Podcaster: Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay
Title: Astronomy Cast: Ep. 753: Why is the Moon’s South Pole So Interesting?
Organization: Astronomy Cast
Link: http://www.astronomycast.com
Description: Streamed live on April 21, 2025.
I’m sure you’ve heard that all eyes are on the Moon’s southern pole. This is where various NASA and Chinese missions are targeting. What makes this region so special and what are the special challenges that explorers will face. From TV shows to real-world missions, it seems like everyone just wants to explore the Moon’s South Pole. But why? Learn here!
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:
20250428-365DoA
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.
[Speaker 3]
It’s the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast, coming in 3-2-1.
[Fraser Cain]
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 Cain. 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. We escaped tornadoes yet again. It is that time of year.
Yesterday was the second anniversary of the first Starship launch, and it was super bittersweet because it was just like, this promised giant telescopes in space, and Artemis, and it’s just so far behind on its deadline, and one of the things I realized you and I have said many times is no longer true, because when they first started on Starlink, we talked about how well with these giant rockets they will be able to just launch 8-meter telescopes, no big deal, all the way into space.
And it turns out that the LSST is 330 tons, and Starship will only be able to launch to LEO 100 tons. And so it’s just sort of like, I have sad. I had much sad.
[Fraser Cain]
Oh, they could slim down Vera Rubin and, you know, because it won’t have to be in space.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
I know.
[Fraser Cain]
So they could probably make it work. But yeah, I mean, it turns out rocket science is hard. Turns out this stuff takes longer.
Turns out having a CEO who is busy doing other things is distracting for the objectives of the company. So yeah, hopefully, maybe this time next year, we will see orbital reusable two-stage rockets. I’m sure you’ve heard that all eyes are on the Moon’s southern pole.
This is where various NASA and Chinese missions are targeting. What makes this region so special? And what are the special challenges that explorers will face?
All right, the Moon, South Pole, why? Water, cold traps.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And one of the things that came up last week, so there’s two different lighting conditions that are kind of awesome. And we touched on this a bit last week. So there are places in the craters that because of the angle that sunlight always comes in, the Sun is just never at a high enough angle to get far enough into these craters to illuminate them.
These permanently shadowed regions act as cold traps, which means that whenever water molecules end up in the super tenuous atmosphere of the Moon, they settle back down and then can form ice and just accumulate inside these cold traps. Now the other side of this is, just as the Sun’s angle never allows some of these areas to get sunlight, I made the mistake last week of saying there were permanently illuminated areas. And that’s the wrong way to put it, because if you have an object that’s like sticking up from the very tip of the South Pole, it’s going to create its own shadow.
So as the Sun goes around, there’s no point on this thing that is sticking up that is always going to be in sunlight. But you can stick up solar panels that just rotate over time.
[Fraser Cain]
From the very top of the mountain.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
You can stick up antennae that radiate in all directions. So you have these points that as the Moon turns, can always get you power and always get you communications.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. So we did some reporting on this about six months ago, where researchers looked at various spots on the North and South Pole of the Moon and tried to calculate what are places that receive the maximum amount of radiance. And so typically, if you’re at the equator of the Moon, you’re going to experience 14 days of sunlight and 14 days of shadow.
But if you get to the poles of the Moon, depending on where the Moon is, like remember, the Moon is not perfectly aligned with the Earth’s orbital plane, and the Earth’s orbital plane is not perfectly aligned with the Sun’s orbital plane. That’s why we get eclipses. Sometimes the Moon is a little higher than the Sun, and other times the Moon is a little lower than the Sun, from our perspective.
And so what that means is that you don’t get equally distributed sunlight on the Moon. But you do get places where it’s down to six hours of darkness throughout the entire lunar month. So it gets very close.
Close enough that you could run off of battery for the time that it’s down or slightly move the position of your solar collecting panels, as you say, to try and keep in that sunlight. So it’s, you know, there’s no guaranteed place that anybody’s been able to find. But on the flip side, there are regions that are in permanent shadow, and there’s a lot of them.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And what is so awesome about this is, like I was talking about last week, there’s the thermal conditions. And one of the scary things about being on another world is the idea of not being able to be in communications with Earth if something goes wrong. And so being able to have that constant communications without having to rely on communication satellites, without having to build an entire communications satellite network, that is all just really, really important.
