Tonight’s the Night

The NASA Kepler mission is on schedule for launch tonight (Friday, March 6) at 10:48 p.m. EST. (04:48 GMT). So far, everything looks good and we’re all hoping for a flawless liftoff and perfect deployment of this lean, mean exoplanet-hunting machine.

The Kepler mission has a fine website with a skajillion details about this telescope and the science it will do. I’m quite excited about its chances for finding Earth-like planets orbiting other stars and I think within a few years we’ll know just how “alone”  Earth really is in our neck of of the galaxy neighborhood.

This is the tenth of NASA’s Discovery missions program — all of which have specific goals for exploration of space. For example, Mars Pathfinder, Genesis, NEAR, MESSENGER, Stardust, Deep Impact, DAWN, GRAIL, and Lunar Prospector are also in the Discovery mission “chain.”   So, here’s to Kepler, the latest “discoverer” to head out there and report back to Earth on what it finds.