NASA's Curious Universe - Bonus: Happy Holidays from NASA!

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

Before we return with season five in 2023, celebrate the holidays with us! Join Goddard news chief Rob Garner, NASA social media lead Stephanie L. Smith, and astronaut Shannon Walker on this special, holiday-themed bonus episode.

NASA doesn't do things small. Enthusiasm is a very common trait among all of us here. When you take something like the Webb Telescope, and it opens its eyes for the first time, and offers us an entirely new view of the universe around us, you can't help but celebrate. And that celebration is not exclusive, to NASA. It is not exclusive even just to the partners with NASA on the mission.

It's a celebration that belongs to every person. This is NASA's curious universe. Our universe is a wild and wonderful place. I'm your host, Patty Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide. Welcome to another bonus episode. We like to share these episodes between seasons while we're working on what's to come. Season 5 is well underway and will debut in early 2023. In the meantime, we're preparing not only for the show, but for the end of the year and the holiday season. So while we're stuffing turkeys and stringing lights, we wanted to take this opportunity to give you some updates on topics we've explored in the past and take a look at the lighter side of NASA.

How does NASA celebrate the holidays? the traditional ones and maybe some you haven't yet heard of. I'm Rob Garner, the news chief in the Office of Communications at NASA's Scotard Space Flight Center. My job entails making sure that all of the important stuff that NASA's doing gets out to the people who need to know what's going on. Baked into the NASA charter is the notion that what NASA does is to be communicated to the broadest practicable audience. and that's where I and my colleagues come in. Rob is a fan of fun and nerdy NASA history.

He also leads one of NASA's communications teams, which works to make science relatable. This team not only publishes articles, videos, and podcast episodes, but also joins in on social media conversations and celebrations to get the NASA message out there. So Rob's taken part in a lot of holidays, from sinister Halloween posts to heart-shaped Valentine's nebulae. Rob and his team are always looking for new ways to celebrate science.

Here at NASA, we partake in quite a few non-traditional holidays, from Star Wars May the 4th to International Observe the Moon Night and more. Another holiday that might not surprise you to learn has a number of NASA-based aficionados would be Pi Day, March 14th, 314. Back in 2008, one of the video producers just decided on a lark to start a pie day celebration. So at lunch on the appointed day, a handful of us had procured pies and brought them in, and over lunch, just ate these pies. Goodness, it snowballed since then. It's been an annual tradition in our midst now for many years.

It just continued to grow and grow and grow. I think 2019 was the last observed pie day. I think there was something like 70 or more submissions, pies and torts and kishes and pizzas of every conceivable variety. Not only does NASA bring the science element with pie, 3.14 dot dot dot dot. But employees couldn't help but throw some of their work into their creations, modeling their entries after. exciting NASA missions and spacecraft. There have been things like James Webb Space Telescope, primary mirror pie was one.

There was an Opirus Rex, Osiris Rex being the asteroid sample return mission. My own contribution, I forget what year it was, but I made a very disastrous Klingon Roqueg blood pie that just spilled raspberry juices all over the table. That did not place well. Holidays, besides being a good reason to eat pie, bring people together. They let us pause and celebrate. But for astronauts far from Earth on the International Space Station, they can be challenging, so we do our best to make them extra special.

Astronauts may not get to spend the time with their families in person, but they do get some special treats. From Hanukkah socks and Santa hats to freeze-wrapped turkeys and New Year's harmonicas, our explorers in space get a little piece of home brought up for different celebrations. And as you may remember from our Day in Space episode, birthday is on station usually involves some singing. For astronaut Shannon Walker, neither of her missions included a birthday celebration on the International Space Station,

but she did get to take in a few out-of-this-world celebrations. I did not get to celebrate a birthday and say, you know, I went just around it, But I did a lot of holiday. I got Thanksgiving up there twice. And then this last flight I got to celebrate Christmas twice because we celebrate Christmas on December 25th in the U.S. And so, of course, we're going to celebrate that. The Russian cosmonauts go with the Russian Orthodox calendar and church,

and so they celebrate Christmas later. So we got to have another Christmas celebration. So that was really special, too. NASA loves a celebration, and we have a lot to celebrate. Between mission milestones and important moments in history to broader national and international holidays, communicators across the agency work to spread the joy and fun of NASA's work. There's a big team focused on getting NASA's word out

and engaging with the public to spread information, fun, and often some holiday cheer. Hi, my name is Stephanie L. Smith, and I am the social media manager at NASA headquarters. Social media is all about conversations. It's about talking and listening and responding. Nobody really wants to hang out with someone at a party who only talks about themselves, and then you ask them a question and they walk away. Same thing with social media. We don't just show up and tell people things about America's space program.

