NASA's Curious Universe - An Asteroid by Any Other Name With Special Guest Latif Nasser

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

The idea of an asteroid from outer space crashing into Earth has captured the imaginations of science fiction directors for decades. But here at NASA, we take potentially hazardous near-Earth objects seriously. We have a planetary defense office that plans for every scenario—we’ve even practiced nudging an asteroid off course with spacecraft. But there are tens of thousands of objects in near-Earth space, and the first step in protecting against potential impacts is spotting, tracking and managing every single one of them. Learn how NASA does just that from Joe Masiero, a scientist on the asteroid survey mission NEOWISE. Then, join friend of the show Latif Nasser, co-host of the podcast Radiolab, to untangle the mystery of a strange space rock that’s not quite a moon but not quite a normal asteroid, either.

It's 2013 and just after sunrise on a cold February day in Cheleabinsk, Russia. The sky is a dark blue. Snow is piled high on the rooftops. A few cars meandered down the streets. And dozens of miles above the town, a meteor the length of a six-story building, is hurtling towards Earth. Then it hits the atmosphere, exploding into tons of pieces. The arc of red across the sky turns the dark morning as bright as midday. In Chelyabinsk, cars screeched to a halt on the icy roads as all eyes turn to the sky.

The shockwave sets off car alarms and shatters windows across six cities injuring more than a thousand people. Afterwards, NASA weather satellites detect a cloud of debris circling the entire globe. The scariest part, no one had seen it coming. A bigger asteroid could have wiped out the city. The Chalibinsk impactor, it really brought attention to the hazard that even small asteroids composed to us. That's Joe Massaro, a scientist at Caltech who works with NASA to track near-Earth asteroids.

My elevator pitch from my work is that I use an infrared space telescope to look for asteroids coming close to the Earth and make sure they don't hit us. Like the rest of his team, Joe. takes defending our planet seriously. He keeps a piece of the Cheliabinsk meteorite with him as a reminder of what can happen when we're not watching the sky. This is NASA's curious universe. Our universe is a wild and wonderful place. I'm your host, Patty Boyd. And I'm your co-host, Jacob Pinter. In this podcast, NASA is your tour guide. Today on the show, Planetary Defense, city destroying asteroids are the stuff of science fiction disaster movies.

But here at NASA, they're a threat we take seriously. So strap in, Joe's going to take us on an adventure through near-Earth space to see how exactly NASA keeps you safe from space rocks down on the ground. And stick around, because later on we'll talk with Lutzif Nasser, host of the podcast Radio Lab, to dig into a strange asteroid mystery that one of our colleagues here at NASA helped him solve. Now, to protect Earth from asteroids, the first step is finding. them, and that's not an easy task.

In the vastness of space, asteroids are tiny and can be difficult to spot. But spotting space rocks is what Joe Massaro does. His story starts with a spacecraft the size of a small sedan called the Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or Wise. We have ignition and lift-off of a Delta 2 rocket air rise, searching for stars against galaxies never seen before. Wise is an unlikely hero in this story. It wasn't designed to spot near-Earth objects at all.

Its original goal was to look at the whole sky and discover far-away galaxies and a weird category of stars called brown dwarfs. And to build up an atlas of interesting targets for future spacecraft like the James Webb Space Telescope to zoom in on in much greater detail. And so Wise was that pathfinder, that all-sky map, to allow people to to figure out where are the cool things in the sky. We're talking about cool in more ways than one. Those faraway objects give off a lot more heat than light.

So to spot them, Wise had to look into space in the infrared. So this is light beyond which your eye can see. It's the light of heat. In the infrared, dim means cold. These distant, dim, cold galaxies are objects you'd never be able to see from the ground. be blinded by the heat of our atmosphere. Even in the cold of space, the Pi-tin-sized telescope onboard Y's had to be packed inside a tube of solid frozen hydrogen so that it would stay cool enough. Scientists didn't want Y's to accidentally detect the heat from its own electronics while

it was out looking for stars. So we have this 40-centimeter telescope inside a giant thermos bottle that we lovingly refer to as R2D2. It's this big white thermos with a bunch of tubes on the side that looks kind of like R2D2. When the team switched on Wise's R2D2 telescope and looked into space with its infrared eyes, they saw a lot more than galaxies and stars. Some of the brightest things in the sky at those long wavelengths are the asteroids.

