Through the Looking Glass

Since my attempt at delivering a semi-accurate prediction of the NHL trade deadline turned out not-so-good, I'm going to move onto something else. Though, the moves made by Pittsburgh and Calgary are hardly unprecedented and are fairly typical for teams in their position. Calgary added some good talent at center and defense where they needed help. Calgary is now in a much stronger position to compete for the Western Conference title. Pittsburgh added the classic NHL rental player, Bill Guerin. Don't get me wrong, he is a great player with good playoff experience, but don't waste $150 on a Guerin sweater if you are a Pittsburgh fan, he'll be gone in 3 years or less.

Now, on to business.

On Friday (tomorrow!), NASA will be launching the Kepler Space Telescope! Its mission is to spend the next three or so years surveying a portion of the cosmos for exoplanets. Kepler will do so by detecting the minute changes in the brightness of stars as planets travel between the star and the observatory. This is some really cool stuff, but I wonder about the effectiveness of this detection method. If I interpret Kepler's functionality correctly, it will only be able to detect exoplanets when they cross directly between the star and the telescope. I can only assume (there are billions of stars out there - statistically, I doubt they are all oriented the same way) that a majority of other solar systems do not have orbital planes that make this kind of observation possible. Nevertheless, I look forward to seeing what Kepler is capable of.

Another cool factoid about Kepler: it will be one of the few spacecraft that do not orbit the Earth. Kepler will be placed in a heliocentric orbit (it orbits the Sun). This orbit allows it to make better observation for some technical reasons that I lack the training and education to fully explain, let alone understand. There's a good explanation of Kepler's orbit here.

Supposedly, NASA will be broadcasting the launch live on the NASA TV network and probably somewhere on their website, too. Keep your fingers crossed!