[Fraser Cain]
Mm hmm. Yeah. So let’s talk about this water, because, I mean, you say that there is water ice there.
So one, do we know where it came from?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Well, I mean, we don’t even know for sure where the Earth’s water came from. So just to be clear, this is one of those things where I can tell you things that we think about. Truth may ultimately prove out to be more or less interesting.
So in general, you do have bodies that contain water smash into the moon periodically, comets, asteroids, chunks off of either of these objects. And when these water-carrying things smash into the surface of the moon, no matter where on the moon it is, you end up with their moisture, their water, their ices, their volatiles getting mixed in. And sometimes they get sent into the atmosphere of the moon.
Sometimes they get buried and they’re able to exist beneath the surface of the moon.
[Fraser Cain]
Now, hold on one second before people send you emails about there’s no atmosphere on the moon. There is an atmosphere on the moon.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
It’s super tenuous. Yeah. This is why the GRAIL mission existed.
It was out there measuring the super tenuous.
[Fraser Cain]
It is 10 to the minus six bars. So it is dramatically lower than even Mars. Mars is this ocean of atmosphere compared to the moon, but it exists.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And it is sufficient. And when I’m talking atmosphere, I’m talking about like a few molecules to put this more in perspective. A few molecules of the volatiles that were in whatever smashed into the moon float up and then land somewhere else.
[Fraser Cain]
Right. And so largely they land somewhere and then the sunlight evaporates them and they head off into space. But every now and then they go down elsewhere.
This stuff lands in these permanently shadowed craters on the moon and they have a chance to join their friends and they stay there.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And it’s Brownian motion.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. It’s amazing though. You think about it like if you give any process billions of years to be carried out, it’s amazing what can build up over time.
And so it could be, it could very well be, as you said, that you’ve got these objects crashing into the moon, just individual particles of water are finding their way to the South Pole and then they are freezing in these craters.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And there is some thinking that there are also probabilities of like comet smashes into moon, comet fragments end up in permanently shadowed region when they crash in and they just live there forever. But the probabilities of that is much to be debated.
[Fraser Cain]
And there’s another theory as well about the solar wind, right?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. So you have the solar wind carrying all sorts of different particles and energy. And when it hits the surface, it can liberate particles and you get hydrogen and oxygen liberated.
There’s a chance that they can mix to form water and any ice that’s there can get liberated.
[Fraser Cain]
Right. So there was some research that just came out like this week is super fresh. I haven’t seen it, sorry. Yeah. So the gist is that people have taken the solar wind, they’ve recreated or simulated the solar wind in the lab, they’ve blasted lunar regolith with high velocity simulated solar wind. And really the solar wind is just protons and then other particles, but mostly protons. And so you smash the protons, as you said, with enough energy into the regolith, you get the liberation of electrons, which join with the protons to create hydrogen atoms.
And then they bond with oxygen atoms that have been liberated. And this creates water right in situ, right on the spot. And this is a reasonable explanation for why people are even finding water throughout the regolith on the moon.
It’s just the sun is constantly blasting with protons and those protons are finding friends and turning into water, which is really cool.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And before anyone asks us, yes, when the moon formed from the great sploosh of proto-earth and Theia colliding, that sploosh of low density material inevitably did include water. That is part of the budget, but it’s not at the surface necessarily. So yes, don’t at me.
[Fraser Cain]
Okay. All right. So, you know, we talked about water, water, water, water and where it came from and why it’s there, but why is water important for lunar exploration?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So it turns out human beings need oxygen and we need water. We are biological creatures. And it also turns out there’s ways to process water and turn it into fuel.
So you have the ability to create fuel. You have the ability to keep human beings alive. So send the robots.
The robot overlords will need fuel. Send humans. The humans will need water and oxygen.
Send both. Both are happy.
