NASA Heads Toward Friday Night Launch

Blogger Note: Updated at 10:47 a.m.

NASA is marching through the last full day of countdown preparations at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and the weather forecast for the planned Friday night launch of a Delta II rocket and the Kepler spacecraft is near-perfect.

The 12-story United Launch Alliance rocket and the planet-hunting probe are scheduled to blast off from Launch Complex 17-B at 10:49 p.m. Friday. There will be two, three-minute launch windows: 10:49 p.m. through 10:52 p.m. and 11:13 p.m. through 11:16 p.m.

Air Force meteorologists say there is less than a five percent chance that conditions would prevent a launch.

"It's going to be just about as good as it gets," said Kennedy Space Center spokesman George Diller,

Check out the Official Launch Forecast from the Air Force 45th Space Wing Weather Squadron.

The NASA-ULA launch team today is making preparations for the scheduled 1 p.m. Friday rollback of the Mobile Service Tower at Launch Complex 17-B. Preps to fuel the Delta II rocket for launch also are under way also with final pad close-outs. An engineering walk-down of the launch tower also is scheduled.

The final countdown to the launch will pick up at 5:30 p.m. EDT Friday and you can watch live NASA TV coverage here in The Flame Trench beginning at 8:30 p.m. Simply click the NASA TV box on the righthand side of this page to launch our NASA TV viewer and live coverage, and be sure to refresh this page for periodic updates.

We'll also send text message alerts on the status of the launch. Sign up here to receive those alerts on your cell phone.

Check out James Dean's most excellent story on the unprecedented mission here: Kepler Looks For ET's Home.

Click here to download and save NASA's official Kepler Press Kit

Click here for NASA's Kepler Fact Sheet

For a look at other missions coming up, take a look at our new Florida Today Space Coast Launch Schedule.