Space Policy Edition: Why are outer planets missions so expensive?
It's the 50th anniversary of Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to the outer planets. Pioneers 10 and 11 were scrappy, low-cost endeavors that blazed the path for future exploration. But the future has ...
4 Mar 20221h 27min
5,000 worlds and counting: the success of TESS
Michelle Kunimoto was one of Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30 in science. Now she leads the most successful search for exoplanets that relies on data delivered by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellit...
2 Mar 202248min
Astrobiologist David Grinspoon on life, the universe and everything
Astrobiologist, planetary scientist, author and science communicator David Grinspoon has just been named a lifetime fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He returns to Pla...
23 Feb 20221h 4min
Saving the world one telescope at a time: The Shoemaker NEO grant winne
The Planetary Society has awarded another eight Gene Shoemaker near-Earth object grants to outstanding amateur astronomers and observatories around the world. We’ll meet recipients from Chile, Croatia...
16 Feb 202256min
The weather on brown dwarfs, and worlds on the eve of destruction
Astrophysicists Sam Grunblatt and Johanna Vos are colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Sam’s team has discovered giant worlds that are about to be devoured by their expand...
9 Feb 202251min
Space Policy Edition: JWST and the politics of mega-science (with Robert Smith)
Robert Smith shares the story of how the astronomical community decided upon the JWST as the follow-up to the Hubble Space Telescope, the coalition politics required for mega-projects like Hubble and ...
4 Feb 20221h 20min
Nobel laureate John Mather: The promise of the James Webb Space Telescope
The JWST’s instruments have been turned on. Now begins the months-long preparation for observations that will reveal our universe as never before. 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics laureate John Mather is ...
2 Feb 20221h 3min
Worlds of snow and ice
From Venus to Pluto, our solar system contains a myriad of planets, moons and other bodies whose surfaces are covered in snow and ice made of water and other exotic stuff. Saturn’s moon Enceladus is a...
26 Jan 202250min
