OrbitalHub

Credits: Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/S. Stolovy (Spitzer Science Center/Caltech)

Carnival of Space #131 is hosted at Starry Critters.

This week you can read about the origin of bulgy galactic middles, how the remaining space shuttle missions will finish building the ISS, black hole powered space travel, variable stars, the Allen Hills Meteorite, and much more.

Credits: ESA

Carnival of Space #130 is hosted by Megan Watzke & Kim Arcand at Chandra Blog.

The blog posts cover topics like the future wonders of the Solar System, the Kepler mission, the Super Guppy aircraft, Herschel Space Observatory, chemistry of stars, the VASMIR spacecraft, and much more.

Credits: The British Interplanetary Society

Carnival of Space #129 is hosted by Tracy Zollinger Turner at Tiny Mantras.

The blog posts cover topics like the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Rosetta spacecraft, Olympus Mons, Neptune’s dark spot, water ice found by LCROSS, the Leonid meteor shower, Project Icarus, microsatellites designed and built at the University of Kentucky, and much more.

Credits: ESA OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

On November 13, 2009, at 8:45 AM CET, ESA’s comet chaser Rosetta swung by Earth. Rosetta passed just South of the Indonesian island of Java at an altitude of 2481 km. Its speed relative to Earth was 13.34 km/s. The maneuver provided a boost of 3.6 km/s.

Rosetta’s OSIRIS (Optical Spectroscopic and Infrared Remote Imaging System) narrow-angle camera was used to image the Earth once every hour for 24 hours.

Rosetta will meet asteroid 21 Lutetia in 2010. The final destination of Rosetta is the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which the spacecraft will reach in 2014. Rosetta will deploy a lander to the surface of the comet, and will also orbit the nucleus of the comet and fly alongside as it heads towards the inner Solar System. Most of the time, the probe will hibernate with the majority of its systems shut down in order to optimize the power consumption.

You can find more information about Rosetta’s swing by on ESA’s Rosetta Blog website.

Credits: General Dynamics C4 Systems

Carnival of Space #128 is hosted by Peter Lake at AARTScope Blog.

The blog posts cover topics like a race in Spain to build a space hotel, the Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge competition, commercial space satellites, various forms of space travel being researched and proposed, NASA’s Fermi Gamma ray telescope, the Sun’s gravitational lens, naming of the Martian meteorites found by the Opportunity and Spirit rovers, the Space Station Crew Return Vehicle, and much more.

Credits: NASA/Sandra Joseph and Kevin O’Connel

Carnival of Space #127 is hosted by Brian Wang at Next Big Future.

The blog posts cover topics like the Ares I-X flight, NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC), the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is currently orbiting the Moon just 50 km off the surface, the HiRISE view of Phoenix in the Martian spring, armadas of robots exploring distant planets, the Chandra Source Catalog, which was loaded onto Google Sky, the Skylon Spaceplane, EMDrive propulsion system, and much more.