[Fraser Cain]
Right. Like break up water, turn into hydrogen and oxygen. That’s rocket fuel.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. You’ve also got oxygen.
[Fraser Cain]
That’s for breathing. You’ve got water. That’s for drinking, for growing plants.
And then also a lot of the really interesting institute resource utilization ideas for harvesting material on the surface of the moon requires large amounts of water. And so if you’re going to try and process elements, make titanium and stuff, you’re going to need a lot of water.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And this is where like Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a really cool book to read because it talks about the idea of mining these resources and all of the issues of if you start exporting anything from the moon, you’re now permanently removing a vital resource. So every time we launch a rocket using ice that is mined there, every time they don’t fully recycle water and oxygen and the byproducts of breathing, so carbon dioxide, they are losing a resource just like every time you use a helium balloon on earth, you’re using up a resource. So it’s just cool to think that on the moon, water and oxygen play a similar role to helium on the surface of our planet.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
So we’ve got this sense that, you know, this is why you want the water. And still from the, and you’ve got potentially access to, to 24 seven power and those two come together to give us a good place. So who is currently planning to visit the South Pole of the moon?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Well, I, there have been some attempts that did not succeed entirely well. Most recently we had one of the Clips missions, Odyssey. It hit the South Pole and skidded for a while and then died a terrible death.
So there’s it lying there dead. We also have Chandrayaan three that has been more of a success landing near the South Pole. That’s part of the Indian super successful.
The Chandrayaan missions are just sweet.
[Fraser Cain]
I mean, Chandrayaan two failed, but three succeeded.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. And, and we’re hoping to land Artemis three there with human beings. China is, I have to admit, have they gone or are they planning to go?
[Fraser Cain]
Well, China has landed a sample return mission on the far side of the moon and they’ve landed near the, not, not at the South Pole, but, but closer to the South Pole from the equator and on the far side of the moon and retrieved samples back to earth. But they are, they are absolutely planning on going to the South Pole of the moon and the same reasons why NASA is planning to do with the Artemis missions.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And one of the super frustrating things for a lot of planetary scientists is the Viper mission that was previously the lunar resource, I forgot the third word, mission. So this is something that’s been under development since around 2015 has changed names along the way. It is done.
It is tested. It is complete. It is ready to go.
[Fraser Cain]
It’s flight to the moon has been paid for.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And they’re not sending it.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. I mean, now under the light of sort of the current cuts that we’re looking at for science, I mean, we may see Nancy Grace Roman get cut. We probably will see the Mars sample return mission get cut.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
We’re probably going to see literally everything, but HST and all of it.
[Fraser Cain]
All of it.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
Hubble, Hubble worlds observatory, like, you know, there’s going to be maintenance. And so these smaller missions, Viper, Titan, Dragonfly, well, because Titan, Dragonfly is not a smaller mission. But anyway, these are all just collateral damage to potential significant science cuts to NASA.
So yeah, it doesn’t surprise me that Viper might, you know, I mean, it was already on the chopping block even before we saw the recent suggested proposed budget cuts.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
But yeah, we’ve, I’ve covered this over on Substack. Yes. I need to move things off Substack.
And we’ve covered this with Escape Velocity Space News. We actually, this week’s episode is going to be talking about the human impacts of the president’s proposed cuts. I do have to say, though, other nations are really picking up.
And this is where looking at what China and India are doing is so cool. You know, Japan’s ice space isn’t aiming towards the pole. It is actually in June looking to land mid northern latitudes, like 60-ish degrees north.
But if ice space, which is doing slow and systematic testing and development, it’s going to be on its way as well. This is the new Wild West. It’s now the Wild South, and it’s dominated by robots.
And I’m here for it.
[Fraser Cain]
Now, this is a completely separate rabbit hole. But there was a presentation at the 40th Space Symposium, where a company that’s working on isotope, like radioactive isotope thermoelectric generators, that they’re planning to install a isotope on an upcoming ice space mission to the moon, which will keep it warm through the dark, cold lunar night. And so, yeah, yeah.
