Wherever we go, life goes with us, whether we want it to or not. And when we travel to other worlds, it looks like the most extreme life Earth has ever cooked up is ready and willing to make the journey with us.
In 2017, Elon Musk laid out his grand sweeping plans for the future of SpaceX, the company that would take humanity to Mars. What’s everyone going to eat?
The History And Future Of The James Webb Space Telescope. It’ll fly to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, a relatively stable spot in space that keeps the glare from the Sun, Earth, and Moon all in a tiny spot in the sky.
Betrayed By The Red Edge. How We Can Find People are always worried that alien civilizations will detect the transmissions from our old radio shows and television broadcasts, and send in the invasion fleet. But the reality is that life itself has been broadcasting the existence of life on Earth for 500 million years.
New Horizons gave us the best views we could have hoped for of Pluto. But it was only a single glimpse of half the world. What’s New Horizons up to next? And what plans are in the works to return to Pluto and Charon?
Aircraft make some of the best platforms for science here on Earth. Now we will have on on Mars and it will arrive next month. More about this idea on today’s podcast.
Until we learned to properly navigate our way across the oceans, early explorers were fearful to lose sight of land in case they’d be lost at sea. They learned to use the water currents, winds, movements of birds and of course, the positions of the Sun, the Moon and the stars to find their way across the seas to distant lands.
Venus is a fascinating world – the closest twin to the Earth that we have in the Solar System. It’s nearly the same mass and has the same surface gravity. But we need to explore it to help us understand why the planet went so horribly horribly wrong.
Light can be absorbed, reflected, and re-emitted by gas and dust, giving us a second look. They’re called light echoes, and allow astronomers another way to understand the Universe around us.