Category Archives: NASA

mission madness, NASA

Mission Madness

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Mission Awareness

Mission Madness!
Mission Madness!

NASA is running a cute game to match March Madness (basketball madness). In it, you get to vote for your favorite missions.

We’re in the third round of voting, which ends in a few hours and totals for the quarterfinals will be posted shortly thereafter.

My own personal favorites at this point are any Mars Mission, any outer solar system mission, and JWST (yeah, I know– I’m crazy — but I like orbiting space telescopes).

My other personal faves got knocked out in early voting, so I had to readjust — which is fine.  I’m flexible.

Anyway, here are the two sets of current matchups for slots in the quarterfinals, which begin on March 30:

  • Apollo 11 vs LRO
  • Freedom 7 vs Mars Pathfinder
  • Vikings I and II vs Pioneer 10
  • Soho vs Skylab

The winner inthe first set will eventually battle the winner in the slots below:

  • SPB vs Expedition 1
  • X-29 vs Orion
  • Expedition 16 vs JWST
  • Voyager 1 and 2 vs New Horizons

Interested in voting for your favorite missions?  Get on over to 2009 Mission Madness and vote early and often!

exoplanets, exploration, Kepler mission, NASA

Keplerian Wishes

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Tonight’s the Night

A portrait of the Milky Way by space artist Jon Lomberg, showing Keplers search space for extrasolar planets. Used courtesy of the Kepler Mission and Jon Lomberg (www.jonlomberg.com). (Click to embiggen.)
A portrait of the Milky Way by space artist Jon Lomberg, showing Kepler's search space for extrasolar planets. Used courtesy of the Kepler Mission and Jon Lomberg (www.jonlomberg.com). (Click to embiggen.)

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.