Carnival of Space #118

Carnival of Space #118 is now open for viewing at Stuart Atkinson's Cumbrian Sky blog. Stuart has provided nice summaries of the contributed posts along with some artfully edited images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

I especially liked Nancy Atkinson's Universe Today post on spacecraft navigation for which she interviewed several professional spacecraft navigators. When I was in high school and even for a while in college (where I was eventually a physics major), this was a job that I imagined myself doing someday. I ended up in optics instead, but I remained interested in space and orbital mechanics and was finally able to do something fun with that interest when I discovered the free Orbiter space flight simulator in 2005 and wrote the tutorial book Go Play In Space (also free).