I suppose every handyman at one time or another has asked his wife, “Honey, have you seen my grease gun?” Well, that phrase probably wasn’t uttered in this case, but NASA astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper did indeed lose her grip on a $100,000 tool pouch while performing maintenance outside the International Space Station on Tuesday. And as they say, it simply drifted away…
 
The incident happened as she was cleaning up a mess from a leaky grease gun (something all earthbound handymen and women really can relate to). One would think that the brilliant minds at NASA would have anticipated something like this and taken measures to prevent it (such as tethering the bag to the astronaut), but apparently not.

I guess it just goes to show that even the brightest and best among us can make mistakes. They are only human after all. But at $100,000, what a mistake it was! Maybe next time they should simply buy their tools at Sears?

Astronomers have predicted for centuries that many stars in the universe probably have planets orbiting around them, and in recent decades their actual existence has been proven via mountains of “circumstantial evidence”. But now we actually have visible-light photographs of a Jupiter sized planet orbiting a star named Fomalhaut, which lies approximately 25 light years from earth in the constellation Piscis Austrinus (the Southern Fish).

For the first time in human history we can actually see an extra-solar planet. To many, this might not seem like a very big deal, but indeed it is. Why? Because with billions of galaxies in the universe, each of which contains billions of stars, there are surely many billions of planets as well – and at least some of those planets are sure to be just the right distance from their host star to support life. I have always believed that we are not alone in the universe, and the announcement by NASA that the Hubble Space Telescope has photographed planet Fomalhaut B is one step further in our effort to seek out life on a distant world.

Thanks to the Hubble and our amazing robotic explorers, we are learning more and more each day about the magnificent universe in which our Creator has placed us. What an exciting time to be alive on planet earth!