This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community – plus a a couple of stories that I hadn’t actually gotten around to share because there was so much going on. Last week I was thinking of giving up this weekly posting, but the feedback was so positive again that I decided to keep it going – at least as long as I have the time to put it together. And there were a lot of interesting things happening this week, although there wasn’t one story particularly standing out – that will probably come tomorrow when ExoMars has launched, but I wanted to post this on Sunday to get back into the regular rhythm. So here are a lot of good news for space and science with only a little bit of politics mixed in!

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles I posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community. This was truly the week of all things happening with two events especially standing out: on late Tuesday, the One-Year-Crew of Scott Kelly and Mikhail Korniyenko arrived back on Earth after 340 days in space and while we haven’t heard much from Korniyenko in the western press, Kelly was immediately in the spotlight walking around only hours after his return and giving lots of interviews. And on Friday, SpaceX finally got the SES-9 satellite into space on the fifth attempt with a flawless launch, although the first stage landing didn’t quite work out when the booster hit the drone ship too hard after a very hot re-entry – but the mission was still an amazing success. As usual, there was a lot of interesting stuff happening too, from some drama about fast radio bursts, fascinating news about clouds and ice canyons on Pluto, ESA’s ambitions to build a village on the moon and much more. Let’s go!

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles I posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community. Edition #8 comes one day late because I wanted to wait for the SpaceX SES-9 launch… which was scrubbed yet again yesterday evening after the third attempt was first thwarted by a boat in the safety range and then by an engine shutdown miliseconds before launch. I also wanted to find out if The Martian had won any Oscars, but it didn’t even get one out of several nominations! But there were still a lot of other of very interesting news, so here is last week’s collection only slightly dominated by rocket launches and award disappointments.

This is another edition of my now regular articles about the crew changes on the International Space Station – I posted the last one at the beginning of December, but an early Spring update is now in order because March is going to be a very busy month on the station. On Tuesday, the One-Year-Mission of Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornivenko is coming to and end and they will be going back to Earth together with their fellow astronaut Sergey Volkov and then a new crew of three will arrive after slightly more than two weeks – but that is not all, because after that two uncrewed resupply flights, a Progress from Russia and a Cygnus from the US, will arrive in short succession. So there are at least two launches and one landing to watch out for in the next couple of weeks with more coming soon. Here’s the overview of what’s currently going on in space.

This week’s round of space and science news is again a collection of articles I posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community. It’s been a bit of a curious week with no really major stuff happening after the big gravitational waves surprise before, but there were even some remnants of that to report. There were also two successful rocket launches in the US and Japan, the Cygnus transporter leaving from the ISS, the announcement of another new space telescope, some more news about the NASA budget, the unveiling of the new SpaceShipTwo and quite a few other tidbits. And I hope to post something else between the space news here soon, so stay tuned for that – meanwhile, here are the news!

This week’s round of space and science news is again a colleection of articles I posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community. It’s the big gravitational waves week! The rumours have been running wild since last Autumn and it turns out they were actually right – LIGO had detected gravitational waves already in mid-September, but it took a while to be really sure that it was the real thing. Other news were somewhat dwarfed by this announcement, but there was actually a lot going on from some rocket launches, to strange reports about a fatal meteorite strike, two postponed launches, North Korea’s satellite going wonky, saying goodbye to Philae and the 2017 NASA budget proposal.

This week’s round of space and science news is again a colleection of articles I posted in my Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community. There were no surprising big news this week, but a couple of rocket launches – including one from North Korea-, the passing of Apollo astronaut Ed Mitchell, quite a lot of space politics and business and a spacewalk on the ISS. I also included some articles that don’t necessarily qualify as “news”, but are interesting nevertheless like a visit to the USS Enterprise model in the Smithsonian, a cable dilemma at the LHC and newly processed images from the Chinese Moon mission, which I found so fascinating that I just had to choose them as this week’s opening image.

Only last year, CosmoQuest was referred to as an Ex-NASA Citizen Science Project – but now that’s not true anymore because the NASA funding has returned to the tune of $11.5 Million over the next five years, as project director Pamela Gay has recently revealed during an recording of Astronomy Cast.

We already knew since last September that CosmoQuest had won the NASA grant, but only now the full details are slowly beginning to emerge. There is no official press release from CosmoQuest yet – I’ve heard that is still being worked on – but the overall funding amount of $11.5 Million is much, much more than I had originally estimated back in October based on the number of organisations that got the grants. So this is very good news and will allow CosmoQuest to go back to doing proper science instead of barely surviving on a donations-funded shoestring budget and having to worry about funding all the time.

Update: shortly after I published this post, a new article with a job offer was posted on the CosmoQuest blog.

2016 will be an awesome year for CosmoQuest and citizen science in general – it finally looks like the sad times of sequestration and underfunded science education and public outreach are finally coming to an end. And for anyone who doesn’t know what they stumbled into here, I recommend this article about the Origins of CosmoQuest on the project’s own website that explains everything!

First I have to apologize that this is the fourth article of this kind in a row on this blog, but I wanted to take the January off from everything else and I’ve got some other stuff coming up soon. But now – the news! It wasn’t as much of a rollercoaster as last week, but there were still a lot of interesting surprises. This time of year is a bit subdued because of the triple spaceflight tragedies of Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia that happened at this time and I linked to an interesting article about Challenger from a journalist’s perspective… but I honestly think that while rememberance is good, we also need to reclaim those occasions and make them positive again. This week’s round of news is again a combination of articles I posted in my suddenly very popular Space & Astronomy Collection on Google+ and in the WSH Crew Community.

It’s only the third week of 2016 and the space and science related news keep getting more exciting all the time – the big headliner this week was the mounting evidence for a Planet Nine in our solar system and the following controversy about it, but there were a number of other notable things happening, including another launch of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket and SpaceX’s thruster hover test of its crewed Dragon capsule and much more. As usual, this is only a very selective overview of what’s going on and there’s always more over in the WSH Crew Community and the Weekly Space Hangout – I’m just collecting the articles I’ve posted over on Google+ in my Space & Astronomy category and some additional links from the community. Now, let’s see what was going on this week…