Carnival of Space #393

Welcome, come in to the 393rd 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’ll head over to the NextBigFuture website for the first four stories.

SpaceX successfully launched the DSCOVR satellite and successfully deployed the satellite into it’s parking orbit. The weather was too rough for an attempt to land on the drone target ship, but they practiced a soft vertical landing into the ocean that was only 10 meters away.

In other Elon Musk news, he commented publicly that Tesla Motors could reach $700 billion in market valuation by 2025 with the current rate of growth. Elon Musk is beginning to sound like a genius superhero from a classic science fiction story.

NextBigFuture then focused on the presentation of Young Bae, of the Y.K. Bae Corporation, who discussed Propellant-less Spacecraft. These aircraft conducted some interesting formation-flying and maneuvering with photonic diamond thin disk laser thrusters.

In the final article from Next Big Future this week, they chatted with Robert Hoyt of Tethers Unlimited regarding his Spiderfab construction capabilities and their potential for creating spacefaring vehicles.

From the Chandra X-Ray Observatory site, they show a lovely exploded star that blooms like a flower in the darkness of space.

From the Vega0.0 site, a bright nova has been discovered in the constellation of Scorpio, easily viewable by small telescopes in the early morning hours. Read more here (article is printed in Spanish).

Now over to our friends at BrownSpaceMan.com for 5 Amazing facts about our Sun that you might not know, but should, like what the gravity would be on the surface of the Sun compared to Earth.

Our friend Allen Versfield over at the Urban Astronomer tells us the story of how he found M42 from his backyard, and how we can do it as well!

Then Pamela Hoffman at EverydaySpacer tells us how we can pack our bags and go on some unique, interesting adventures while enjoying the night skies.

Finally, we return to my home site, Universe Today, to hear the amazing explanations from 3 of the Mars One finalists, of why they’d be willing to take a one-way trip to Mars.

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.