The Lego Curiosity Rover compells you – go map the Moon at CosmoQuest.org! Or you can go planet mapping on Mercury or asteroid mapping on Vesta!

The mapping projects have always been a cornerstone of the citizen science projects of CosmoQuest, allowing everybody to contribute to science in an easy, instantly understandable way. Crowdsourcing the identification of craters and other unusual landmarks on the Moon, Mercury and Vesta is as easy as drawing a circle on the screen, but helps enormeously the scientific understanding of these surfaces. And the success is there – in March of this year, the Moon Mappers study was accepted in Icarus, a major peer-reviewed scientific journal, showing that crater identification by citizen scientists is practically as good as if experts were doing it. Two years after the beginning of CosmoQuest, the idea of creating a virtual research lab has now been scientifically proven to be extremely useful.

But what does this really mean for the participating non-scientist? In preparation for the coming Hangoutathon fundraiser, a new series of articles headlined Your Science Results Explained is is giving the answers to this question, because the original paper is admittedly not so easy to understand for non-scientists. But leave it to CosmoQuest to boil the publication down to a more easy level, because this is what they do best: making science accessible for everyone!

To get started with the Moon-, Mercury- or Vesta-Mapping, all you need is to register for free on CosmoQuest.org – this login also works for their Forum as well – and start circling craters on the Mappers websites. You will be shown an introductory video guide the first time you log in so you know what to do, but all in all it’s fairly easy and fascinating as well, because you get to explore the surfaces in great detail and often see images nobody has ever closely looked at before. The mappers websites not only work on the desktop PC, but also on tablets, although with some reservations – I had tested them on several different Android browsers recently and only Dolphin was able to render the Mappers flawlessy for some reason, so I can really recommend it for crater-mapping. Drawing the circles on the tablet is a bit tricky especially on small display sizes, but even on 7″ devices it works well especially if you can use a stylus.

There is also a free Android app called Moon Mappers Crater Decay from CosmoQuest which lets you grade crater images on their level of decay. And you can also buy their educational game Earth or Not Earth for $1.99 (or €1.49 if you’re in Europe) with the proceeds going to CosmoQuest to fund their programmers – the app is also available for iOS devices now. Even if you don’t want to play it, it’s a great way to make a micro-donation!

And regarding donations, of course you can always give something to CosmoQuest, but if you can’t, at least spread the word and support them by doing a little public outreach. And watch the Hangoutathon this weekend, it will be amazing! :-)

Remember when CosmoQuest held a 32 hour marathon Google+ fundraiser hangout back in June 2013? It’s going to happen again this weekend on Saturday, April 26th beginning at 11am EDT / 5pm CEST and this time it will last a full 36 hours. While the previous Hangoutathon was absolutely amazing and a big success, CosmoQuest is always in need of donations because of the still very dire funding situation. So, for the sake of the future of science and astronomy, the whole CosmoQuest team and their friends and guests are going to do a whole new mega-show to inspire everyone to contribute.

I will post another announcement when there are more details, but the reason for this article is actually last year’s Hangoutathon. The whole 32-hour hangout is available in eight parts on Youtube, but due to the size of the event it has not yet been cut into separate parts. At the end of last year, I went through the Youtube videos and prepared an index table with the help of the schedule to provide links to the starting times of the separate events. Until now, I had not posted the index publicly, but now it’s the best chance to promote the next Hangoutathon with it, so here it is. Some excerpts are also being posted right now on the CosmoQuest stream on Google+ and I will add these to the index when they appear. Go watch some recorded science and then participate live this weekend!

I can’t believe another year has come and gone, but tomorrow is Yuri’s Night again – an open, worldwide celebration of humanity’s first spaceflight on April 12th, 1961, which was also the first flight of the Space Shuttle twenty years later. It’s not about Soviet spaceflight or Yuri Gagarin specifically, but actually the fact that this was the beginning of human space exploration itself. It’s not about politics at all, which is especially important this year due to the tensions around the Ukraine and Crimea, but only a way to raise more public interest about space exploration. This is why Yuri’s Night has also been called the World Space Party, a celebration that humankind has ventured off its home planet for the first time.

