NASA called

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was created by Congress in 1958, purportedly to explore space and study aeronautics. Although part of its declared mission was to ensure that the space program would be conducted for peaceful purposes only, we now know that much of what NASA does is expressly military in nature. There have been many more manned and unmanned space missions than the ones the public has been told about. We can only guess at what they were designed to accomplish and whether they succeeded or failed.

But there is one mission that we know exactly what it was meant to do. The Kepler Space Observatory, named after German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, was launched on March 7, 2009 to look for Earth-size planets orbiting other stars.

And they’ve found lots of them. Over one thousand already.

Back here on Earth, we try to ignore all the telemarketers and spammers calling our shop during the day, but when NASA’s Ames Research Center calls, we answer the phone. They’ve called before, as have the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the White Sands Missile Range, and the U.S. Air Force on several occasions. They’re always looking for new maps and globes and we’ve got what they need at worldmapsonline.com and 1worldglobes.com.

This time, NASA needed us to create giant, custom inflatable globes of some of Kepler’s latest discoveries. They sent us the digital artwork they had created and we had it fashioned into a new family of globes – all thanks to the Kepler Observatory that’s still flying today in an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit through space.