Kepler Launch in 2009
NASA – On Launch Pad 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, United Launch Alliance’s Delta II rocket carrying NASA’s Kepler spacecraft rises through the exhaust cloud created by the firing of the rocket’s engines. Liftoff was on time at 10:49 p.m. EST on March 6, 2009.
Kepler is a space-borne telescope designed to search the nearby region of our galaxy for Earth-size planets orbiting in the habitable zone of stars like our sun. The habitable zone is the region around a star where temperatures permit water to be liquid on a planet’s surface. The challenge for Kepler is to look at a large number of stars in order to statistically estimate the total number of Earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars in the habitable zone. Kepler will survey more than 100,000 stars in our galaxy. Image credit: NASA, Regina Mitchell-Ryall and Tom Farrar
By Laurence Copeland – Quietly, without any official recognition of the fact, the ECB has taken charge of the situation and is now effectively running fiscal policy for most of the euro zone by simply buying enough Greek, Italian, Spanish and maybe French bonds to keep yields from going too high, but not buying so many as to reduce yields to anything like comfortable levels.
By Geoffrey Orsak – The production of physics degrees is but one reason to maintain the existence of physics programs. Even with the longstanding federal funding for physics programs, our country has never produced much more than 6,000 physics graduates a year. Yet the entire enterprise of modern science, engineering, and medicine requires strong and available physics departments to teach the extensive physics curricula required by nearly every technical discipline.
