Time Magazine has released its list of the 50 Best Inventions of 2009.  It’s worth checking out – tons of interesting stuff.

Topping the list is NASA’s Ares Rocket. Yay!  And the Herschel Space Observatory is also on it, which happens to be the subject of our latest video for Time.com.

Herschel is a European Space Agency mission but, like so many space ventures today, it’s an international collaboration.  NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed two of the three instruments with which it will study the far-infrared and submillimeter wavelengths – analyzing some of the coldest objects in space, hoping to shed light on star formation.  And, cooled by liquid helium to just a fraction above absolute zero, Herschel’s instruments are themselves some of the coldest objects in space – at least for the next three years, til the helium runs out.

We visited JPL and CalTech to speak to Paul Goldsmith, the NASA Herschel Mission scientist.

For more information about Herschel:

Jet Propulsion Laboratory Herschel Mission Home Page

Herschel at CalTech

ESA Science & Technology: Herschel

Herschel Science Centre

Herschel on Wikipedia

From the Wikipedia entry on Vega:

Vega is the brightest star in the constellation Lyra, the fifth brightest star in the night sky and the second brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, after Arcturus.  It is a relatively nearby star at only 25.3 light-years from Earth, and, together with Arcturus and Sirius, one of the most luminous stars in the Sun’s neighborhood.

Vega has been extensively studied by astronomers, leading it to be termed, “arguably the next most important star in the sky after the Sun”.^[8] Historically, Vega served as the northern pole star at about 12,000 BCE and will do so again at around 14,000 CE. Vega was the first star, other than the Sun, to have its photograph taken and the first to have its spectrum photographed. It was also one of the first stars to have its distance estimated through parallax measurements.

Also:   Vega became the first star to have a car named after it when Chevrolet launched the Vega in 1971.

From their website:

Odyssey Moon is the first team to complete registration for the $30M Google Lunar X PRIZE competition. The company made its first public debut on December 6th, 2007, at the Space Investment Summit in San Jose, California, unveiling its plans to make history with the first private robotic mission to the surface of the Moon and win the Google Lunar X PRIZE. The inaugural Odyssey Moon mission will involve a unique small robotic lander designed to deliver scientific, exploration and commercial payloads to the surface of the Moon.

 
Good luck! The more the merrier!

There’s a promo video on their website but a longer version is available on YouTube:

And the X PRIZE Foundation’s own video from last year explains their “incentivized competition,” inspired by the $25,000 Orteig Prize which Charles Lindbergh won for the first non-stop flight between New York and Paris: