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Podcaster: Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay

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Title: Astronomy Cast: Ep. 752: Should We Go to the Moon or Mars Next?

Organization: Astronomy Cast

Link: http://www.astronomycast.com

Description: Streamed live on April 16, 2025.

There is an ongoing debate on where NASA should go next with humans: to the Moon or Mars. (Or maybe an asteroid or one of Mars’ moons). We are on the verge of sending humans back to the Moon. At the same time others would prefer we focus our exploration on Mars. It’s a tough choice because there are costs and benefits to both. Let’s try to give this conversation some nuance. Let’s discuss the reasons for each of these worlds.

Bio: Fraser Cain is the publisher of Universe Today and Dr. Pamela Gay is a Senior Scientist at Planetary Science Institute and a Director of  CosmoQuest. They team up to do Astronomy Cast, a weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos

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Transcript:

[Fraser Cain]

Astronomy Cast Episode 752 Should we go to the Moon or Mars next? Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Kean, I’m the publisher of Universe Today.

With me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, how are you doing?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

I am doing well, and happy is that a meteor, a satellite, or a lightning bug season for all those who celebrate.

[Fraser Cain]

Wow, I wish we had lightning bugs. We have non-lightning lightning bugs.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Oh.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah. They are genetically lightning bugs, but they don’t light up, which is really disappointing.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Those are failed lightning bugs.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah, they have one job. But man, spring is just exploding all around us. It’s amazing how much of just the swallows are back, all of my tulips are up, the daffodils are up, and we are laughing.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And it’s the lyrids and the eta aquarids. So if for some reason you feel the need to get up before dawn, it’s wild out there. Because it’s often easiest to see meteor showers in the couple of hours before astronomical twilight and sunrise.

You are seeing them at the same time that sunrise has already occurred at orbit. So I know that the meteor showers are about to tick up at the same time that I start seeing more and more satellites. And so I swear, it is always this, is that, no, is that, no.

[Fraser Cain]

That meteor is moving too slowly.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Or it’s a lightning bug in switched directions, it’s one or the other.

[Fraser Cain]

And so one other piece of news, I just bought a Seastar S50. We’ve been touting them, but we’ve never actually owned them or used them. And so I just got one.

And I’m already sort of climbing the difficult mountain of new knowledge. But please, I’m sure some of you out there have these things, and you’ve already gone through all of the things that you had to learn early on. And so if you’ve got recommendations, let me know, please.

All right. We are on the verge of sending humans back to the Moon. At the same time, others would prefer we focus our exploration on Mars.

It’s a tough choice because there are costs and benefits to both. Let’s try to give this conversation some nuance. So before we have this conversation, I want to have a larger fundamental conversation about the value of human space exploration.

Because I think there’s going to be a bunch of people who are listening to this are going to say, why are you talking about the Moon or Mars? The answer is neither. Duh.

We send the robots. So let’s just take a second and explain why we think that there is a place for human space exploration.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

So there’s two different groups of humans that go to space now. One of them is the folks that are going up on government-funded missions, typically. And these humans are doing this for a trio of reasons.

One is just general peacekeeping, being able to keep the International Space Station functioning as a multinational endeavor is perhaps one of the things that keeps the U.S. and Russia talking on good grounds. And our two nations have been, and the USSR prior to that, have been trying to enable peace through science for decades. So peacekeeping is one reason that you put humans in space.

Then there is also the fact that we have thumbs and creativity. And having humans in space allows us to tinker and to fix and to figure things out in ways that would require purpose-built robots at this point. So having humans allows creative activities that otherwise just can’t quite happen yet.

We’re really good construction workers and mechanics. And so putting humans in space to do those things that are spur of the moment and to fix those things that suddenly go boink in the night is something that we’re also good at. And then the third reason to put us up there is we’re studying the biology of it.

We are our own test subjects. And we need to fund the humans as test subjects because then there is that second population of humans, the extremely wealthy, who are going to go no matter what.