They're glowing exactly at those wavelengths. And so when you look at the sky at 10 microns, it is just full of asteroids. Why? Because it turns out the asteroids near our planet are, weirdly enough, about room temperature. If you could stand on one, except for the whole thing about not having an atmosphere

and being really far from home, you might be pretty comfortable. Asteroids get their heat from the sun, much like the Earth does. And so if you are about as far from the sun as the Earth is, you'll be about the same temperature. And so the asteroids that are about the distance from the Earth away from the sun are a little bit warmer

than it would be at room temperature. Since they're so warm, these asteroids were super bright in Wise's images, compared to the dim, cold galaxies much further away. For the astrophysicists, they were almost a nuisance. But as a side project, the team cataloged them anyway, eventually identifying over 100,000 objects in the asteroid belt out past Mars. Then, after finishing its planned six-month survey, Wise was out of time. Its hydrogen coolant had run out, so the team put Yves.

into hibernation. They pointed its solar panels toward the sun and turned it off. NASA has been interested in asteroids for a long time. In 1998, Congress asked us to find at least 90% of all asteroids near Earth bigger than about a half mile within the next 10 years. So near-earth objects are, it's kind of a line in the sand. Near-Earth objects are asteroids or comets that get within about 30 million miles from Earth's orbit. That's a lot of ground to cover, but it gives us a big margin of safety. And these are just objects that over hundreds of years might have orbits that can move them around enough that we should want to pay attention to them.

And stuff that could have a planetary flyby or could be drifting in from the main belt. To date, we've found some 35,000 near-Earth asteroids. Now, don't panic. These are mostly friendly neighborhood asteroids with no chance of hitting us. But some of them are what we call potentially hazardous asteroids, ones that get within 5 million miles of Earth's orbit. And that may still sound far, but it is too close for comfort. Because that's the close approach distance that in a hundred-year time span, the photon pressure from the sun and the gentle tugs from the gravity of all of the objects in the solar system, could move that orbit enough in about the century.

These are those disaster movie asteroids, the kind that could potentially hit us and cause big problems. NASA's search for them was well underway by 2013 when the Chellubensk meteor hit, but that impact made planetary defense a global priority. The same day it exploded over Russia, the United Nations called for a global asteroid warning system. In 2016, NASA launched its Planetary Defense Coordination Office and started holding regular

asteroid impact simulation drills. We wanted to find and track every near-Earth object to make sure we would never be blindsided again. And with these new planetary defense goals, NASA needed a spacecraft ready to find asteroids that would complement the agency's ground-based telescopes, and we needed it like yesterday. Joe had just the one in mind, Wise, the same one his team had wisely, left hibernating a couple of years before. Without its coolant, Wise wasn't the telescope it once was, but it could still see asteroids

close to Earth, the warmer, brighter ones, perfectly well. And so he said, you know, if we could turn this back on, we could detect, you know, a couple hundred objects every year for as long as well on the survey. NASA agreed and Wise was resurrected as Neo-Wise. And with its focus fully on space rocks, it quickly began spotting near-Earth asteroids scientists hadn't seen before. So you might be wondering,

if you're on the Neo-Wise team and you spot a new asteroid, what do you do? Well, first, you make sure everyone knows about it. A few months into reactivation, the computer system said, I think I found a new object. We reviewed it and we said, yeah, this does look new. and we reported to the Minor Planet Center. The Minor Planet Center is an office of the International Astronomical Union.

