Astronauts
in space are hard at work building the International Space Station, but that
doesn't mean they are immune to the lure of Earth's NCAA college basketball
championship tournament.
The
seven astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery, currently docked at
the station, are receiving updates on the basketball tournament in their daily
electronic mail. Mission Control has been beaming up the latest brackets for
the teams since Friday.
"It's
strictly keeping them up to date in the games," NASA spokesperson Kyle Herring
told SPACE.com from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Discovery
has been linked to the $100 billion International Space Station since Tuesday
to ferry a new crewmember to the orbiting lab and deliver the outpost's final
set of U.S. solar arrays. The $298 million solar
wings were unfurled on Friday, and astronauts plan to perform the
second of three planned spacewalks on Saturday.
Herring
said that before astronauts launch into space, they have a chance to choose
which types of news or events to be included in their daily news roundup. One of Discovery's
crewmembers likely asked for NCAA basketball tournament updates, he said.
Discovery's
crew has at least one diehard basketball fan, lead spacewalker Steve
Swanson, who mentioned his affinity for the game among his interests in his
NASA biography. His crewmates also listed a variety
of sports, including snowboarding, hiking, hang-gliding, soccer and NASCAR
among others.
Discovery astronauts
will miss the first two rounds of the basketball tournament, since they
launched on March 15 and will land on March 28. The three long-duration
astronauts on the space station, however, have to wait longer.
Space
station skipper Michael Fincke of NASA, an
admitted a football fan, is due to return to Earth with Russian cosmonaut
on April 7 with a visiting American space tourist after spending six months in
orbit. However, they are set to land on the barren steppes of Kazakhstan in
Central Asia, where U.S. college basketball tournament results may be harder to
come by.
SPACE.com
is providing continuous coverage of STS-119 with reporter Clara Moskowitz and
senior editor Tariq Malik in New York. Click here for mission
updates, live spacewalk coverage and SPACE.com's live NASA TV video feed.
Live spacewalk coverage begins at 11:45 a.m. EDT (1545 GMT).
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