But NASA has a big launch planned for Saturday.
The space agency is sending up a new Mars rover named Curiosity. It will take some eight months to reach the Red Planet.
And once it's there, Curiosity will search for signs of Martian life.
Well, all of this week, we will be taking a closer look at efforts to find life in outer space.
And John Zarrella joins us from CNN Miami. John, we had the editorial meeting earlier. We were talking about you.
We said it would be great to have breaking news this week that John Zarrella has discovered life out there in space.
But tell us what they're up to this week.
Haven't discovered life quite yet, but you know you mentioned that Mars rover and its ability to actually search for signs of life.
It's the first time ever that a NASA spacecraft, a rover, has gone to Mars with that capability.
So there's some high expectations that if life ever existed there it... they may be able to pick up on it.
So, given that as a backdrop, we decided... you know what?
Let's take a look at how the search for life in the universe overall is going. And what we've found is pretty fascinating.
Probes to Mars, telescopes searching for other Earths, listening for life out there.
There's no proof yet, but the body of evidence is growing -- we are not alone.
But one thing that strikes you is that every time we learn something new about the universe, what we learn is that our situation doesn't seem to be all that special.
And that suggests that life is not all that special, either.
But it is still just that: a guess, based in part on astronomy in overload, findings from telescopes like Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra --
new discoveries at a breathtaking rate, revealing the sheer mind-blowing grandeur of the universe. Consider these heavenly numbers just for a minute.
Perhaps one trillion -- with a T, that's right, trillion -- galaxies in the universe.
Stars, you ask? OK, how about 300 sextillion? That's three followed by 23 zeroes.
So where does that leave us with planets, more specifically, planets like our own?
We're learning something that's of fundamental importance to mankind: how frequent are Earths around other stars?
Bill Borucki is the principal investigator for NASA's Kepler telescope. Its mission: find planets similar in size to the Earth,
orbiting their suns. So far, it has been successful beyond expectations.
Of the 1,200 planet candidates Kepler has found, nearly 70 are Earth sized.
The indication from data that we have in hand is that small planets are common, that the galaxy makes them efficiently. So they're going to be abundant.
The number is large enough so there must be, you know, many billions of such planets in our galaxy. So, that's been a very happy surprise.
How many are orbiting at just the right distance from the sun to support life?
More than 50 candidates found so far where life might be possible.
What Kepler can't do is detect life. So, for now that will remain just a guess.