So how about this... Nasa scientists on the hunt for extraterrestrial life announced the discovery of Earth's closest twin: it has the jazzy name of Kepler-452b.
Shortly to be shipped off for launch, due later this year, this Nasa mission is designed to answer fundamental questions about the Martian atmosphere.
The Landsat 7 imagery used for this NASA-CASA modeling was collected on August 29 , 2001
Another big winner is Ridley Scott's The Martian with seven nominations, and this is another likeable, good-natured film about a Nasa astronaut marooned on Mars which is riding a wave of popularity, very much on the back of Matt Damon's boyish and winning lead performance.
"Of course," says Blumenthal, still grumpy about it, "Nasa weren't having that".
"This is really a call to action to find all asteroid threats to human populations and know what to do about them," Nasa Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said last week.
And if there is an entertaining movie about a Nasa mission to Mars, which at certain points is almost a feature-length ad for Nasa … well why not time your latest announcement to coincide with its release?
In an article for the Evening Standard in 2014, Berger described Gravity, a Time Warner film "about a Nasa space mission, made by a Mexican director, starring two of the world's biggest American stars" as a "great example of the evolution of British film" because it was "shot, produced, mixed and edited in Britain".
This is because Apollo 18 is about Nasa's discontinued moon-landing programme.
It could hardly have come at a more spookily appropriate time: just when film-fans and the media are getting excited about the entertaining new sci-fi movie The Martian, about a troubled Nasa mission to Mars, released this week in the UK and the US.
