Each year I completely forget about Carl Sagan Day and I get reminded by the internet about it. But this year, the reminder is something special: Mad Art Lab’s Ryan Consell has created a crowdsourced reading of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, which is absolutely wonderous and beautiful. Even better, as I’m writing this, I’m watching two russian Astronauts perform a spacewalk on the ISS and the Pale Blue Dot keeps rolling the background. You can’t help but feel really, really small, but in an absolutely wonderful and awe-inspiring way. H/T to Nicole Gugliucci of CosmoQuest, on whose stream I’ve seen the video first!

The International Space Station, currently the only human outpost in space, is going to be as busy as a railway station this week – it has happened before, but at the same time it is highly unusual to have more than six astronauts at the same time there. This is going to happen on Thursday, when a Soyuz spaceship launching in the night before brings up another three crew members, causing a rare overlap between the expeditions. There have already been some preparations as the Soyuz which will carry three astronauts back to earth on Sunday has been moved to another docking port, but the real busyness will only start later this week.

So, who is up there, who is coming back, and most importantly, who is keeping contact not only with Houston and Baikonur, but also with us ground-dwellers via social networks? Unfortunately all of the Russian astronauts are not in the loop (yet?), but almost everbody from the USA, Europe and Japan is.

Coming back to earth on Sunday are Karen Nyberg, Luca Parmitano and Fyodor Yurchikhin. Parmitano has been walking firmly in the footsteps of Chris Hadfield and while there has not been much singing or guitar-slinging this time, the italian ESA astronaut has been keeping in touch with his own blog and on Google+, Facebook and Twitter, where he has been posted amazing photos from space and the station almost daily and written amazing articles. His colleague Karen Nyberg from NASA has limited herself to her Twitter-Account at @AstroKarenN, but she also posts regularly.

Staying until March of 2014 are Mike Hopkins from the USA and the Russians Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazansky. Hopkins is also a regular on Twitter as @AstroIllini and always posts interesting photos and short status updates, but like Karen Nyberg he has no official accounts on either Google+ or Facebook.

The newcomers arriving on Thursday are Richard Mastracchio from the USA, Koichi Wakata from Japan and Mikhail Tyurin from Russia, all seasoned astronauts who have been in space multiple times. Both Mastracchio and Wakata have already been busily tweeting their preparations for their coming launch as @AstroRM and @Astro_Wakata and I’m sure they will continue once they have reached the station.

This unfortunately means that there will be no astronauts in space on Google+ for a while, but with the changeover from expedition 37 to 38 there will still be three active Twitter users in low earth orbit. Many of the coming ISS crew members are also on Twitter and sometimes even on other social networks – most notably italian ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, who is currently writing a logbook about her experiences in preparing for her November 2014 launch on her Google+ account – she’s also on Twitter as @AstroSamantha. Other soon-to-launch astronauts on Twitter are Reid Wiseman (@Astro_Reid) and Alexander Gerst (@Astro_Alex), who are right now also tweeting from the launch preparations in Baikonur.

I am sure I have missed mentioning some of the astronauts in this article, but I have also made my Twitter Astronaut List public if anybody wants to follow just about everyone who is, was and is going to be in space. I may be updating this list semi-frequently, I’m sure I haven’t found all tweeting astronauts yet! With this list, you can follow all the action over the course of the week, but there’s also NASA TV, its Youtube Channel and ReelNASA with great excerpts and summaries.

This time I’m ready and won’t be surprised when the first podcast suddenly pops up! I’ve already noticed some weeks ago that Brian Cox’ and Robin Ince’s brilliant science-comedy radio show The Infinite Monkey Cage is going to return starting November 18th on BBC Radio 4 and, of course, after the broadcast as usual in shape of a podcast. No official word from the BBC as usual, but the news came from the Monkey Cage Twitter account and new episodes are already being recorded right now. And there are now 42 (yes, forty-two!) past episodes on the podcast archive site to download!

I can only highly recommend this show – Brian Cox and Robin ince are utterly funny and their guests are always fantastic. Besides, it’s even educational, despite most shows ending up somewhere completely different than they originally started – but that’s just the fun of it. As usual, major English listening skills and a healthy curiosity about science are required, but it’s actually quite easy to listen to. And, of course, if you like Brian Cox and/or Robin Ince, you’re in for a very special treat :-).

