As always, a lot of things happened in astronomy and planetary sciences this week. Here’s your weekly round-up of stories from my subsite, and anywhere else that was downright interesting.
It’s my last week as a Space Recruit. My numbers are healthy, but I still haven’t passed that critical 300k boundary for US People to stay on. Here’s my stories from this week. See something you like? Pass it on and share the love!
Dragon Comes Home Bearing the Gift of Scientific Data
Wind Whipping the White Dunes of Argentina
A Robotic Arm in Space Mixes Brawn and Beauty
Science in Game of Thrones: The Good, the Bad, and the Confusing
An Earthgrazer Meteoroid Tracked by a NASA Telescope
Spitzer’s Newest Nebula is a Rorschach Inkblot Test in the Stars
All the Robotic Space Explorers since 1958
Flooding in the Balkans Comes with Landmines
The Simple Joy of 100 Pounds of Magnetic Putty
Reviewing the Science of Godzilla for Plausibility and Imagination
Chatting with ISEE, the 1970s Spacecraft That’s Coming Home
One of the First Palaeontologists Wore a Top Hat on the Beach
The Moon Seen from the Space Station is Beyond Breathtaking
How Big Can An Earthquake Get? In 1960, Chile Found Out
Fossil Poaching and the Black Market in Dinosaur Bones
A Global Portrait Mosaiced from Self Portraits
Mars Gets a New Crater, We Find it Within a Day
The Ring Nebula Stretches Filaments of Gas into the Darkness
Data from the Lunar Orbiter Creates Abstract Moon Art
A Self-Repairing Space Robot on the International Space Station
Radio Signature of the First Camelopardalids Meteor Shower
How Did This Big Ball Of Space Junk Wind Up In Uruguay?
This Flying Saucer Will be Plummeting Through the Skies Over Hawaii
In the Midst of the Cold War, a Pact to Cooperate in Space Was Born
As always, we can’t cover it all, so here’s some stories from around the web:
Canada is just a wee bit obsessed with dinosaurs, including a glow-in-the-dark dino-coin.
New Horizons needs to pick a Kuiper Belt Object to go visit after Pluto.
Run a fossil-finding activity for wee ones with felt and a box of paper scraps.
Venus Express science mission ends; aerobraking experiment beginning
NASA invites social media press to watch a launch in California.
The Camelopardalididn’ts: the meteor shower was underwhelming, but watching a fuel dump is always cool!
We’re hosting the Carnival of Space this week!
Image credit: NASA/Spitzer Space Telescope of Kappa Cassiopeiae (HD 2905) in infrared.