The IAU is like the Census Bureau of Space, responsible for keeping track of every object out there, from asteroids to exoplanets. To go from what they call a candidate new asteroid to a confirmed one, you need to know it's orbit. And since Neo-Wise just takes a wide snapshot of the sky at a single point in time, it's up to other people, from big observatories around the world

to amateurs in their backyards to confirm that orbit. For this specific asteroid, Joe's team spotted a few months into reactivation. That wasn't easy. And the problem with it was that it was in the deep south of the sky. And so we were getting followed from observers

in Australia and New Zealand. I had to get one of the big telescopes in Chile to tip all the way over to get follow-up observations. And what was really cool is a few weeks after we discovered it, it was going to have a close pass with the Earth in the daytime sky. Our friends who do research using radio waves were able to paint it with radar and to get these beautiful radar images of this object

that only a few weeks ago we hadn't known about, and now suddenly we're getting this nice, resolved 3D shape model effectively from radio. And it demonstrated how interconnected and how important all the various pieces of this near-Earth object community are to understanding what these objects are. Three times a week, like clockwork for 10 years, Joe and his team met and went through the list of detections, reported their findings to the Minor Planet Center,

and worked with the community to track them. Everyone pitched in, because when it comes to near-Earth objects, there is no one on Earth who isn't affected. Planetary Defense is a team sport, and it's of global concern, right? It's defense of the planet. And so we all really do have to work together.

Now for the fun part. When you discover something new in space, the minor planet center gives it a number. But that's not very catchy. So they also give you the right, or privilege, depending on who you ask, to name it. For example, there's a mysterious group of asteroids

in the main belt called the Barbarians. They're remnants of the earliest days of our solar system. And they're called that because the first one discovered was named Barbara. Then astronomers kept finding more of them. So you know, the plural of Barbara. So, yes, our community has

away with names. It all started with the planets, long before you or I were looking up at them. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. These were big, important bodies in our skies, visible to the naked eye. So the ancient Romans

decided they'd name them after their mythological gods. Then, in the 1700s, a British astronomer with a telescope discovered a new planet and named it, drum roll please, Georgium Sidus, after King George III, the ruler at the time. That made astronomers in other countries very upset, and after a lot of debate, they swapped it to the name we know today, Uranus, for Greek god of the sky. And then we got into this habit of looking for more planets. out there, finding more and then giving them mythological names.

Neptune got the same treatment, named for the Roman god of the sea. Then in the early 1800s, astronomers started spotting smaller objects, what we call dwarf planets and asteroids today. They named them after goddesses. And so first you found series, then you found Palace and Juno and Vesta, and the asteroids started getting these mythological names. I know we found so many asteroids who started running out of mythological names, And so the main bell kind of became honorifics to various people that the discoverers could choose.

By now it's the late 1800s, which brings us back to the barbarians. And so Asteroid 234 was named by the discoverer after Barbara. And this was long enough ago that I'm actually not sure which Barbara it's referring to. Nowadays, you have to write up a paragraph explaining who the person is and giving some background. But back then, it was just a name. Actually, no one knows who this Barbara. was. The New York astronomer who discovered asteroid 234 might have had St. Barbara, the patron saint of mathematicians, in mind. We do know that the guy who discovered the barbarian group's unique

properties is on board with the group name now, although Joe says it took a while for him to come around. Oh, and that was asteroid 234, right? Well, now we're well into names with six digits. We're in the, I think, in like the 600,000s or almost getting close to the 700,000s now. That's a lot of objects to name. Who keeps track of them all? Well, remember the minor planet center of the International Astronomical Union? The IAU has another branch, the Small Bodies Nomenclature Committee, that reviews proposals. And there are some rules.

Anything in near-Earth space has to be named after a deity of some kind from six. some religion, it can't be after a person. You don't want, like, you know, asteroid bob to be impacting the Earth next week. Like, that was, they just want to rule that out that possibility. For the main belt asteroids, it's more open-ended. There are some limitations, but you can name them in honor of family members, friends, celebrities. One of the other rules is that the discoverers are allowed to propose two names per month.

So when you have 33,000 objects, you know, that's only 15,000 months. months we have to wait. So in about, you know, a couple thousand years or so, we'll be able to name all of our objects. The Neo-Wise team has named a lot of asteroids in honor of team members, especially those who've passed away in the 30-some years from the time the original mission was first proposed. And as the person who has discovered some of those asteroids, Joe has been able to choose some names himself. I have named asteroids after, you know, my family members, after my kids, some of my friends. When I got married, I named an asteroid after all of my groomsmen, for instance.

So that was one of my wedding gifts to them. Now, those were main belt asteroids. For potentially hazardous rocks closer to Earth? The unfortunate thing is for a lot of these objects, we don't know a lot about them. We know their orbit, but we don't know a lot more about it. And so you kind of want to wait until you have a little bit more information. What makes this asteroid special? How do I assign a name to it?