[Fraser Cain]

Who will think about them?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And it’s probably for the best that we’re able to go, look, look, you need to know before you go, this is how you stay alive. Because we have already learned that capitalism causes people to do unsafe things. And unfortunately, an entire crew of submariners thought it was or very wealthy would-be submariners thought it was a good idea to get in a tank controlled by a video game controller to attempt to go to the Titanic.

And while going to the bottom of the ocean is actually way harder than going to low Earth orbit, that mission demonstrated people will do stupid things.

[Fraser Cain]

So I want to completely disagree with your first two premises and partially disagree with your third premise. All right. Go for it.

So I think that there is no reason, no justifiable reason to send humans instead of robots to anywhere ever.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

You think the robots are good enough now?

[Fraser Cain]

The robots are good now and they’re going to get better and they do it for a fraction of the price. And so, and they are safe and nobody gets hurt. And so you always send it like, if you need an outcome, then you send a robot.

If you want to explore Mars, you send a robot. If you want to explore the moon, you send a robot. If you want to explore space, you send a robot.

You always send robots, robots, robots, robots, but, um, but, but space is what’s next. And so once you have stripped away all of your reasons and rationales and justifications, all you’re left with is because that’s the next place for human beings to go because we’re curious and we want to do it and we want to prove it. And I think the most powerful words that have ever been spoken about space exploration that came from, from Kennedy when he said, you know, we choose to go to the moon, um, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard that, that it brings out the best of us, that, that accomplishing that feat demonstrates to ourselves that that’s the thing that we’re able to do.

And, and so, you know, when people say we should just send robots to the moon and Mars, you know, the, I always counter with, well, why don’t you just send your iPhone on a European vacation? Right.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

So I do want to point out, you asked the question to space and space versus another world are slightly different questions.

[Fraser Cain]

Well, I think you’re, I mean, I think if you were going to use those same reasons, you know, you could still send a robot to Mars. Like it doesn’t matter that you send a robot with thumbs.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

So, and I just think that because, because as soon as you make this argument that we need, you know, that makes it more sense to send a human for, for all of these different reasons, then someone will go, look, I made a robot, it’s got thumbs and now your argument falls apart. And then human space exploration is, is locked away forever. Right?

And old thumbs bought 2.0 goes to Mars, gives us the thumbs up and we never send people. And I think we don’t want to close off that Avenue of exploration that, that there’s just something special about a human climbing a mountain, about a human getting into a better built submarine and going down to the deep ocean, about a human going to the surface of the moon and a human going to Mars. And that once you can, once you strip away all of those reasons, you’re left with one that is pure and there really is no argument against it.

We go because that’s what’s next. We go because that is X, that is the heart of exploration.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And humans can be disobedient, which sounds like a really stupid justification, but there, there’s a story of a NASA astronaut basically being like, we’re going to get that rock. And it was a rock they weren’t supposed to get. It was a rock they were told to ignore, head back and they got the rock and the rock turned out, if I’m remembering the story correctly, to have probably been a meteorite from another world that hit the moon that we brought back to earth.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah. Again, I think we can send rebellion bot with thumbs to the moon and Mars. So again, you know, if you’re looking for this kind of control rebellion, I think you can still program it into a bot.

But okay. So, so I just wanted to get that, that first thing. And so the people who are like, never send humans, only send robots.

Like we, we hear you and we did, we disagree and we disagree for faith based reasons. So, so it’s really hard to have an argument with us now about this because we feel in our bones that it would be cool that humans could go to the moon or Mars. All right.

Now we’re going to make the case for those two worlds. All right. All right.

So, um, make the case for sending humans to the moon first.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Launch windows. It turns out that because the moon is going round and round the earth and the biggest concern at a certain level about when to land is what is the phase of the moon when you get there? We can pretty much go once a month, no big deal.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And, and with Mars, we’re looking at a launch window, November, December, 2026. Another one, December, 2028, January, 2029.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah. Every two years.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah. And it turns out iterative design to a point is really the way to figure these things out. So, so just like with the Apollo program, you go, you orbit, you make sure your spacecraft is good to come home.

You go, you almost land or land. You come home and, and this constant iterative design to make sure your spacecraft and everything else works, this get all of your goods there before you get there. You can do all of that so much faster when you have the potential for a monthly cadence of launches.

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

And the flight time to the moon is days, just a couple of days. And so the amount of radiation you’re going to experience is very low. The ability to send resupply, you know, you don’t even have to necessarily follow that launch cadence.

If you need to send emergency supplies, you could send it off cycle and still have it get there. Like you’re not going to time it perfectly for the, for the day, but it doesn’t matter if they really need more toilet paper, you can send that instantaneously and it’ll get there. The amount of time they spend in, in direct radiation is lower because in theory, once you’re on the moon, you can hide from the, from the radiation.

And then when you’re done and you want to come home, you can come home anytime you want. And so, and so I, I a hundred percent agree with you that it, that what you’re getting is this launch cadence, this mission cadence that you are, you are quickly cycling through your ideas. You’re learning your mistakes and you’re fixing them as rapidly as possible.

You’re getting 24 times as many chances to learn lessons by going to the moon as you are by going to Mars.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah. It’s, it’s more like 26, 28, but yeah, it’s wildly more chances and you can even, if you feel like it, land and take off when it’s dark. So come and go as you please.

Some of the orbits are slightly more energy efficient than others, but come and go as you please. And while we very rarely take advantage of that with the international space station, astronauts who are up there have stayed up there when parents have passed away, when other terrible things have happened down on earth and their job kept them in place. But if a medical emergency did arise, we could deal with it in some cases easier than we can deal with medical emergencies in Antarctica.

So if someone gets cancer on the moon or the international space station, we don’t have to worry about the fact that it’s winter, so you can’t take off. Or you’re on Mars, so you can’t come home. Right, exactly.

So that increased launch window gives us the chance to recover from mistakes. It gives us the chance to iteratively design rapidly. It gives us the chance to just try things and know if this doesn’t work, we’re just a couple of days away from home.

[Fraser Cain]

And is that 95% of the reason to go to the moon first?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

No.

[Fraser Cain]

Okay. You think there’s some other good reasons that have nothing to do with cadence, okay, and distance?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah. So beyond that, the moon has some nice places for dealing with thermodynamics, for lack of a better way to put it. The rise and fall of temperatures that you have to deal with on these worlds that don’t have as much light are killer.

Now Mars does have something of an atmosphere, it doesn’t have the extreme swings in temperature that you find in the moon. But what the moon has is permanently shadowed craters.

[Fraser Cain]

There are permanently shadowed craters, but there aren’t any permanently illuminated peaks on the moon. But there are places that are illuminated 97%, like you’re going to get a couple of hours of darkness and the rest of the time you’re in sunlight.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

For all intents and purposes of battery packs, they’re good. On Mars, places near the pole have polar ice caps that come and go. And I don’t know about you, but I am perfectly comfortable with burrowing into a crater to build a home in its rocky goodness.

And I am uncomfortable on Earth’s glaciers and definitely do not want to be trying to build a home on Mars glaciers.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah, that’s pretty scary. And then I think you’re getting four times as much sunlight at Earth and the moon as you are on Mars. And so you need dramatically bigger solar panels to be able to accumulate that energy.

Once you’re out to Jupiter, I think it’s 125th the solar energy that you would have to collect. So if you want to live on Europa. And power is going to be a pretty big, like power is everything.

Whether or not you survive, it comes down to can you generate enough energy? You’re going to need to have more energy if you’re going to go to Mars. So that’s another really big one.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And then as you start thinking about needing solar panels, we all have memories of those poor rovers. We were actually together in Huntsville when we learned about Spirit’s demise. If you get too much dust piled up on a solar panel, it’s no longer going to be able to do its job.

And if you get a dust storm that is too thick for too long, it doesn’t matter if you are capable of going outside with your squeegee and squeegeeing off that solar panel. If the clouds aren’t letting the sunlight through, you’re still going to run out of power. And these storms can last tremendous amounts of time.

And while things like radiothermal generators are an option, do you want to be living with those? They’re great for robots. They’re not as dangerous as a lot of news stories make them out to be, but they still don’t seem like the solution for keeping your base going during a dust storm.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah. You’re going to need some kind of portable fission reactor is probably going to be what it’s going to be. You’re going to be huddled up to.

And you know, those have challenges all on their own. All right. So like, are there any other reasons why you think the moon makes sense?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

There’s as far as we know, less deadly stuff in the regolith.

[Fraser Cain]

Wait a minute. Now I’m going to question that because it doesn’t have perchlorates, but it is like asbestos compared to the Mars dust.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah. So you’re going to bring dust inside in a lot of the different spacesuit scenarios. There are a few that I actually really, really like where you essentially dock the back of your spacesuit to your habitat and you wiggle your arms out and reach up and pull yourself out, which is going to be easier on the moon than on Mars.

Um, and these kinds of scenarios are designed to help keep that sharp as glass, dangerous as asbestos sand out of the confines of the capsule or habitat on the moon.

[Fraser Cain]

But it’s going to get everywhere. Like it’s going to get into every piece of equipment and machinery and every joint and every everything. And this stuff is like, is, is going to grind and cause wear and tear on equipment.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah. It’s gross and terrible. And on Mars, the dust and dirt has been thoroughly weathered, not as weathered as here on earth, just because the atmosphere isn’t as thick and there hasn’t been water for a good long time, but it does have more wear.

So we aren’t fully like, we don’t have a dust sample from Mars to understand exactly how does the sharpness compare between the two worlds? But I don’t think anyone’s planning to try and start a garden with unprocessed regolith that they’ve just mixed poop in and planted potatoes.

[Fraser Cain]

All of the Martian, I mean, those experiments have been run. I mean, not the poop part, but people have attempted to grow plants in, in lunar regolith on the, the Chinese did this on the moon. So, all right.

So we have, like, it feels like the moon is an overwhelmingly good choice. If you’re going to go somewhere, why not go to the moon? But there are some things that Mars has going for it as well.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

So where to start? I mean, the best place to start is it’s at humane temperatures ish, ish, ish. So I, yeah, it can get on freaking believably cold on Mars.

But I still remember the day that little opportunity landed. I was in my office in Harvard. They were talking about the temperatures on Mars.

And I looked at the thermostat, not the thermostat, the temperature readout for our weather station up on the roof. And it was warmer on Mars that day.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah. I mean, like near the equator, Mars can get up to 20 Celsius.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah. Yeah. You can get reasonable temperatures ish.

The air pressure is still such that if you attempted to go outside with just an oxygen mask, you would have massive amounts of bruising. The capillaries on your skin would be like, and we explode now.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah. It’s like a hundred times less air pressure than earth. So but it’s still better than the moon.

Like I think, you know, if you want some atmosphere, then Mars is better than the moon. And that atmosphere gives you protection from radiation. It gives you like a certain tiny, tiny little level of, of atmospheric pressure.

So it’s still like Mars is in the, like you’re already like, oh, they are, their pressure is so low. Well, yeah. But beats the moon.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Right. And, and this also adds a certain dimension of safety. So on the moon, uh, if you put yourself in a permanently shadowed region, which honestly I recommend, uh, your heating goes out, you die because you freeze to death and everything you have with you freezes to non functionality.

You just freeze. If you put yourself in a sunlit area, you’re dealing with this constant temperature cycling, hot to cold, hot to cold. And that is not good for any structure because things thermally expand and contract.

On Mars, you don’t have the same amount of thermal cycling. You have a yearly thermal cycling and you have more, uh, earth-like day, night, like I said, not identical, uh, temperature cycling. Right.

And if your systems go out, this is going to give you a lot more time to try and recover. We know how she dressed for the cold. We can send stuff so that these astronauts can literally bundle themselves up and probably not freeze to death while they’re trying to fix all of their systems.

It also means because there’s more pressure outside that if you get a leak in your system, um, don’t do like the Russians did and attack the leak, trying to figure out what happened. The video, if you have never seen it, there was a very upset cosmonaut that literally attacked one of the components of the international space station trying to figure out a leak. It is hilarious and terrifying.