So you can see ideas for how you could keep these spacecraft warm and producing electricity month after month after month, because normally they die, right? Most of these landers are dying as soon as night falls on the moon. But maybe there’s a way to continue further.
All right. Okay. So we’ve got an understanding of why the moon is important.
We’ve got an understanding of sort of what current missions are there. So explain what a future path might be for a return to the moon, and specifically going to the South Pole.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
So what we’re looking at is by robot or human, and most likely a combination of both. First landing outside of a crater, someplace sunny. If you want to die, you land at the bottom of a crater.
So land somewhere high up, like Firefly Aerospace did. Get all those solar rays. And then from your lander, the next step that we’re hoping to be able to do, and this is what makes that failed Odyssey and all of its things on board so frustrating, is they had on board a rover that was going to go drive itself into a permanently shadowed region.
And this is what we want to do is, first of all, make sure, yes, we can do this. Yes, we can navigate. We can not die, because trying to get auto-driving cars going on the planet Earth is complicated enough, and they have headlights and roads and all that sort of stuff.
So now we’re looking to drive a rover on the moon into a permanently shadowed crater. So we have to figure this one out before we send people. So that’s on the to-do list.
There’s some really cool plans where some programs have tethered little guys. Some companies have big old rovers that look more like something that you might have built in high school and raced around a track or from Junkyard Wars. These are our future, is figuring out how do we navigate down into craters that can have angles of repose we can’t even imagine on the planet Earth.
This is the angle at which soils, regolith, dirt, whatever the stuff of the ground is made of, are able to exist at before they collapse in landslides. Because the moon has significantly lower gravity than our world, you can end up with these kilometer-deep, sharp drop-offs.
[Fraser Cain]
Did you watch For All Mankind on Apple TV?
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yes.
[Fraser Cain]
So I think it’s in the second season when they are building bases on the moon. They’ve got just an incredible description of this and sort of showing how this would work. They’ve got the Soviets and the Americans have bases on the rim of a crater in the South Polican Basin.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And the winch system.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah, and having to winch down into these incredibly steep craters that are in permanent shadow and all the challenges go on and all the political challenges between them. It’s just terrific. And if you really want to kind of wrap your mind around that, I highly recommend For All Mankind.
Yeah.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah, and so we need to figure out, there’s going to be a whole lot of infrastructure needed. We need to figure out just how to consistently land. So all eyes are on these CLPS teams on Blue Origin with their blue moon.
We’re hoping Starship catches up at some point. And this is what’s going to first take our robot colleagues and collaborators there and allow them to build the infrastructure we need, allow them to explore safely, allow them to figure out just what is possible. And then both China and the United States are hoping to put a first transitory set of humans on the moon and then eventually build research stations there.
[Fraser Cain]
So right now the Chinese have put six probes down onto the surface of the moon. So Chang’e is one through six. Yeah.
Chang’e seven is the next one that’s going to be launching in 2026. And that is going to the South Pole of the moon. And it is going to have a suite of cool stuff on board.
So it’s going to have a rover. It’s going to have a lander. It’s going to have a mini hopping probe that is going to jump around on the surface of the moon to demonstrate if that’s a really good way to do locomotion.
I don’t think it’s going to do a sample return. But, and then the eighth, the eighth one, the eighth Chang’e is going to also go to the South Pole of the moon and they’re going to be testing in-situ resource utilization. So they’re going to try to 3D print material out of the regolith.
It’s going to scoop it up and try to spit out Lego bricks and things like that onto the surface of the moon.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And one of the really cool things, the first time I saw this research, it was out of a University of Tennessee or Tennessee State, I don’t remember which research team, where they figured out that if you zot lunar regolith with the correct wavelength of microwave light, it solidifies.
[Fraser Cain]
Right.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And so you can start to imagine that instead of street cleaners that have brushes making our roads, you instead have something with a microwave reflector on the bottom that is going along and making the roads as it drives and controlling dust on the moon. We cannot stress how important that’s going to be. This stuff is nasty.