This year, the number of events on the Yuri’s Night website has sadly gone down from over 300 of 2013 to barely 200, so the interest seems to be waning, but there are still a lot of Space Parties listed, even here in Germany – but unfortunately not anywhere near me. But the organizers  leave it up to everbody to make up their own event – throw a star party, just meet somewhere, screen a movie or hold an online event! Everybody can celebrate in their own way, but the organizers would just appreciate if you would let them know what’s going on so they can list it on their website.

I’m not throwing much of a party this year again, because there will be unfortunately no stargazing opportunities at all due to the lousy weather, but I will be watching out for some special online events. Tonight at 9pm CEST there will, of course, be the Weekly Space Hangout and Scott Lewis and Tony Darnell are also planning something with the live edition of Space Fan News starting at 3am CEST (bit late for me, though!). April is also Global Astronomy Month and Nicole Gugliucci and Georgia Bracey had Mike Simmons of Astronomy without Borders on their Learning Space hangout series recently. And, of course, you can always watch the Virtual Star Party live or recorded if your skies are not cooperative or if you don’t have a telescope.

And there will is also something over on DVDLog too with a little collection of space-themed reviews, which I fortunately now at least have partially translated to English. Keep watching my stream on Google+, find out more about Science and Astronomy related podcasts in my blog post from January or add my Science, Space & Astronomy or Astrophotographer Google+ circles which I had shared on December 31st, but which are still up-to-date. And keep watching the skies… if you don’t have clouds overhead, that is!

After the supposed “near-catastrophe” that was just a minor navigation problem, a new crew of three astronauts has now finally arrived on the International Space Station. They had to take the long way with 34 instead of 4 orbits, but no one was stuck in space like some of the more sensational news headlines claimed. The docking was actually quite amazing to watch on NASA TV, with the spaceship slowy coming nearer and the final docking even a little ahead of schedule. Videos with the highlights of the docking and the hatch opening and the welcome ceremonies are already up on Youtube. But who’s now up there and who has just arrived? I originally wanted to keep tabs on the astronauts regularly since I had written a first article in November, but was so busy to write a followup, so I’ll just start again.

Who’s up: Already on the station since November 2013 are Rick Mastracchio from the USA, Koichi Wakata from Japan and Mikhail Tyurin from Russia. Both Mastracchio and Wakata have been busy tweeting a lot of great photos from space as @AstroRM and @Astro_Wakata – Rick’s recent photo of the Soyuz launch actually made a lot of well-deserved news headlines since! All three are staying about two more months and will be going home in late May.

Who’s arriving: The second half of Expedition 39 are Aleksandr Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev from Russia and Steven R. Swanson from the US, who will be staying until September and have just arrived with the delayed Soyuz flight. Swanson and Skvortsov are on their third and second spaceflight, but Artemyev is a rookie astronaut on his first venture into space. Sadly, the russians are not using any social media (yet?) and Swanson does not seem to be using Twitter either, so when the first half of Expedition 39 goes home and the three become the first half of Expedition 40 waiting for the new arrivals, there could be a short social media outage from the ISS. But NASA has opened up an Instagram account which will supposedly be used by Steven Swanson.

Who’s coming: It won’t be long until the next personnel change on the ISS when the first half of Expedition 39 is leaving in late May and the next three astronauts go up: Reid Wiseman from the US, Maksim Surayev from Russia and Alexander Gerst from Germany! I expect our media will go nuts over this, but maybe it will bring spaceflight a bit more into the public here again. It’s actually Wiseman’s and Gerst’s first flight and they both have already been extensively reporting about their experiences as @Astro_Reid and @Astro_Alex on Twitter in a very casual and friendly way, so their stay on the ISS will certainly be interesting.

Also notable is the italian ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, who will be going to the ISS in November and is chronicling her preparations in a detailed logbook on Google+ and is also active on Twitter as @AstroSamantha. Save for Chris Hadfield (who is actually a retired Astronaut now), I only know one other astronaut who is active on Google+: Andreas Mogensen from Denmark, who will be launching in November 2015 to the ISS, but only on a short 10-day-mission.

Last November, I had already made my Twitter Astronaut List public and I’ve been updating it ever since, so if you want to have a good overview of just about everyone who is, was and is going to be in space, this might come in handy. As usual, you can also watch NASA TV live and recordings and excerpts are always on the NASA TV Youtube Channel and ReelNASA.

That’s it for this article – the next one will be coming sometime in late May when the next astronaut changeover is happening!

Last year I wrote about the new, faster and more comfortable launch approach the Soyuz spaceships have been taking since the end of 2012 to reach the International Space Station, which just takes six hours instead of almost two days as before. Last night, in a picture-perfect night launch, three astronauts, Aleksandr Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev from Roscosmos and Steven R. Swanson from NASA went up from Baikonur and originally were again scheduled to arrive only six hours later, but this time there was a slight navigation problem which prompted the onboard computer to break off the final approach. Instead, the Soyuz will now take the old 34-orbit journey, which unfortunately takes about two days, but is actually just a completely normal procedure.

The media is, of course, really freaking out about this, especially here in Germany because the German ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst is going up with the next flight in May. Headlines like “Serious computer glitch prevents astronauts from reaching ISS” or “Space docking maneuver failed” are making the rounds, but as usual Spiegel Online has the best fearmongering going with “Flight to the ISS: Russians and Americans stuck in space”. No, the docking didn’t fail and the final approach also didn’t fail because the flight computer didn’t even attempt to do it. What apparently went wrong was that the last burn before the final one resulted in a slightly wrong orbit, which is not surprising because the faster approach requires much more precision than the standard, long flight. The crew is okay, they have enough provisions to last even longer than the two days it takes them to reach now and while this is certainly uncomfortable, it was actually completely normal until the end of 2012. And the engine is working and nobody is “stuck” – they’re actually flying right now and performing regular burns to sneak up on the ISS in the old-fashioned way.

I shouldn’t even complain about this, because it’s always the same each time something out of the ordinary happens during these launches – if everything goes according to plan, the media basically just ignores it, but if there’s only the slightest problem everybody jumps on it like a bloodhound. What I especially dislike about the current reporting is that many journalists want to make this all about politics because of the Ukraine and Crimea tensions. Do the Russian astronauts even talk with the Americans anymore? Are the Americans stranded on the ISS because Russia won’t let them use their Soyuz capsules anymore? These are only some of the outrageous questions that are asked and often very inaccurately answered. What many people don’t realize is that the daily operations of the space station and the flights up to it are largely independent of any short-term political decisions – even Roscosmos is not as close to the Kremlin as you might think. There are scientists and engineers at work, not politicians and long-term contracts like NASA has with Roscosmos to buy seats on the Soyuz cannot be cancelled just like that.

The bottom line is, in the words of Douglas Adams, Don’t Panic. A minor problem with the flight computer means that the astronauts will arrive a little later on the station. If not and something more serious happens, I stand corrected – but the chance of this happening are astronomically small.

Because this article has turned out to be longer than originally intended, I’ll write another one with a little breakdown who is actually up on the space station, who will be coming and who will be going for tomorrow when the Astronauts actually arrive.

In October 2012, I had written a blog post with a collection of Google+ Hangouts, which I had last updated and translated into English about a year ago. Since it’s been a while and some things have changed, it’s time for another updated and revised edition, which now includes not only on-air hangouts, but also a couple of Podcasts from an earlier article I had originally written in German only. It does not matter if you have time to watch hangouts live, because everything is archived and together with the enormeous archives of the podcasts there is a lot to discover. With this collection, you can fill your media player queues for years!   

