Citizen Cartwright

Asteroid miners' creative ideas

So a privately owned company backed in part by Google's founders plans to build telescopes to hunt for asteroids orbiting near the Earth and robotic spacecraft to mine them for precious metals, water and other materials.

And the company, called Planetary Resources, is raising money on Kickstarter — a website used to raise funds for creative projects — to "make space exploration accessible to everyone."

If you pledge $25, you can send a picture to be displayed like a billboard on the side of a telescope, with the Earth showing in the background. A picture of your picture on the satellite will then be sent back to you.

If you find this as confusing as I did, you may want to take a look at this sample picture.

3D-printed food for trip to Mars?

NASA is funding research to develop a 3D printer that will create “nutritious and flavorful” food suitable for astronauts on long missions, The Washington Post reports.

Crippled Kepler space telescope

Is it the end of the search for "Goldilocks" planets — places beyond our solar system that are "just right" to support life?

NASA says it will try to fix the problem that's caused the telescope to lose its ability to control its orientation in space.

The telescope has confirmed 132 planets and identified more than 2,700 potential ones. Its mission was supposed to be over, but there were hopes that it could continue for a number of years.

Discovery of the most Earth-like planets yet

NASA says the two planets believed to be capable of supporting life orbit a star 1,200 light years from here, in the northern constellation Lyra.

The Kepler space telescope "and other experiments are finding planets that remind us more and more of home,” says Geoffrey Marcy, a longtime exoplanet hunter at the University of California, Berkeley, and Kepler team member. “It’s an amazing moment in science. We haven’t found Earth 2.0 yet, but we can taste it, smell it, right there on our technological fingertips.”

Should we colonize Mercury?

It can be 800 degrees Fahrenheit at noon on the equator of the planet closest to the Sun, so scientists are surprised that NASA's Messenger spacecraft has found as much as a trillion tons of ice at the planet's poles.

But in The New York Times article on the findings, I most enjoyed the "what can Mercury do for us" sentiment.

It turns out that between the roasting equator and frozen poles, there's a temperate area, especially a few feet below the surface where the soil insulates against temperature swings.

That's an "ideal location to build a colony," says the Times.

New planet found just 4 light years away

It's the closest planet found outside our solar system so far, but its surface temperature is an estimated 2,192 degrees Fahrenheit.

"This is our back yard, so to find out that planet formation occurred there is just extraordinary," says University of California astronomer Greg Laughlin.

NASA's most advanced Mars rover has landed

What fun in my house overnight, watching coverage of the Curiosity rover's arrival on Mars to try to find out whether the planet might ever have been hospitable for microbial life.

The arrival was an "engineering tour de force, debuting never-before-tried acrobatics packed into 'seven minutes of terror' as Curiosity sliced through the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph," says The Associated Press.

Then, "in a Hollywood-style finish," cables delicately lowered the rover to the ground at a snail-paced 2 mph.

Curiosity will use a drill and scoop at the end of its robotic arm to gather soil and rock samples that will be analyzed by instruments inside the rover.

Curiosity is powered by electricity generated from the heat of a chunk of plutonium and could operate for years — and maybe decades — exploring the 96-mile-wide crater in which it has landed.

65th anniversary of Roswell, N.M., flying saucer 'capture'

"If you believe the government," a UFO didn’t crash at Roswell and spawn a massive cover-up, the Los Angeles Times says provocatively.

Former CIA agent Chase Brandon says the alien crash really happened, reports The Huffington Post.

Ex-astronauts to hunt for killer asteroids

A team of ex-NASA astronauts and scientists has formed the B612 Foundation — named after the home asteroid of the prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's book "The Little Prince" — and hopes to raise money for a private space telescope to scan the skies for small and mid-sized space rocks capable of wiping out a city or continent.

"We know these objects are out there and we can do something to prevent them" from hitting Earth, says former Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart.

First private rocket heads for space station

The SpaceX company's Falcon 9 rocket launched early Tuesday.

NASA is looking to the private sector to take over orbital trips in this post-shuttle period, and several U.S. companies are competing for the opportunity, The Associated Press says.