Do not do that. But while you’re repairing the leak, air is going to escape slower through the same size holes. So all of these slight improvements by you time to try and figure out how to fix things that you don’t have.

[Fraser Cain]

If you’re on the moon, you’ve got more gravity.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yes. So with more gravity, we are still trying to figure out, we do not have enough data on um, how much gravity is necessary to keep human systems happy. Um, there, we don’t know at what point does calcium loss stop, uh, being as big a factor.

We don’t know at what pressure does ocular damage stop being as big an issue, but with higher gravity, if you’re trying to compensate through exercise, you’re probably not going to have to spend quite so many hours banded up trying to exercise against elastic.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Um, yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

And so that day length, you know, on the moon, it’s 14 days of day and 14 days of night. Yeah. On Mars, it’s pretty much almost the same as earth, like 20, you get 45 more minutes.

Yeah. Yeah. So just shy of 25 hours.

And that’s, that feels like the, almost the nicest thing. And it’s interesting, um, people have done experiments, like people have gone into caves and let their circadian rhythms just become detached from the actual day night cycle. And it turns out human beings can shift to longer rhythms.

So it should be easy to adapt to a Mars day.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

There was one insane researcher. Um, if he was sane, when he went in, he was not entirely sane when he came out.

[Speaker 3]

Yeah.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Who put himself in a completely dark scenario for, I want to say it was 75 days. Um, and his day night cycle shifted to about 30 hours.

[Fraser Cain]

Yes. So there’s room there to breathe for sure.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah. So the longer day, uh, especially if you put it all into your sleep, Lord knows most of us don’t get enough sleep. Um, it’s going to be a good thing.

[Fraser Cain]

And then, you know, we talked about, and I think this one is the wash, which is that on the moon, the regolith is glass and will cause long-term health damage. And it’s your bloodstream. It is less jagged on Mars, but still not totally safe.

Like there’s some, there’s some research we’ve been reporting on this. Well, not even just the Prochlorates. We’ll get to that in a second.

But, but that even the shape of the stuff on Mars is potentially dangerous that it can be, you know, very small, very, you know, the dust can go into your lungs and can cause potentially damage emphysema, bronchitis, things like that. So, um, but on Mars it is filled with Prochlorates or not filled, but has like 1% of its weight is Prochlorate, which is poison. So you have to wash this stuff.

If you want any chance of, of interacting with it and not causing damage, you know, your poop potatoes will need to be in washed regolith, not just straight up.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

Um, are there any other advantages to being on Mars?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

So.

[Fraser Cain]

Moons?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

I mean, there, there is option C and any of you who remember the early days of the constellation program back under the Obama administration, it feels like every president has their own goals for space exploration. Um, there, the idea was moon asteroid Mars. And the reason that you want to go to something like a distant moon, so Phobos Deimos, go to an asteroid that is not in the main asteroid belt, but is closer, is these are that intermediate experiment where we don’t know if we can successfully land on Mars and then take back off.

It could very easily be a one-way journey. We know that we know how to take back off of lower gravity things like the moon.

And asteroids come in sizes that are very moon-like and smaller down to as small as you want basically. And so these lower gravity environments allow us to go someplace that has all the challenges of Mars in terms of distance, in terms of light travel time, lag. That’s something that didn’t come up is you can have an awkward real-time conversation with someone on Earth if you’re on the moon.

You’re looking at times when there’s absolutely no communications allowed because the Sun is annoyingly located with Mars. There’s blackout windows, there’s 20-minute delays even in some of the most optimum conditions.

[Fraser Cain]

And then I think there’s a bunch of stuff that’s awash. There’s lava tubes on both worlds, so you can use those. There are local resources that you can use, various kinds of metals and silicon and oxygen and all this kind of stuff on both.

There is access to water in both places, you know, in different spots. So I think a lot of that stuff is awash. So I think we’ve reached the end of our episode now.

So I guess we’ll both vote, but I suspect we’re gonna say the same thing, which is that if you then had to come, you know, someone said choose, you’ve got to decide. It’s one or the other. We’re going to the moon, we’re going to Mars, or to an asteroid first.

