Weekly Space Hangout – Oct 2, 2015: Water on Mars, Blood Moon Eclipses, and More Pluto!

Host: Fraser Cain (@fcain)

Guests:

Morgan Rehnberg (cosmicchatter.org / @MorganRehnberg )
Pamela Gay (cosmoquest.org / @cosmoquestx / @starstryder)
Kimberly Cartier (@AstroKimCartier )
Brian Koberlein (@briankoberlein / briankoberlein.com)
Alessondra Springmann (@sondy)

This Week’s Stories:

Water on Martian surface, Curiosity banned

India launches nation’s first space observatory into orbit

New Charon pictures!

Magnetic fields of Earth-like planets around small stars

Flying to the edge of space without an engine is an idea so crazy it might just work?

Lawrence M. Krauss on Twitter: “Rumor of a gravitational wave detection at LIGO detector. Amazing if true. Will post details if it survives.”

How do atoms alter during a supernova explosion?

China opens global contest to name dark matter probe

Top Quark: New precise particle measurement improves subatomic tool for probing mysteries of universe?

NASA cuts ties with organization aimed at protecting Earth from asteroids

Dawn Team Shares New Maps and Insights about Ceres

Asteroids Found To Be the Moon’s Main ‘Water Supply’?

Mechanism of explosions and plasma jets associated with sunspot formation revealed

EM-1: MAF gearing up for SLS Core Stage production

NASA awards Boeing a five-year contract extension for ISS support

European Venture Seeks To Raise $1 Million for Lunar Mission

NASA selects five potential planetary missions for development

Pluto’s Big Moon Charon Reveals a Colorful and Violent History

NASA’s rover banned from examining water on Mars

Moon Express Buys Rocket Lab Launches for Lunar Missions

NASA’s MSL Curiosity Rover successfully completed drill operations at “Big Sky” on Sol 1118 of its Gale Crater mission.

Physicists from Konstanz University succeed in direct detection of vacuum fluctuations

The golden anniversary of black-hole singularity

New method will enable most accurate neutron measurement yet

10 000th Free Image Published in the ESO Image Archive

We record the Weekly Space Hangout every Friday at 12:00 pm Pacific / 3:00 pm Eastern. You can watch us live on Google+, Universe Today, or the Universe Today YouTube page.

You can join in the discussion between episodes over at our Weekly Space Hangout Crew group in G+, and suggest your ideas for stories we can discuss each week!