Space

Yesterday I got to spend the afternoon and evening with Wil, discovering the joys of the carpool traffic. We stopped by Michelle's workplace at Ball Aeropspace to drop off some dinner for her to take to her Mom in Denver and ended up with an unofficial tour of some of the labs, including donning the "bunny suits".

Michelle's most recent spacecraft for the program Kepler, is already in Florida being placed atop a rocket for a March 5th launch. If you click on this link, enter Kepler in the search bar to see photos. Kepler's NASA mission is to search for Earth-type planets around other stars. We also got to see the new Worldview 2 satellite that will provide imaging to Google Earth, among other users, and glimpsed a mirror that will be on the James Webb Telescope, the Hubble replacement.

I'm always in awe when I see these spacecraft. I think about view of the universe they provide, our human desire to find others like us, somewhere out there, and the fragile nature of our own planet. A sign in Michelle's office also makes me smile: "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see there are many women rocket scientists."