Looking ahead to Curiosity, farewell Sally Ride, and other space and astronomy stories

I present a late report that is short and sweet because of the emphasis on the Olympics and British science in Overnight News Digest: Science Saturday (Opening of London Olympics edition) last week. I'll let This Week @ NASA cover the week's top U.S. space stories.

Red Planet Rendezvous on This Week @NASA

The Curiosity rover continues to make its way to Mars and its scheduled landing in Gale Crater on Monday, Aug. 6. Also Mars Yard; New record set; New heat shield test and new mission previewed; Landsat 40 and remembering Sally Ride and more....

NASA has more on Mars in the next video.

ScienceCasts: Mars Landing Sky Show

On the same night Curiosity lands on Mars, a "Martian Triangle" will appear in sunset skies of Earth. The first-magnitude apparition on August 5th gives space fans something to do while they wait for news from the Red Planet.

DarkSyde on Daily Kos has more on Curiosity and a few other space stories in This week in science: The good earth.

Speaking of British space stories, here's one from the BBC.

Moon formation: Was it a 'hit and run' accident?
27 July 2012

Scientists have proposed a fresh idea in the long-running debate about how the Moon was formed.

What is certain is that some sort of impact from another body freed material from the young Earth and the resulting debris coalesced into today's Moon.

But the exact details of the impactor's size and speed have remained debatable.

In a report online to be published in Icarus, researchers suggest that the crash happened with a much larger, faster body than previously thought.

And that's it for last week. Time to start putting together this week's edition, first for Daily Kos and then for here.