What is your answer?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

The moon.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah, me too. Yeah, it’s the moon. It’s so clearly the moon.

But okay, like I want to throw a bone to the Mars people.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

If we, in all of humanity’s future space exploration, were only able to go back or go to one of those worlds, and we did it and we were very successful, which is the one that you would have preferred that we would have gone to?

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Mars, because I want to go fossil.

[Fraser Cain]

Mars would be, yeah, like the one that we want to go to is is Mars.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

But the one that we think practically makes sense is the moon first, then go to Mars. So I think we have no disagreement with the Mars people. Right.

It’s just baby steps.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Can we practice first?

[Fraser Cain]

Can we practice first? Yeah. Yeah.

Before we put it all on the line and go to the world that is so much farther and so much more dangerous.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah. And like I said, fossil hunting. You can do fossil hunting on Mars.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah. Mars is just so cool.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

And yeah, all of these places, someone’s mentioning in the in the chat, right? Valles Marineris, Olympus Mons, these incredible terrain that Mars is just going to feel like to be in that one third gravity, Mars is going to feel like another place. It is the one that I emotionally would rather us explore.

Someone’s saying we’ve already been to the moon. That’s exactly true. We’ve already been to the moon.

So Mars is the one that emotionally we want to go to. But practically, if we want to do this right, if we want to be careful and rational, we go to the moon first, we learn all our skills, and then we go to Mars.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

And I want to recommend the book Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s older, but it still stands up as one of the few to look at all the sociological issues of going to Mars. And don’t buy into terraforming.

That’s not going to happen anytime soon.

[Fraser Cain]

Anytime soon.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

But yeah.

[Fraser Cain]

Yeah. And then I think the one that will talk you out of all of the reasons that people give for going and living on Mars is… I know what book you’re going to say.

Yeah, is A City on Mars by Zach and Kelly Wienersmith.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Exactly.

[Fraser Cain]

So good. You know, you’re going into it going, I think we should build a giant city on Mars. You’ll come out the other side of it going, there is no point to build a giant city on Mars.

So all right. Well, that was awesome. Thanks, Pamela.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Thank you, Fraser. And thank you to all of our patrons out there. We would not be here without you.

This week. I want to thank Sergey Manilov, Conrad Hailing, Tasha Nikini, the mysterious Mark, Hale McKinney, John Herman, Joanne Mulvey, Katie and Alyssa, Papa Hot Dog, Michael Hartford, Will Hamilton, Fairchild, Just as it Sounds, J.P. Sullivan, Galactic President Scooper Star McScoopsalot, Boogie Nets, Zeggy Kemmler, David Troge, Nick Boyd, William Andrews, Alexis, Adam Annis Brown, Astro Sets, Gold, Simon Parton, Claudia Mastroianni, Abraham Cottrell, Arctic Fox, Andrew Stevenson, Jim McGeehan, Gregory Singleton, David Gates, Georgie Ivanov, Irene Zegrev, Father Prax, Nate Detweiler, Dwight Ilk, Disastrina, Lou Zealand, Paul D.

Disney, Peter, Alex Rain, Ruben McCarthy, Astro Bob, Alan Gross, Elliot Walker, Jeff McDonald, David Rossetta, Travis Siporko, Mike Haizu. Thank you all so very much.

[Fraser Cain]

Thanks, everyone. And we’ll see you next week.

[Dr. Pamela Gay]

Bye bye, everyone.

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Planetary Science Institute. Audio post production by me, Richard Drumm, project management by Avivah Yamani, and hosting donated by libsyn.com. This content is released under a creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. Please share what you love but don’t sell what’s free.

This show is made possible thanks to the generous donations of people like you! Please consider supporting our show on Patreon.com/CosmoQuestX and get access to bonus content. Without your passion and contribution, we won’t be able to share the stories and inspire the worlds. We invite you to join our community of storytellers and share your voice with listeners worldwide.

As we wrap up today’s episode, we are looking forward to unravel more stories from the Universe. With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories, and each milestone in space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within it.

Until next time let the stars guide your curiosity!