Lunar Eclipse’ that you won’t want to miss, on Sept. 27. Read here for more about the viewing zones and advice on how to catch this rare, beautiful event!

That’s it for this week’s Carnival! See you all next time!

And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to carnivalofspace@gmail.com, and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, sign up to be a host. Send an email to the above address.