And the more you can solidify and dust free a region so that when things come in for a landing, when someone walks, all these just basic, you’re trying to get from point A to point B kinds of existences don’t do you in because of the dust. And the other thing that we haven’t talked about is there’s all of the radiation concerns. And this is, again, something that came up in For All Mankind, where when you’re on the moon, you’re beyond the Earth’s magnetic realm of keeping us safe.
And when there’s solar flares, if you’re in a crater and you can duck into a cave on the side of the crater, that is a way, if it’s permanently shadowed, it’s not going to blast you.
[Fraser Cain]
Right. Yeah. You know that it’s safe.
It’s been there for billions of years. Yeah. Yeah.
And people don’t realize like just the background radiation is about 200 times what you would experience on the surface of the Earth. So it’s a lot of radiation. That’s the cosmic radiation and some radiation coming from the sun.
But in a bad solar storm, you’ll receive a lethal dose of radiation in an hour. You’re straight up dead.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
If you’re caught out in a bad solar storm. And again, they cover that in, as you said, they cover that in For All Mankind. It’s phenomenal.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. So let’s talk about sort of the human return to the moon. You know, we’ve talked about this a bit.
So for Artemis, the plan is Artemis 3, 2027.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Yeah. And the original plan was launch on… So the original, original plan was Constellation.
Current plan is Space Launch System with the Orion capsule. Launch to orbit, dock with a Starship HLS. So Human Landing System, which is…
[Fraser Cain]
Do they dock in Earth orbit or lunar orbit? I think they dock in lunar orbit.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
It depends on which set of plans you’re looking at, honestly. And originally there was the Deep Space Gateway, which comes and goes in the current plans, depending on his budgets. Everything is in flux, I think is the key right now.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Because it’s been recognized and our friend Dustin over at Smarter Every Day did an amazing video that is on my must watch list for everybody on just how complicated refueling is going to be and how much harder it’s going to be than what a lot of people think. So… Yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
I mean, they’re estimating 15 to 20 refueling launches. Yeah. And like so far, like, I mean, right now Starship doesn’t, hasn’t been able to both launch the Super Heavy Booster and Starship successfully and retrieve them back at the launch pad.
They haven’t demonstrated transferring cryogenic propellants. We are in 2025. You know, when you think about the stack that needs to happen, I mean, they need to launch the, they have to demonstrate this orbital capability.
They need to demonstrate cryogenic transfer. They need to build and launch the human landing system. They need to send it to the moon.
They need to demonstrate that the human landing system can go down to the surface of the moon and come back up into orbit to prove that it’s ready for Artemis 3.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
We need order of 60 launches before. And so that’s the issue. Because you have the test flight, which is going to be 20.
You have the human flight, which is going to be another 20.
[Fraser Cain]
Oh, my understanding was that it’s just, it’s the one is going to go there and then it will first do a test, but then we’ll solve enough fuel in the tank to then do a human land.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Okay. So that was the information that I had.
[Fraser Cain]
You don’t need, you don’t need multiple HLS, just the one. Okay. Yeah.
But still, so I mean, I guess the, what we’re saying is prepare yourself emotionally for delays, but NASA is already starting to consider not using HLS for Artemis 3.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And this is where blue origins, blue moon program starts to get so exciting, which also doesn’t exist yet. Correct. So we’re going to have two different don’t exist competing.
Um, yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So, so again, 2027 is the planned date. No one has told you that the date is going to be otherwise, but do not be surprised when the date becomes, you know, otherwise now on the Chinese side, things are moving full steam ahead. So they’re planning on launching two long, large 10 rockets.
One is going to contain the crew capsule and the service module. The other is going to contain the lunar lander and the ascent module. They’re both going to fly directly from earth to the moon.
Then the crew is going to dock just like in the Apollo missions. The crew is going to get into the, um, into the lunar lander portion. And then you’re going to go down to the surface of the moon.
They’re going to do their mission round at the South pole, get into the ascent module. It’s going to launch off the surface of the moon dock with the, the command module and service module. And then they’re going to return home.
