Carnival of Space 340

The Carnival of Space 340 is up at Dear Astronomer

The Meridiani Journal – About that ‘mystery rock’ on Mars: no it’s not a plant, but…

Universe Today – Super-Earths Could Be More ‘Superhabitable’ Than Planets Like Ours

Nextbigfuture – NASA NIAC project determines a conceptual solution to asteroid impacts.

Use an interceptor which separates into two parts.
The first part is 10 meter ahead and makes a crater.
The nuclear bomb part follows but is 20 times more effective by blowing up in the crater.
The fragmentation would reduce the impact to about 0.1% of non-fragmented asteroid.
Earth would pass through the fragment cloud.

The assembled interceptor rocket(s) needs to be fully assembled and waiting to launch.

Nextbigfuture – Skybox was founded out of the CubeSat community and they are ardent believers in the power of commodity, commercial electronics to change the cost of doing business in space. Traditional satellites capable of taking imagery at better than 1 meter resolution weigh thousands of kilograms, which makes it prohibitively expensive to launch enough of them to capture timely imagery. They have produced similar performance in a box 20x smaller by breaking open the many black boxes that define traditional systems and creating an optimized design using automotive grade electronics.

Nextbigfuture – NASA NIAC conference provides updates on Spiderfab and propellentless photonic thrusters

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