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Liftoff Houston!
Stephanie: Hi, my name is Stephanie L. Smith.
I'm the digital and social media supervisor here
at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, CA.
And right now we are in mission control, which we
sometimes refer to as the center of the universe.
This is where all of the data for space craft beyond
the moon flow through before they go off to the
Science and Engineering teams.
So we handle communications for NASA missions, European
space agency, Japanese space agency, it all comes
through right here in Pasadena, California.
What makes the deep space network unique, this series
of radio dishes that we have around the planet, is that
it allows us to have 24/7 communication with space
craft beyond the moon.
You have to be able to see something in space
in order to talk to it.
It's called line of sight transmission.
So our three DSN arrays
are in
California,
Australia,
and Spain - about 120 degrees around the earth.
So as the globe turns and one station sets, another
one comes online allowing us to have that
constant contact.
We've now found more than 4,000 planets around
other suns.
These are called exoplanets and they're really weird.
There are worlds out there that are so close to their
suns that they don't have solid surfaces, they just
have lava.
There are other worlds where it rains diamonds.
There are even rogue planets that have been cast free
of their solar systems and I like to say that the
night life never ends there.
Lots of weird worlds mostly found by NASA's Kepler
space telescope and one of the things that Kepler
taught us is that there are more planets than stars.
So the next time you find yourself in a dark sky
condition and you can look up and you can actually
see the stars, just know that there's probably at
least one planet for each of those stars if not an
entire system and let that dance around in your mind.
My first point of contact with Star Trek was definitely
'The Original Series' in rerun with my dad. I was
probably 5 or 6 years old and he would bake chocolate
chip cookies and we'd sit down and we'd watch the series
together and it really did spark a lifelong love of
space travel and exploration and boldly going
and now I get to, you know, open hailing frequencies
on social media channels and talk to the world
about all of the great work that we do here at NASA.
Live long and prosper everybody.