Right? To really make the names mean something. Over 10 years, its mission extended a year at a time as it kept returning great data. Neo-Wise saw so many possible asteroid intersections along the racetrack of Earth's orbit. It collected enough data that scientists are now going beyond asking what's out there and answering questions about the different sizes and physical properties and origins of these near-Earth objects. But Neo-Wise has been on borrowed time since it was reactivated a decade ago. Early in 2024, its second wind started running out.

As we approach solar maximum, you might have heard our sun is getting more active, spitting more flares and coronal mass ejections out into space. What it's also doing is injecting energy into Earth's upper atmosphere and causing it to puff up a little bit, not a lot, but a little bit. and a few extra molecules of atmosphere make a big difference to a spacecraft. And so each time one of these coronal mass ejections hits the Earth, as we're tracking the spacecraft, we've noticed it drops by like about a kilometer. According to the navigation team, sometime in the fall of 2024,

Neo-wise will have sunk enough in its slow spiral towards Earth that it won't be able to stay in orbit. It'll take one final dramatic plunge down to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere in a fiery streak. Not unlike the space rocks, it's been 10 years looking out for keeping us safe. Most likely it's going to be over the ocean because most of the Earth is the ocean.

But maybe we'll be lucky and someone will take a photo of it. We'll see. The team knew the end was coming. As Neo-Wise's orbit decayed, its data would soon become too ragged to process. On July 31st, they gathered around the monitors in the operations room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Joe said goodbye to Neo-Wise.

They remotely put the spacecraft into safe mode, turned off its instruments and computers, and sent it a final flight path. So just make sure you stay pointed at the sun and hang out there and hold this attitude. And then on August 8th, we had our final decommissioning, where we turned off the transmitter for the last time.

And so we had the whole team gathered around. They were walking us through, here's what's going on, here's what you're seeing. And then they sent the last command. final power off command. The command has been sent and received by the spacecraft, so everything is completed. We are no longer receiving telemetry data.

Right now, time is 2220. I now declare Neo-Wise decommission. And yes, after we had the decommission, we did have a party. It was a memorial for Neowise as it were. Celebration of life. Celebration of science. What a great mission. What a great team. I can't say enough about this team. And they make it happen. And it was, you know, I mean, I wouldn't say sad. It's bittersweet, right? It's, especially for me,

I've, you know, I joined the mission two months before launch right out of graduate school. So I've been working on this for all of my professional career at this point. And so it's a, it's a change. right? But there's new stuff on the horizon. Yep, there sure is. With a decade of experience on Neo-Wise, most of Joe's team is moving on a new project. Neo-surveyor, the very first spacecraft built from the ground up to discover near-Earth objects and to answer questions that Neo-Wise couldn't. We're still learning new things about asteroids all the time. Last year, Luddiff Nusser, host of WNYC Studios Radio Lab, contacted NASA with a question about a mysterious object.

And the answer made us think about our universe in a whole new way. Yeah, there are many asteroids out there to undersell it a little bit. And Lutthiv went down the rabbit hole about one weird space rock in particular. This is a super fun story with lots of twists and turns. And I was so glad to just have a minute to chat with Lutthf about it. So here we go. Keep all that asteroid stuff we just learned tucked in your mind because it's going to come right back and enjoy this story. Today's extra special because we have a live studio audience.

It feels like being on cheers or something. So thank you for being here. Well, let's start with the hard questions, Latif. Can you introduce yourself? What's your name? Who are you? What's your deal? Sure.

My name is Latif Nasser. I am the co-host of the show Radio Lab. But in general, I feel like I am a professional nerd, like yourself, like a lot of the people that work here. Well, let's nerd out because we're at the Goddard Space Flight Center, and we just spent most of the day touring around and seeing stuff that we do here. I'm so stoked. I don't know. It's been, I feel like it's a kid in a candy store kind of a day.

Well, we're glad you schlepped out here. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So you've gone down this rabbit hole about space. and our solar system and how we name things that we see in that solar system, which we'll get all into. But where did that start for you? What was like the entrance to the rabbit hole?