Today, NASA is 55 years old – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration became operational on October 1st, 1958 and back then there were not many other space agencies around. Today, almost every country of the world has one and there have been many groundbreaking achievements by all of them – but NASA has every reason to be proud of itself. For the anniversary, NASA has posted a kind of laundry list of what has been made possible in the last 55 years. It’s not just Apollo, Space Shuttle and the space stations – from the beginning, NASA has always been and always will be about understanding the nature of the universe.

But what does NASA get for its birthday? It gets shut down!

Yes, that’s right – the US government shutdown also affects NASA. If you thought the sequester was bad, this is nearly end-times armageddon: NASA will stop just about everything except the bare necessities. Universe Today and Bad Astronomy have detailed articles about the situation, which is nothing short of unbelievable: 97% of all employees are being furloughed, meaning being sent home without pay. The rest also will have to work without pay to keep the shop running, which means keeping contact with the space station, controlling robotic missions and other essential things. On a more positive note, Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society has said in an article that everything controlled from JPL and APL, which are private companies under NASA contract, will continue, which means that the initial news that the Mars rovers are going to be put in hibernation was false. But all scienctific operations at NASA have ceased and there is danger that future missions, like the coming launch of the MAVEN Mars orbiter, will be severely affected if they, like in this case, miss a launch window or worse.

Also, as of only a couple of hours ago, all the NASA websites have been taken down and redirect to a status page. NASA TV has also ceased broadcasting, and all NASA public outreach and education activity even on social media has stopped completely. Space journalist Amy Shira Teitel has called this an information black hole for space news, and she’s absolutely right – this is taxpayer-funded information, which should be accessible to everybody regardless of funding. Stopping to update the websites is one thing, taking them offline altogether is a whole new dimension – but I can imagine that NASA has done this not out of malice, but to show how essential they really are. The government shutdown could not have come at a worse time for NASA and it shows the utter disregard of a certain political party for everything which has remotely to do with science.

Of course, the government shutdown does not only affect NASA, but an unbelievable amount of people, institutions and services. Zoos, national parks and everything else not in private hands will simply cease to function, hundreds of thousands of people are not getting paid – something which is completely and utterly unbelievable from an European perspective. I think Pamela Gay’s posting on Google+ sums the situation up very well and I can’t possibly add anything more to it except… this is total madness. And that’s about as political as it’ll ever get on my websites.

Okay, if I write something about the LADEE launch, I also have to mention the other launch from NASA Wallops which has just happened today: Orbital Sciences has launched their first demonstration flight of their Cygnus freighter on top of an Antares rocket to the International Space Station!

So why is this so interesting? First, because Orbital Sciences is the only one of two commercial spaceflight companies who were awarded contracts from NASA to supply the ISS in the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program – the other one is of course Space X, who are already regularly flying to the ISS with their own Dragon transporter. Secondly, because it is the very first launch from Wallops to the space station – Space X is launching from Cape Canaveral, but Orbital Sciences has their launchport at Wallops. The first test launch with a dummy payload was in April, but now the “real thing” is on its way to the ISS, opening another cargo route to space. I think the Wallops facility can now really be called a spaceport in every sense!

The last reports are that the Cygnus transporter is fine, the solar panels are out and it’s on the way to the ISS! Orbital Sciences has a page with great photos, NASA’s Flickr album of the launch is also amazing, the launch video has also been posted and I’m sure there will be a lot more photos since the launch should have been almost as perfectly visible as LADEE. No word about any frogs hitching a ride, but there has been talk that the amphibians have been trying to invade the launchport at Wallops! :-)

[Update 29.09.: And today, after some delays caused by a now-fixed software glitch, the Cygnus space freighter today has been successfully docked to the ISS! In the meantime, on Wednesday a new crew has arrived on the station bringing the permanent residents in outer space back to six.]

This morning at 5:27am CET, or better 11:27am EDT, there was a rocket launch to the Moon. No, NASA has not unveiled a super-secret attempt to send Astronauts back to the Moon – it’s LADEE, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer! The newest lunar probe was launched not from Cape Canaveral, but from the Mid-Adlantic Regional Spaceport at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, which was a first for a mission leaving earth orbit and allowed millions of people on the US east coast to see it. This prompted NASA to make the night launch into a real party, because even today such spectacular launches are comparatively rare.