They’re going to ditch the ascent module and then eventually ditch the service module and then return back through the capsule. And, and this has all been played out in the existing sample return missions that, you know, the whole point of the sample return of multiple sample return missions is they are testing out each one of these pieces. Now they’re going to have entirely new hardware, entirely new rockets, but you know, two rockets launching together seems relatively feasible and a lot less complicated than what’s going to happen, but it’s a lot less sustainable.
You’re throwing away every single part of all of those rockets, just like you did with the Apollo era. While with Starship, the, all of the boosters are reusable. The Orion capsule is reusable.
And then Starship, I guess, is reusable, even though it’s going to be out at the moon. It’s that you lose all of the, you know, you lose all of the parts of the SLS.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
And the thing to think about is China has the human budget, the natural resources budget, and the dollars budget that they can afford to throw things away during innovation.
[Fraser Cain]
Yeah.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Even dropping rockets on villages downrange, right?
[Fraser Cain]
Whenever we talk about this kind of stuff, and people are like, yeah, but they drop rockets on villages. And you’re like, yes, they do. Yes, yes.
We are aware. We are aware. That’s the price that they’re willing to pay for their citizens to be able to accomplish such a fast moving thing.
And I don’t approve of that. That’s not a cost I’d be willing to pay. So in theory, we’ll see many more missions to the moon, and we will see humans to the moon, hopefully by 2030.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
That’s the goal. I really think that one nation will have humans to the moon by 2030. I just don’t know which nation.
[Fraser Cain]
All of the above. Yeah, all of the above. And there will be this time.
Like right now, when you see the International Space Station fly overhead, and you’re like, wow, there have been people in space on that thing continuously for 25 years. And there will be a time when you’ll be able to look at the moon, and you’ll say there’s people there. Always still there doing research, sending home pictures.
It’s going to be so cool.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
This is the future we want. And I just want to acknowledge real fast that there have been a whole lot of planetary scientists here in the US who have been just like, I’m not going to retire until we land humans on the moon again. Because they joined during the Apollo missions.
They were in college for the Apollo missions. And no return to the moon has occurred. And a lot of them are now looking to retire because they recognize…
[Fraser Cain]
Don’t retire.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
But the thing is, they’re doing it to leave space so that there’s a budget for younger people. And I just want to thank all of the elder planetary scientists who are retiring so that younger humans can have jobs. It’s just heartwarming and devastating.
It’s sort of like when you hear the kid raise the money to pay off the school lunch debt. It’s awesome, but why did that have to happen? So, yeah.
[Fraser Cain]
Wonderful. Thanks, Pamela.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Thank you, Fraser. And thank you, patrons. The two of us get to do independent science journalism where I can talk about what’s going on in the United States.
Fraser can talk about any science he darn well feels like anywhere on the planet. And we here in AstronomyCast can speak without worry about getting a call from some program officer because all of you are out there funding what we do. So, we can’t thank all of you by name every episode, which is a great problem to have.
But this week, I’m going to thank David Rosetter, Travis Porco, Mike Heisey, Jonathan Poe, RJ Basque, Jimmy Drake, Bob Krell, Tricor, Noah Albertson, Ryan Amari, Mike Dogg, Simeon Torfason, Mark Schneidler, Michael Purcell, Jeanette Wink, Brian Cagle, Jason Kwong, Tiffany Rogers, Robert Plesmo, Laura Kettleson, Fredo Tenenbaugh, Red Bar is watching. A pronounceable name. Jeremy Kerwin, Kinsayo Panflenko, Sharesome, The Lonely Sandperson, Scott Briggs, Benjamin Cryer, Jim Schouler, Marco Iorassi, Naila, David Green, Smansky, Rando, Benjamin Mueller, Benjamin Davies, Planetar, John Drake, Bruce Amazine, Paul L.
Hayden, Jeff Hornmorder, Pauline Middleink, Jordan Turner, Robert Hundel, Taz Talley, and Leah Harbourn. Oh, sorry, Lee Harbourn.
[Fraser Cain]
Thanks, everyone.
[Fraser Cain]
We’ll see you next week.
[Dr. Pamela Gay]
Thank you.
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.
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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!