For this particular project, like it really caught me off guard. So it was now probably almost like two years ago. My son was two years old at the time. I was putting him to bed in his crib. And on the, because I'm, as you know, a space nerd, I had a solar system poster on his wall, and it just sort of like, like out of the corner of my eye, I saw on that solar system poster, as I was putting into bed,

Venus had a moon, and I was like, that's weird. Like, I didn't remember, I don't remember ever learning that in school. Like, does Venus have a moon? But I was like, okay, whatever. So I put him to bed, and then I went to my bedroom, and I looked up, does Venus have a moon? And the first result is, of course, from NASA. saying Venus has no moon.

And then I was like, huh. And that felt like, I was like, that's really, like, maybe I just, maybe I was imagining it or something. And so then the next morning when my kid woke up, I went back to his room. And it was right there and Venus had a moon. And then not only did Venus have a moon, Venus had this, the Venus moon, this Venusian moon,

had on this poster, it had a name. And it was Z-O-O-Z-V-E-Z-Z-V-E. Zuzvay. That's so specific. Like that can't be a... That's not a mistake. That's not an accident. Yeah.

And then I Google that. And then there's no English results. Hmm. Were there other languages results? Yeah, there were Czech results. Oh. And they were all about zoos. And I was like, that's not right.

So I was like, what is going on? Like, that doesn't make any sense. Now, let's fast forward a little bit here. What Latif did next was track down the poster's illustrator. He swore Zuzwe wasn't a practical joke or the name of his dog. The artist said he had found it on a list of moons online. As far as Lutthif was concerned, this was a dead end. So Lutthiff phoned a friend, a friend named Liz Landau,

who is a communication specialist here at NASA. And if that name sounds familiar, It's because Liz has produced a few episodes of Curious Universe in the past. And she was also in the audience when I talked to Latif. So I still couldn't figure out. And actually, Liz was the one who cracked it. Thank you. So she texted me back and she was like, it's not Zuzve.

It's 2002 VE. So the Zs were twos and the O's were zeros. And so it's 2002 VE. And she was like, it's a real thing. It is actually a thing in space. This is not a map artifact or someone spilled a drop of ink or something on a poster. Like, this was a real thing out there in the solar system. And then so I managed to track down the guy who discovered it,

who was a guy called Brian Skiff at the Lowell Observatory. He was involved with this big scale, like mass observation of asteroids, like starting in the late 90s, early 2000s, where they were just trying to like find and label as many of these things as possible in case one of them was trying to hit Earth. And so he was the person sort of on shift that night when it was discovered. For me, I was like, oh, finally someone who knows about this thing, the guy who discovered it. Yeah.

And then he was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. You've never heard of this thing. And I'm like, how have you never heard of it? You discovered it. But it turned out because he just, because it is one of those mass, yeah, he's like discovered so many things. They're finding a ton of them. They're finding so many. I think he said one night they discovered like 2,000 of them or something. This sent Latif straight back to square one.

If even the person who discovered it couldn't tell Latif what this Zuzwe thing was, then who could? Well, Liz was still on the case. She pointed Latif to a scientific paper by a group of astronomers who happened to be really, interested in Zuzwe, except they didn't call it Zuzwe. They used its official name at the time, 2002-V-E-68. These astronomers confirmed this was indeed a very interesting space rock, but for a reason Lutif didn't expect. So a moon generally orbits a planet, a planet generally orbits a star.

This thing, it's out there, it's an asteroid that kind of knocked loose, it's near VU. It's orbiting the sun, but it's orbiting the sun at basically the same rate and the same distance from the sun as Venus. And it's far enough away from Venus that it wouldn't act like a moon. But as it's going around the sun, it's also very slowly going around Venus. It's doing both. It's doing what a planet does and it's doing what a moon does. But that thing, that type of object, that orbital pattern, people had had. hypothesized, it speculated that such a thing, including Darwin's son, had speculated that such

a thing could have existed for like 100 years. But then this one, Zuzveh around Venus, was the first one of those they ever discovered. And they call them quasi-satellites or quasi-moons. Is it a moon or isn't it? It's sort of a moon, but kind of not. It's too far away to be a moon, but it is going around the thing that it's supposed to be going around. But it's also going around this other thing. So it's like, it's this weirdo. It's this kind of strange, checks off some of the columns of column A, checks off some of the columns of column B kind of thing. This was the point in the story that really blew Latif's mind, because quasi-moons aren't the only weirdo asteroids in our solar system. There's a whole class of misfits called co-orbital objects.