Two years ago, at the end of the second live broadcast of Astronomy Cast, Pamela Gay and Nicole Gugliucci announced their amazing citizen science project CosmoQuest, in which, of course, also many other amazing people are involved. Myself, I didn’t even notice it until much later, but when watching some early Astronomy Cast videos last year, I discovered that the moment of announcement on January 1st, 2012 was actually preserved for posterity in the video I’ve embedded below.

So, this is where it all began two years ago. I hope that CosmoQuest will have a bright future, despite all the recent funding problems. But they all have done so much and built such a momentum that I think cannot be stopped that easily!

There’s so much happening in spaceflight and astronomy at the moment that it’s really hard to keep up, but I just wanted to write a final posting on the subject before the end of the year. The landing of the Chinese Moon probe Chang’e-3 with its Yutu rover, the Jade Rabbit, on December 14th was the most exciting event since Curiosity in 2012. The landing was actually transmitted live by the Chinese state television, but what’s so exciting about a Moon landing – they happen all the time, don’t they? Actually not – this was the first soft landing of a human spacecraft on the Moon since 1976, that’s slightly longer ago than my own lifetime! So seeing the landing play out live was amazing to say the least.

Since the landing it has been a bit difficult to get first-hand information, but Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society has done a great job of gathering the news, images and videos together, like the first colour photo, an extensive translation of the recent press briefing and yesterday’s update about the healthy rover and NASA’s LADEE orbiter not noticing the landing at all and a first panorama, still made from low-quality screengrabs. And of course there’s the absolutely awesome landing video, which was put together afterwards from single frames captured by the lander and first appeared on the CNTV website, but was later posted on Universe Today in a corrected version because the original was actually upside down.

Some people are arguing that this is not only the beginning of a new space race, but we’re right in the middle of it with China having painted the Moon red now. But can there really be a race if there is only one participant? China’s Moon mission is not empire building and we are not in the 1960s anymore – of course there’s a fair amount of smugness and bravado on their side, but considering it could also have been NASA taking this step and only politics and finance, but not technical reasons have prevented it, it’s only fair to say that the Chinese deserve all the applause for their successful mission. There’s an interesting article on Space.com about the political background of NASA’s non-cooperation with the Chinese space agency – the ESA has even helped the mission with providing communication links through their network of radar dishes. And I’m sure that there will not be a space war on the moon with lasers shooting down satellites and other science-fiction stuff – there are scientists at work and not power-hungry madmen after all. For all Mankind, as the old saying goes.

As I was thinking about writing this article this afternoon, I was watching two American astronauts performing a spacewalk on the ISS to replace the defective cooling pump that had raised the interest of the media in the last week considerably. Nobody really talks about the space station much anymore and everybody takes it for granted – but if only the slightest thing goes wrong, sensationalism takes over and even allusions to the Gravity movie are made. But is everything so bad, is the space station falling to pieces? Not by a long shot – like every facility, the station just needs some occasional repair work.

The best headline came from Universe today, reading Astronauts get three Spacewalks as an early Christmas present – because that’s what it really is. The spacewalks are extremely strenuous, but every chance to go outside of the spacestation is a treasured adventure for the astronauts. And yes, the water leak problem which hindered Luca Parmitanos spacewalk has been fixed according to NASA, and the only problem more than five hours into the first of three spacewalks seems to be that Rick Mastraccio seems to be understandably groggy and has called it a day after the defective pump was removed. There are two more spacewalks on the 23rd and 25th planned, but everything seems to have gone very well and Rick Mastraccio and Mike Hopkins had actually worked ahead of schedule so that the third spacewalk may not be necessary after all.

And last, but not least… remember that Canadian with the guitar? I can’t believe it’s already so long ago, but Universe Today noted that one year ago Chris Hadfield launched into space. The “launchiversary” was also celebrated by the Canadian Space agency with a wonderful little video, but Hadfield is far away from gone – he may have retired from being an astronaut, but he has written a book about his experiences, is currently on a book tour and continues to be a great spaceflight and astronomy communicator.

