Welcome to the 29th weekly Carnival of Space, a roundup of space news and views from across this great InterWeb of ours.

I'm more than a little excited to host this week's Carnival. If you'd like to know more about it—or better yet, be a part of next week's edition—see this handy information over at Universe Today, where Fraser Cain is the new head carny.

Fraser is also the co-host of Astronomy Cast, and this week they recorded an episode about Uranus, part of their planetary tour through the Solar System.

Not surprisingly, the breathtaking Kaguya images of an Earthrise over the lunar horizon caught the eye of several space watchers this week, including Steinn Sigurdsson at Dynamics of Cats and Louise Riofrio at A Babe in the Universe. Meanwhile, Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer, provides some context for the lunar features seen in the shots.

Rosetta, a mission to several minor planets, was also in the spotlight this week for spectacular Earth pictures of its own, but not before the approaching craft was was mistakenly named among the minor planets itself when it was "discovered" as a faint dot in the sky by near-Earth asteroid surveys, as Emily Lakdawalla recounts in the Planetary Society Weblog. Despite the brief mix-up, as both Emily and Steinn point out, the incident ultimately proved that the international system of astronomical alerts actually works.

New images of the Earth as seen from space seem to be coming in from all directions at the moment. Amateur astronomer and self-confessed image hoarder Stuart at Cumbrian Sky looks at them and wonders if the most precious thing in the lives of the astronauts of the future will be something we've all taken for granted until now...

Another interesting notion from the previously-mentioned post at A Babe in the Universe: Astronomers have long dreamed about a giant radio telescope on the lunar farside. Today that seemingly impossible dream has become a plan. A Lunar Interferometer tended by astronauts on the Moon would view an unknown but critical time in evolution of the Universe.

Ian Musgrave has a post up at Astroblog in which he finally gets to see Comet Holmes, and muse on the nature of amateur astronomy.

The Space Video of the Week at Robot Guy is a speech given by Burt Rutan in 2005 to the National Space Society. Although the speech is two years old, Robot Guy reports that pretty much everything Rutan says still applies today.

At Tales of the Heliosphere, there is a discussion of an Arkansas company that purports to own the Moon and is offering lunar land for sale at $28 per acre. Why shouldn't this company, and others that do the same, be shut down?

This week's video at Rockets Away describes the mission of shuttle Discovery, Germany's plans to send a probe to the Moon, and discovery of a fifth planet in a solar system that resembles our own.

Amanda Bauer reflects at astropixie on the successful big bang theory of how our particular universe began. She mentions some lingering questions about the universe not explained by the big bang theory and wonders what future experiments we can perform to further test big bang cosmology.

Centauri Dreams writes about "The Sun and its Stellar Twins" in a discussion of finding stars that are almost exactly like the Sun, and the advantages this may have in pursuing astrophysical investigations as well as possible SETI work.

SpaceX has completed a major upgrade to the rocket engine that is crucial to the firm's launch vehicle plans, reports TopSpacer of Hobby Space.

TZT's toddler son is completely obsessed with space, from our solar system's planets and their moons to distant galaxies, many of which he can identify thanks to Hubble, Spitzer, and others. She documents a lot of his space obsession on her blog, Tiny Mantras, and this post is about Jupiter, which he particularly loves, so much that he finds features of it in the everyday Earth world quite often.

At A Mars Odyssey, Nancy Houser describes how NASA's Applied Science Program and 14 orbiting satellites have recently joined forces with the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, in order for scientists to eventually be able to predict and prevent the major infectious disease outbreaks that are developing around the world so rapidly.

Colony Worlds explains that the US government has taken a fresh look at the possibility of constructing solar powered satellites, which would be able to collect energy from the sun and beam it down back to Earth. While launching and building one of these satellites in space may have its own engineering and problems above, constructing the receiving rectenna on land may provide even more nightmares below. In order to avoid these concerns, scientists may want to consider building a solar satellite rectenna over the ocean instead of on top of land.

A 32 megajoule railgun has been delivered to the US navy for testing, writes Advanced Nano. A 64 megajoule version would be needed for a desired weapon that could be mounted on a new destroyer. Further progress would also enable a railgun for sending payloads into space, and frequent gun launches would bring the cost down for ruggedized payloads.