There’s been no shortage of big news in the world of space science these past few months: water on the moon, the successful completion of the Atlantis STS-129 mission, and the unveiling of the first commercial spacecraft among them.

However, it looks like there are some potentially HUGE developments coming our way in the very new future. Scientists are in the process of discovering thousands of previously unknown planets, and it’s expected that the number of Earth-link planets could easily be in the hundreds.

The official announcements will begin to roll out next month, but based on the comments of those involved, it seems clear that there are some big new discoveries on the horizon. Here’s the quote that got our attention:

“I was not prescient enough to anticipate something that we’re seeing,” David Latham, a mission co-investigator from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told msnbc.com. “There are some good things coming.”

What does that mean? Who knows, but it looks like we’ll be finding out soon. In the meantime, watch this video about the Kepler spacecraft and the COROT satellite and cross your fingers that we’re all about to have our minds blown by whatever it is they’re about to uncover.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Notes from Dom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.