Some more random bits: It’s the 45th Anniversary of Apollo 8’s flight around the moon – NASA has re-created the famous earthrise in a wonderful video and space historian Amy Shira Teitel is live-tweeting the events in near real-time. Also, happy Winter Solstice – we are over the hill and the days are finally getting longer and the nights shorter again! Unfortunately we did not get a comet for christmas since ISON seems to have been vaporized by the sun after all, but there’s always the Curiosity Rover available as a Lego set now :-).

Of course, there’s much more going on and I haven’t even mentioned Mars in this posting – but if you follow all the usual channels, you may already be up to date. Usually I don’t bother much with this kind of article anymore, but maybe I will continue to do a monthly roundup of space-themed stories. Soon I will also re-post and update my old podcast and hangout recommendations, maybe even before the holidays.

Everybody said that Comet ISON, or more exactly C/2012 S1, would be either the comet of the century or a complete dud after it would swing around the sun. The comet had even reached naked-eye visibility in the last two weeks and there were a lot of amazing photos taken by astrophotographers around the world, but then came the initial disappointment: yesterday the comet reached perihelion, the closest approach to the sun at about 18:45 UTC and at first it seemed like it had not survived its first and perhaps only trip around it.

NASA had broadcast a two-and-a-half hour hangout during the event, because thanks to the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, the Solar Dynamics Observatory and STEREO satellites it was possible to monitor the comet’s approach and departure practically in real-time – and very soon it seemed like the comet was simply going to fizzle out. Even before it had reached the sun, the tip became smaller and smaller, like the nucleus had already broken up. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, who participated in NASA’s webcast, was the first one who reluctantly and sadly agreed that Comet ISON had probably disintegrated and when the webcast ended after nothing had emerged on the images from the satellites, everyone thought it was the end of ISON and went to their Thanksgiving dinners.

But then something amazing happened: the comet made a reappearance, as you can see on the image above – at first everybody thought it was only the remnants of its enormeous tail, but then the comet, or what was left of it, suddenly brightened more and more. For the full scoop, I can recommend Elizabeth Howell’s Article on Universe Today called Zombie ISON ‘Behaving Like A Comet, Stunned Astronomers Say’ which sums up the current situation very well. Phil Plait also has a great post on his blog up and Emily Lakdawalla has even more animations and images in her article! The bottom line is that nobody really knows yet what Comet ISON is up to and it may even be possible that it will be visible in the skies in December after all. All that remains at the moment is to wait, to gather data and to figure out what is going to happen to ISON. And this is the part scientists especially love: ISON is a great challenge, sporting a behaviour that has not been seen before. [Update 4.12.: Well, it seems ISON has fizzled after all, but it had put up one hell of a fight – it’s still to early to say if the remnants will be visible at all, but it doesn’t look too good.]

While Comet ISON has after all not turned out to be a turkey, the second launch attempt of the SpaceX next-generation Falcon 9 rocket to transport a communications satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit at 80000 kilometers from from Earth, certainly has. The first attempt on Monday had already been scrubbed because of technical problems and the Thanksgiving launch had an even more spectacular abort: the engines had already fired when the launch sequence was automatically aborted because the system had detected not enough thrust buildup. A second attempt was also scrubbed because the engineers did not have enough time in the launch window, after that it was decided to bring the whole rocket down to inspect the engines. But this is not a catastrophy, quite the contrary: SpaceX is being deliberately careful and this shows the company’s competence. This is rocket science, and it’s not easy. As Elon Musk said in his tweet shortly after the abort – better to be paranoid and wrong! [Update 4.12.: The caution has paid off, yesterday SpaceX launched the rocket successfully and put the satellite on board into the required geosynchronous orbit without problems!]

Everybody is writing about the fifteenth birthday of the International Space Station today and I don’t really think I can add to all of it except say Happy Birthday, too! I’d just like to link to a wonderful article on Universe Today about the very first day on the ISS back on December 10, 1998 when the Russian Zarya and US Unity modules were joined together for the first time. And there’s also this video not from NASA, but the Canadian Space Agency, which brilliantly expresses what the Space Station is all about.