We listen to what they have to say. We see what they're excited about. We see what they're confused by. And we stick around for the rest of the conversation. With social media, NASA can join in on fun conversations online and hopefully add a bit of science or wonder to people's holiday plans. Take Halloween, for example. Hashtag Halloween is always going to trend.

People are always going to want to share pictures of their costumes. So one thing that we like to do is invite people to show us their space-themed costumes, whether it was them, their kids, their friends. but maybe we use it as a chance to share other resources. So if they're young children, we might be able to share coloring pages or activities. We have a website called NASA Space Place that has lots of resources for young children. If the kid is really excited about the James Webb Space Telescope or about the Orion capsule, we can share those resources with parents and caregivers and help build a strong

a relationship between the public and our missions. Joining these holiday conversations is an opportunity to bring some beauty, awe, and wonder, some perspective to people's lives. It's fun. It's just fun. It's fun and it's a chance to join a global conversation and remind people that NASA has a sense of humor, that NASA is made of people. We might be the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but we're not robots.

And we like joining conversations. We like talking about what we do. If we have a chance to do that on a holiday like Valentine's Day by sharing a heart-shaped crater or a rose-shaped nebula, fantastic. NASA's workforce might be made of people, but there are a lot of robots around here, too. And some of our robots are on social media, joining conversations and giving conversations and updates. Stephanie had the chance to portray one of the Mars rovers on Twitter and ring in Thanksgiving as the Curiosity rover with people across the country. One of the best parts of my job was getting to

portray the Curiosity rover on Twitter at Mars Curiosity. We did the account and still do in the first person. So Curiosity is there to tell you what she did at work with. today, work just happens to be on Mars. The very first Thanksgiving that I worked as curiosity was marvelous. We got well wishes from around the country, from other people who were traveling or might have been alone on the holidays. They related to curiosity being far from home, on her own, on the road. And I like to say that the rover is alone, but she's not lonely. Having the connection of social media and the conversations there is an important point

of connection. And getting to portray that character made me feel connected to people far and wide. Another important holiday for the Mars Curiosity rover was its first. first anniversary on the red planet. Curiosity spent a year collecting important information about Mars, but our scientists and engineers snuck a bit of fun in there too. August 5th, 2013, so the one-year land anniversary for the rover on the red planet. Some of the team members on the SAM instrument, that sample analysis at Mars,

found that the instrument makes tones and the and that they could program it to play Happy Birthday. The Happy Birthday song was an opportunity to celebrate with NASA fans around the world and to commemorate the huge accomplishment of doing science on another planet. Our mission milestones are worth celebrating in their own right. But in 2021, we were able to experience a holiday and an incredible step in understanding our universe on the same day. December 25th, 2021 was an extra special Christmas morning for space fans around the world.

At 7.20 a.m. Eastern Time. An Arian 5 rocket launched off the pad in Karoo-French, Guyana, sending the James Webb Space Telescope onto its long-awated journey to space. For everyone here at NASA, it was an extra special treat to behold. For Rob, it was an opportunity for some quiet celebration with his family. My son was just over a year old that Christmas morning. He was not a late sleeper then, still isn't. And so for us at least, we were up anyway that morning,

regardless of the fact that the Webb telescope was launching. We had our Christmas tree behind us, and I'm sitting there in the dark. watching the web stream of the launch and the deployment. I had the Christmas tree lights reflecting off the screen, and then the glow of the monitor. That was the only light in the whole house for those first couple of hours, before the rest of the home woke up to come down and open gifts. But what a gift to have gotten,

