Godspeed

Exciting news: NASA is launching a new orbital telescope that will hunt for earth-type planets. All the extra-solar planets they've found up till now have been weird (well, to us) gas giants orbiting really near their suns. The Kepler telescope will be able to find earth-type planets in the crucial liquid water zone.

Kepler’s strategy is, in effect, to search for the shadows of planets. The core of the spacecraft, which carries a 55-inch-diameter telescope, is a 95-million-pixel digital camera. For three and a half years, the telescope will stare at the same patch of sky about 10 degrees, or 20 full moons, wide, in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It will read out the brightnesses of 100,000 stars every half-hour, looking for the telltale blips when a planet crosses in front of its star, a phenomenon known as a transit.

To detect something as small as the Earth, the measurements need to be done with a precision available only in space, away from the atmospheric turbulence that makes stars twinkle, and far from Earth so that our home world does not intrude on the view of shadow worlds in that patch of sky. It will take three or more years — until the end of Barack Obama’s current term in office — before astronomers know whether Kepler has found any distant Earths.

NASA has wasted so much money over the years focusing on manned space flight, and I hope that a new president means an end to the Mars mission (remember that?) and more money spent on this type of thing. Let my brother's old firm Bigelow Aerospace risk people's lives in space. This is probably the one subject on which the Instapundit and I are in complete and total agreement. Although I have never read him mention it, I am also certain that I share one belief with John Derbyshire: the 1982 revision of the Episcopalian hymnal was a travesty. No "Onward Christian Soldiers"?!

Comments

[Robert Halford]

Eh? "Onward Christian Soldiers" is Hymn # 562 in the ECUSA Hymnal 1982.

Just goes to show how mistaken it is to flirt with Derbyshire, always.

[Matt]

I am also certain that I share one belief with John Derbyshire

I'm glad that it's not the belief that it would be really great if you were allowed to bang 13 year old girls.

[jholbo]

crap, it must have been a different martial hymn I was keen on that got axed.

[grackle]

Nothing matches the travesty of the bowdlerization of the 1928 prayer book. "We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts and there is no health in us," cannot be improved upon.

[Mrs Tilton]

Kudos to R. Halford @09:47 AM for his familiarity with the 1982 hymnal, and for his peerless heavy metal vocal stylings as frontman of Judas Priest.

[Myles SG]

I use the Church of England Book of Common Prayer, when the occasion demands religious content, which is fairly rare.

I am sure Onward Christian Soldiers is in there. Heck, I sang that at memorial services when I was at school.