There's not just quasi-monds. There's these like horseshoe moons. So they're like going around like a moon does, except they don't do the full loop. They just, Like at one point, they just kind of make a U-turn and then go back around. And you're like, what? That's possible? Or another one that's just going, like it's doing a little comma shape. Yeah. And they call that one a tadpole.

And like, there are tadpole moons? Like, you look closer and you're like, wait, there's, this isn't the only, I mean, this is the first of its kind weirdo. But there are a lot of other kinds of weirdos out there. Yeah. Yeah. And you're like, oh, huh. Like, we don't just live in a cookie cutter suburban neighborhood. Like, they're a weirdos in our neighborhood.

You know what I mean? That's kind of how it feels. So you, not to spoil the surprise, I guess, but you went to some lengths to actually get this thing to officially have the name Zuzveh, not 2002-V-E-68. Yes, that's right. Why, you know, once you found all this out as you're sort of processing and learning, why was it important to you to officially give it the name Zuzvei? Part of it, it felt like almost, not to diminish it at all, but it felt like the punchline to the joke. It felt like there needed to be, it felt like the natural conclusion. I was like, okay, I discovered this thing that felt like, I mean, it's just a rock.

It's a rock the size of the Eiffel Tower or something. It's a potato-shaped Eiffel Tower rock. And so it's just a rock. But then like all of a sudden, the more I learned about it, and even the way it felt like it was at least for me, like, kind of of redefining like what movement is possible in our solar system you know and like I was like wow that's cool and that's special and that feels like it deserves more than you know like 2002 VE8 V68 it's almost like a feels like a like a like a phone number a car serial number or something it just like was this randomly assigned thing and I was like no no this is special

this is more special than that it deserves a name and it felt like that name was so perfect because it was, you know, from my Google experience, like, it was like a unique name. And I was like, oh, and this feels like, I mean, this was the first one we found like this. So this is a unique thing. And so it feels, it just feels natural, you know, it felt like a, it felt like the sort of obvious, like it just clicked right, you know? Yeah. So, you know, I imagine if you are one of these space scientists scanning for these types of bodies and you find one and you want to name it, you probably have some resources.

Like, you know, okay, I need to do X, Y, and Z to give it this name. But when you are not actually a scientist like that, when you're just kind of a guy who wants to name something, where do you start? Yeah, well, right. So I had no idea. So I asked, you know, a bunch of the people that I talked to in the course of the reporting, like, how do you name things? And they had all named stuff before. Brian Schiff, he had named, he had found four in a row and then he named him after the Beatles. or he's named so many of them

to the degree that he says that he has naming fatigue because he just like he's discovered so many things he's like I just there's no more names like I can't what are I going to name but anyway so I asked now I was like okay how do you do this and they're like okay there's this group

the International Astronomical Union and they have within their group a subgroup called the working group for small body nomenclature they walked me through it I didn't even tell them that I was trying I was just like, oh, if one theoretically wanted to name a thing, and then they outlined the process for me, and then I was like, okay, I got to do this.

And then I had to kind of, first I had to win over Brian because he's the discoverer. So the discoverer kind of gets the sort of first dibs to put in a name contender. Okay. And at first he thought the idea was really dumb, and then I convinced him. And then that, hopefully, the write-up that he put in had to convince the committee. It's this committee of, I don't know what, like 13 or something, astronomers around the world. And so, yeah, but then eventually they voted on it. And there's this, like, one hitch that I thought was going to be the fatal flaw,

which was that for everything, a certain distance from the Earth, it has to have a mythological name. And so obviously, Zeus-Fa-Dade did not, because it was not really a name. And so we were trying to like back invent like retcon. Yeah. A minor deity named Zuzwey. Right, a minor deity named Zuzwey in some obscure culture. And we're like, yeah, it's not going to worry. Let's just be honest.