and now we have an indelibly inextricably linked NASA milestone that you can bet is going to be mentioned for Christmas's, hence to come. Whether we're bringing people together to watch a rocket launch or observe a solar eclipse, providing the tools and the fun to learn about our universe is one of the best parts of the job. Back in 2017, when we had the total solar eclipse

that a vast percentage of North America was witnessed to, I remember we had at the visitor center crowds and crowds of people, Everybody had their solar eclipse viewing approved safety glasses. There were people who had brought their own pinhole projectors to observe the eclipse. We had a couple of solar observing stations, telescopes of our own. It's not every day that what's going on in space is something that someone has the ability to observe it on their own. I remember us on the loudspeakers counting down, oh, it's such and such minutes until totality.

It's just great to see so many people of so many backgrounds coming together for observing something like that. There were families here with their young kids, there were teenagers. It's a perfect example of the kind of thing like, yes, look, you don't have to be a doctoral student. You can participate in these kinds of celestial events. and still take away something very all-inspiring from it. Whenever we can connect the work that we're doing at NASA on behalf of people, all people, to something that you can go out and see for yourself, it makes the job that much easier to drive home what we're doing

and why it's important. When we get a leg up from a magnificent planetary alignment, thanks, universe, we owe you one for that. In case you couldn't tell by this point in our episode, we here at NASA look for any occasion to bring people together, virtually or in person. Every fall, we encourage stargazers across the world to join us in International Observe the Moon Night,

a yearly event to appreciate our closest celestial neighbor. In the spring, we encourage people to join a pie day celebration. And with every major mission milestone, we like to remind people that these These celebrations aren't just for scientists, they're for everyone. Whether it's Pye Day, whether it's International Observe the Moon Night, no matter what it is, you don't need to be a scientist to partake in it. Space exploration, it's for all of us.

We don't send missions out into space just to send them out into space. We do it because there's an ingrained aspect of the human condition to explore, to seek out that which is not known and just to learn. It's only natural that whether it's a social media holiday or an event that brings people closer to each other to discuss science or not, building those human connections is what it takes to really make meaningful the overall work that NASA does. NASA is your space agency. We want to hear from you.

We want to know what you're excited about, what you're curious about. We are on this journey of exploration together. Everyone's invited and we'll see you online. Before we leave you to celebrate the holidays, we wanted to provide you some updates from past season's episodes. The James Webb Space Telescope team continues to release beautiful images and incredible findings. If only have we seen galaxies in new detail, we already know more about exoplanets.

Plus, we saw the rings of Neptune in ways we never have before. You can see all these images and more at webteloscope.org. You might have also heard about the DART impact, an exciting event where we sent a spacecraft into an asteroid. If you want to hear more about this exciting achievement, check out NASA.gov slash dart. And finally, on November 16th of this year, 2022, the Artemis 1 mission launched off the pad at Kennedy on its way to the moon. You can hear about the incredible SLS rocket that is taking us to the moon and beyond in our season 3 episode, Rocket Assembly Required.

We have many more exciting adventures to come, so keep an eye and an ear out for early 2023 when we'll start releasing the next season of NASA's Curious Year. We'll explore gravitational waves, track wildfires, and visit an Australian rocket launch site. Until then, stay curious, and happy holidays from all of us here at NASA. This is NASA's Curious Universe. This episode was written and produced by Christina Dana. Our executive producer is Katie Konins. The Curious Universe team includes Maddie Arnold and Michaela Sosby, with support from Christian Elliot.

Our extra special holiday theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santa Guida of System Sounds. If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show, and tagging at NASA, or sharing NASA's curious universe with a friend. Still curious about NASA? You can send us questions about this episode or a previous one, and we'll try to track down the answers. You can email a voice recording or send a written note to NASA-curious universe at mail. go to nassah.gov slash curious universe for more information. Patty, do you have any NASA holiday traditions? I have several NASA-themed Christmas ornaments that are hanging on the Christmas tree every year. I've also got a whole bunch of Star Trek ornaments on my tree.

And it's been really cool to see how science fiction has been walking hand in hand with science fact through all these decades.