Just about everybody was there, even the folks from CosmoQuest had two undercover agents there – both media producer Richard Drumm and CosmoQuest Academy director Matthew Francis were in Wallops, and even Universe Today writer Jason Major was able to see it from Rhode Island. Of course Universe Today has an article with many beautiful photos, which I won’t even attempt to reproduce here – let’s just say it must have been an insanely spectacular view, even if the launch reportedly happened very quickly, as is visible on the launch video from NASA’s Youtube channel. Google+ is especially buzzing with lots of articles and photos from the launch, as is Twitter – this is a time where social media really shines and citizen journalism takes over from the conventional media.

After this furious start, LADEE will take its time to reach the moon in about four weeks instead of four days like the Apollo missions did, mainly to save fuel. Once there, the bus-sized orbiter will examine the lunar exosphere with three different instruments, which was partly prompted by observations made by the Apollo astronauts, who had sometimes seen a faint glow above the Moon’s surface. There’s also an exciting new laser-based communications system on board, which will allow much higher data transmission rates. The mission timing is critical, because NASA wants to have a good look at the lunar exosphere before more human missions, like the Chinese robotic lander announced for this winter, arrive and potentially disturb the Moon’s surroundings further. After a 100-day-mission, LADEE will actually do that itself: crash into the moon and maybe provide even more science with its (big?) crash.

But the main point of this article is something entirely else. Why is everybody so excited about a rocket launch, these happen all the time, right? Well, here in Europe, rocket launches are completely alien to us, we simply do not have any space ports around here – the nearest one on this side of the world is actually in Baikonur! There is, however, actually a planned spaceport in the swedish city of Kiruna in north Lapland, where a company called Spaceport Sweden wants to launch Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo beginning in 2015. Other than that, there is nothing even remotely approaching a rocket launch to be witnessed around here – this is why I have never seen a rocket launch up close and probably never will be. But I’m not sad about it, because at least we are able to see a lot of launches via the Internet almost live and while a web transmission and the first-hand reports via social media will never be able to substitute the real thing, it’s much better than just reading about it in the news the next day!

There’s a lot going on this weekend over in the USA… far away from the depressing news cycle. There’s not only the long labor day holiday weekend, but also Dragon Con and everybody, and I mean really everybody seems to be there, including the whole CosmoQuest crowd! This had the curious result that the Weekly Space Hangout, which usually happens on Friday afternoon (or evening if you’re in Europe), was forgotten and not even properly cancelled, leaving everyone hanging – what a disappointment…

No, wait – of course not! There was no raging mob in the comments on the event page, just a little group of regular viewers wondering where our intrepid space journalists were – and when nobody showed up, we decided to make our own “hangout” in the comments. We just talked amongst ourselves about some space news topics and showed some photos – it was actually a lot of fun and there was no complaining, quite the contrary! We all know how hard everyone works on producing these hangouts and although Fraser Cain and his amazing group of journalists do not really have any obligations to the viewers other than those they choose themselves, they are always very keen on bringing up a show every week. So while it has become very rare that one of the hangouts is cancelled or in this case just doesn’t happen for some reason, it’s absolutely nothing to complain about. After all, they do all this for free – although donations are always greatly appreciated.

A couple of hours after the “hangout that didn’t happen”, some of the WSH and CosmoQuest folks – Amy Shira Teitel, Nicole Gugliucci and Richard Drumm – checked in and were so nice to apologize for forgetting the hangout – while this was really not necessary, it was a wonderful gesture to the crowd of viewers. So thank you everyone, again – I’ve written this before in the comments, but it can’t just be said often enough.

Also, there was something even more awesome going on in the night before that I had not even noticed: there were announcements all over the place for the Atlanta Star Party happening the night before Dragon Con, but I didn’t know that it was also broadcast as an ad-hoc Virtual Star Party Hangout with all the VSP regulars and even Nicole Gugliucci, Pamela Gay and Phil Plait as surprise guests! The Youtube recording of it is a wonderful substitute for the canceled Space Hangout, and I think there may also be the regular Virtual Star Party on Sunday night.

Yesterday’s Weekly Space Hangout had a report about a new nova that had suddenly appeared near the constellation Delphinus – I hadn’t heard about it before because I somehow missed the first great article on Universe Today and was really surprised when David Dickinson said that it would be at an easily viewable magnitude of somewhere between +4 and +5. Now, I have to admit that I am actually a very lousy amateur astronomer and until recently was always struggling to even recognize star constellations in the sky, but I have gotten steadily better at it. But my first reaction was to wonder if I would even be able to find the nova, let alone see it!

