Another mission named after a famous physicist. This time we’re looking at the Planck mission, designed to study the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation over the entire sky. Like the previous WMAP mission, this will help astronomers understand the first moments after the Big Bang.

The twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have been crawling around the surface of Mars since early 2004 – years longer than they were expected to live. And what they have discovered there on Mars has given scientists their best understanding of Martian geology over the last few billion years. Let’s investigate these amazing rovers and their ongoing mission.

Last week we talked about Lyman Spitzer, and this week we’ll take a look at the orbiting observatory that bears his name: the Spitzer Space Telescope. Designed to see into the infrared spectrum, Spitzer has returned images of objects that were previously hidden to astronomers by thick shrouds of gas and dust.

The first interplanetary series of missions was the American Mariner program. These successful spacecraft visited Mercury, Venus, and Mars, and laid the groundwork for the US missions to the outer planets. Let’s take a look at the program and their incredible accomplishments.

Launched in 1977, the twin Voyager spacecraft were sent to explore the outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Because of a unique alignment of the planets, Voyager 2 was the first spacecraft to ever make a close approach to Uranus and Neptune. Let’s take a look back at this amazing program, and see where the spacecraft are today.

Space missions are expensive to build and launch, so there’s a lot of planning that goes into choosing exactly what’s going to be shot into space. Space scientists and engineers recently went through the process of deciding on their science goals, so we thought we’d spend an episode explaining how this works, and how the next generation of spacecraft and telescopes will be selected.

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory is the third of NASA’s Great Observatories, sent into space aboard the space shuttle to view the Universe in high energy X-ray radiation. This is the territory of supernovae, supermassive black holes and neutron stars; some of the most extreme places in the Universe.

Last week we studied Kepler the man, and this week we take a look at Kepler, the mission. Launched in March, 2009, this is a spacecraft designed to search for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. Let’s take a look at the history this mission, the launch and the science gathered so far.