Places to Go for the Latest

Seasoned web surfers know that you can find just about anything on the Web that’s worth knowing — and quite a lot that isn’t worth the time it takes to click on a link.  Which is to say that there’s a lot of really bad and useless knowledge out there floating around along with the good and useful stuff. The trick is to know how to discriminate the really bad from the really good stuff.  For astronomy and space science, there are so many good sources that it’s tough to single out a dozen or many dozens of “the best of the best”.  But, I’ll make a stab at it here.

First, there’s the weekly Carnival of Space.  It’s a weekly roundup of the best entries in space and astronomy blogs (albeit self-nominated, but I’ve yet to see a clunker in the bunch).  I’ve hosted it once, and hope to again in the future. This week it’s being hosted at Robot Explorers and features a collection of good reading (including one of mine).

Then, there are the space agency public outreach links. They supply the latest and greatest news from their respective countries’ space agencies and are good places to find out what’s flying and what’s on the drawing boards.  Here are a few to get you started today.

BNSC — British National Space Centre

CNSA — China National  Space Administration

CSA — Canadian Space Agency

DLR —  German Aerospace Center

ESA — European Space Agency

ISA — Iranian Space Agency

ISRO — Indian Space Research Organisation

JAXA — Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

KARI — Korea (South) Aerospace Research Institute

NASA — the United States space agency

ROSCOSMOS — Russian Federal Space Agency

Those are just a few — and you can find a more extensive listing here.

Tomorrow I’ll post a list of observatories with extensive public outreach offerings.