Europa Clipper Sails Toward Launch
Jupiter’s moon Europa hides a vast water ocean under a protective layer of ice. The Europa Clipper mission will send a powerful orbiter to investigate. Mission system manager L. Alberto (Al) Cangahual...
25 Aug 202144min
How Perseverance drives itself around Mars
NASA’s Perseverance is driving farther and faster than any previous Mars rover, thanks to its advanced AutoNav system. Vandi Verma, the mission’s chief engineer for robotics at NASA’s Jet Propulsion L...
11 Aug 202154min
Space Policy Edition: Mars via the Nuclear Option
Can nuclear propulsion fundamentally transform our ability to send humans to Mars? Bhavya Lal, a policy and nuclear engineering expert now working at NASA, helped write a new report on the topic for t...
6 Aug 20211h 10min
Alan Stern Says It’s Time for Suborbital Science
An experiment rode next to Richard Branson when he rocketed to the edge of space on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo last month. Planetary scientist Alan Stern says we’ve begun a new era of affordable s...
4 Aug 202146min
Andy Chaikin on Apollo 15 and the lessons of Apollo
Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan said of Andy Chaikin’s book A Man on the Moon, “I’ve been there. Chaikin took me back.” Andy returns to help us mark the 50th anniversary of Apollo 15 and the first use...
28 Juli 20211h 27min
Amy Mainzer and a New Asteroid-Hunting Space Telescope
We may finally get the powerful telescope we’ve needed to find almost all of the near-Earth objects that are big enough to destroy a city. University of Arizona professor Amy Mainzer leads the NEO Sur...
21 Juli 202149min
We’re Going Back to Venus
Sue Smrekar and Jim Garvin woke up in June to some of the best news a planetary scientist can receive. Their complementary missions to Venus had just been given the green light by NASA. The VERITAS an...
14 Juli 20211h 2min