While the Perseids were a near-complete failure this year for us, thanks to the star charts provided by Universe Today and some very basic detective work by myself which mainly consisted of locating the constellation Delphinus in the first place, I was actually able see the nova (which is just a nova, not a supernova) with my own eyes just with the aid of my trusty old 8×40 binoculars. The problem was that I would never have recognized it as the nova because it just looks like another star when you look at it through binoculars – only after some intense star chart checking I was absolutely sure I had really found it It’s a case of “one star too many” and if you are not really familiar with this portion of the sky you would never come to the idea that something appeared that wasn’t there before.

So, this was my first nova sighting and I’m really happy I saw it, even if it was just another pinpoint of light. Perhaps I would even have managed to take a photo – if my camera can pick up the Andromeda Galaxy, a magnitude 4 nova should be no problem! But before I was able to set up the camera, the clouds came and for this reason, this article doesn’t have an image attached. I will try again tonight to at least see it, but for better images I recommend you go to the Universe Today article!

Actually, our dreaded curse of the Perseid Meteor Shower was already broken last year, when we had some spectacular good luck and were able to see quite a few meteors. But is the lucky streak going to hold this year? We were already able to see a few isolated ones recently and hopefully the weather is going to cooperate on the nights of August 10 to 13 – but the forecast doesn’t look good for our location. The best chance to see the Perseids should be on the 12th, but it is also possible that meteors can be seen on the previous and following nights.

If you want to know more about the Perseids, Universe Today has a really good Observer’s Guide written by David Dickinson and Fraser Cain has made a great short explainer video about meteors in general. In short, if you have a reasonably clear view of the sky to the east and northeast, you are all set to go! I hope that I can catch some this year since I’ve finally got a camera which can do really long exposure times – but I think we’re really out of luck if the weather keeps being so unstable. But still, fingers crossed!

[Update 12 August: Yesterday was a total wash-out – it was absolutely bucketing down. Tonight, at least at the moment (23:30), the clouds are occasionally allowing a brief look at the stars, and I at least saw one little meteor dashing right through Cassiopeia – and I was only looking out of the window!]

One year ago, shortly after the landing of the Curiosity Rover, I had put together a collection of useful links about the Mars missions, which I still frequently use. The reason for the list was to provide all the information without having to write constantly about the Mars missions myself, something which others are doing in a much better way. I’ve occasionally written articles about NASA and the Mars missions since then, but even one year later all these links are still valid and absolutely essential if you want to keep up with what’s going on on Mars.

NASA Websites – The official sources
• Mars Science Laboratory @ JPL – The most important, always up-to-date site
• Mars Science Laboratory Raw Images – Everything the rover cameras deliver
• Mars Science Laboratory @ NASA – NASAs Curiosity website with sometimes different content
• NASA Main Page – Not only Mars news, but still a great resource
• NASA Television – Live stream of the current program
• NASA Television @ Youtube – NTV’s video archive

Other Websites – The inofficial ones often do it much better
• Universe Today – Simply the best resource not only for Mars, but all things space
• Universe Today @ Youtube – All the videos from UT including the hangouts
• Bad Astronomy – Phil Plait’s Blog is an ideal addition to UT
• Planetary Society Blog – Emily Lakdawalla’s detailed reporting
• Curiosity Raw Images Browser – Better overview of the raw images including an RSS-Feed
• Mars Ogler – Another browser for the raw images
• Martian Vistas – Wonderfully edited images from all Mars rovers
• HiRISE Image Catalog – High resolution images from orbit (also with an RSS-Feed)

Twitter Streams – Because it’s often much faster
• Curiosity-Rover – NASA’s official account of the rover
• Mars Rovers – Joint account of all the rovers
• Universe Today – Not only announcements from the website
• Pamela L. Gay – Astronomer, educator, co-host of Astronomy Cast & CosmoQuest boss
• Nicole Gugliucci – Radio astronomer, educator & CosmoQuest post-doc
• Emily Lakdawalla – Planetary Society space evangelist
• Neil deGrasse Tyson – Astrophysicist  and generally amazing and clever person
• Brian Cox – Some prof from Manchester, actually busy at the moment with other things

Updates:
27.09.12 » Added HiRISE and Curiosity Raw Images Browser
03.10.12 » Added Mars Ogler
08.08.13 » English version posted, slightly updated & improved