[BLOG] Some space-related links

[rfmcdonald]

• Anders Sandberg notes how the book and film 2001 are touchstones still for what we might fear of our future.


• Centauri Dreams touched on quite a few issues while I was offline, noting a proposed solar-sail probe to Halley's Comet, notes the positive implications of geysers and liquid water for life on Enceladus, notes the exceptional distance of exoplanet Kepler-421b from its star and precisely measures the size and orbit of Kepler-93b and looks at the dryness of hot Jupiters and studies the misaligned gas discs of the stars of binary HK Tauri, and looks at ways to keep Earth-like planets orbiting red dwarfs habitable for hundreds of billions of years.
  
• The Dragon's Gaze notes that Gliese 1214b is an evaporating hot Neptune, looks at the search for rogue exoplanets in the Pleiades, mourns the non-existence of Gliese 581g and Gliese 481d, points to evidence that X-ray source IGR J17361-4441 was blocked partially and briefly by an exoplanet, looks at the search of exoplanets around nearbuy red dwarf stars, links to a reexamination of some Kepler exoplanet candidates and their stars by the Hubble space telescope, and notes that most worlds more than 1.6 times the radius of Earth are likely to be Neptunes.


• At The Dragon's Tales, the planet-reshaping impacts of the Late Heavy Bombardment on the early Earth are noted, as are forces acting on solar sails, as is a proposal to use the Voyager 1 spacecraft's movements and signals to look for distant planets, as is a paper suggesting that Titan's inner sea is as salty as the Earth's.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes (1, 2, 3) the Rosetta spacecraft's rendezvous with its target comet, notes a conference examining the habitability of Mars, looks at an odd mountain on Vesta, and links to an inventive revisiting of Venera images of the Venus surface.


• Progressive Download's John Farrell celebrates the ESA's Georges Lemaître ATV, named after a Belgian cosmologist of note.