And hopefully this thing will sail by on Charm alone. But we were like, maybe, maybe, well, won't it? And then it did. And then it did. And then they officially accepted the name. And it was like, we did not expect that was going to happen. And a lot of people probably assume that this is, that NASA is the group that names the asteroids or whatever. Right.

But it's not our lane. It's the IAU. And no disrespect intended. I'm kind of glad it's not because I think that, so the International Astronomical Union, which does work with NASA, I think, quite a bit, it's the whole world. It's representing the whole world. And I think that's how it should be. Like they have this, they still have this mythological requirement, but it's no longer just, you know, ancient Greek and Roman names. So now when they're naming stuff, it's off off of any culture, you know, so it can be from any part of planet Earth.

And that's, you know, that feels right for the sky. We like to say that Curious Universe is for first-time space explorers. And it's funny because you kind of are in this story or you're exploring a new part of space for the first time for you. What did this process teach you about space and just how we explore it? I think for this story, one of the really cool things that I didn't know about was the three-body problem. You can only predict the sort of system is so chaotic that you can only predict where Zuzwe is going to go for a certain. So for a few hundred years, we know it's going to leave Venus. we don't know what it's going to do after that.

It could do anything. Like to me, I don't know. That was kind of the thesis of the whole piece that I learned and kind of the, I feel like the revelation that Zuzvae gave me, it's like because of those posters, we all think we live in like a clock. And it's actually like, it's like we live in a club. Like anything can happen.

Like we're all dancing and maybe we'll be dancing over here and maybe we'll be dancing over there. And maybe these two will switch partners. And it's like, wow, that's cool. That's the solar system we live in. Yeah. And I'm like, whoa, like anything is possible and anything is possible everywhere. That to me is like, wow, that's so cool.

I think it's one of those things too where it's really easy, especially as someone who is not a scientist who has no advanced degrees, to hear about science and think, oh, we understand this pretty well. And then the more you learn, the more you have these questions and the more you figure out, the more you realize we don't know anything. There's so much that we don't know. Oh, yeah. And that's like, that's what I crave. I feel like that's what I've spent my whole career chasing is that feeling of. being tiny and clueless that's what I love that's why I feel like I do what I do what we do it's because you like just I crave that hit of like learning over and

over again how much we don't know how much and and it like it's it's it also sorry just because I'm here like NASA is the place where when I didn't know was Venus a Moon I looked up on NASA right NASA was NASA was in some ways like the arbiter of like what is known in the universe universe, right? And then later, full circle, you all, I don't know if you did it or somebody else here, put it on the NASA website for the Venus page. Now there's a little thing if you look up, it's like Venus has no moons, but it does have this crazy little little called Zizh day. And so, but it's like it's so cool that, yeah, I don't know, like the even to be here, the kind of the ultimate arbiter of what is known in the universe. And like, even here people are like, I don't know, I have no idea. And that's like, oh, I don't know. That, to me, it's so humbling and exciting. And it makes me want to, like, ride shotgun or look over the shoulder of the people who are like, who are on the cusp of learning new things.

Yeah, but it's always, it's always, I don't know, but let's find out. Yeah. And then let's figure out how to find out. Yeah, God. It's so exciting. What an exciting place you work. Yeah, really, really, really exciting. This is NASA's Curious Universe.

This episode was written and produced by. by Christian Elliott. Our executive producer is Katie Conan's. The Curious Universe team includes me, Patty Boyd, Jacob Pinter, Maddie Olson, and Michaela Sosby. Christopher Kim is our show artist. Our theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguita of System Sounds.

Special thanks to the folks at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the International Astronomical Union, and the Radio Lab team. And if you're still curious about planetary defense, Check out our episode from Season 5 of Curious Universe called Defending the Planet from Asteroids. As always, if you enjoyed this episode of NASA's Curious Universe, please let us know by leaving us a review and sharing the show with a friend. And remember, you can follow NASA's Curious Universe in your favorite podcast app to get a notification each time we post a new episode.

But some 15% of them are what we call potentially hazardous. Hazardist asteroids. hazard disasteroids. Hazard dis asteroids is a good vocal exercise. This is an official NASA podcast.