NASA's Curious Universe - Bonus: Still Curious?

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

At NASA, we are driven by curiosity, and we know you are too! Join us as we hear from our previous episode experts about what they’re interested in and answer some questions from listeners like you. What are you still curious about?

Awesome. Well, our last question is the question we ask everyone we talk to. What else are you still curious about? Oh, wow. That's a really good question because there's a lot of things that I'm curious about. Oh, my goodness. I think I'm curious about everything. That might be why I've been in this job for so long. And one of the reasons why I love working for a NASA mission so much. I'm innately curiosity-driven. I think we all are in different ways. It could be a back. out what music we like, how we want to look, how we want to play sports, how we want to do art. How do we understand to build the things that let us live, better, safer, thrive longer.

The way you work in the U.S. and the fire you have in your spirits and the passion you have for space is exactly the same we have here. We are really driven by the same fuel on both sides of the Atlantic. The fuel is named Curiosity. 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. Curiosity is all around us, and it can show up in a lot of different ways.

We here at NASA love curiosity so much. It's in the name of this show. And it's at the heart of all the different projects that scientists and engineers take on as we explore our home planet and beyond. Science is driven by curiosity and the search for answers. We're working on season four of Curious Universe now, but in the meantime, we wanted to release a bonus episode to hear about some of our experts' curiosities, answer listener questions, and share a few updates on missions we've covered in the past. At the end of each episode of this show, we like to ask our listeners, what are you still curious about? And when we record,

the interviews to make these episodes, we ask our experts the same thing. So let's revisit some of the voices you heard in season three and our James Webb Space Telescope mini-series to learn what NASA experts are still curious about. Kimberly Arcand, from our data sonification episode in season three, found that a deep-seated sense of curiosity drives her work with the Chandra X-ray Observatory. I'm learning something new quite literally every day.

Every time you think you know the answer to one thing, you end up getting 10 new questions to ask. And I love the not knowing. I'm comfortable not knowing. So it's hard for me to predict, like, where I will go from here or what else I will learn after this, because I'll be completely surprised with something new tomorrow. In Curious Universe, we like to take listeners on adventures to far off worlds. And we also investigate incredible discoveries here on our home planet. In season three, we touched down on Venus with the teams who are sending probes to explore our sibling planet in 2029.

Here's Giata Arne, who's working on the Da Vinci mission. I think there's a innate human desire to always learn more, and we're just such a curious species. So this curiosity has taken us across continents and oceans in the past. And it's also driven us to amazing discoveries across science. and also driven us to create amazing pieces of art and literature. All the things that humans do are amazing. I'm really curious about how planets evolve through time and how habitability evolves through time.

I'm also really curious about planets beyond our solar system. I'd love to know what other solar systems are like. I'd love to know if there are planets beyond our solar system that look more like Earth and maybe even host habitability in life themselves. One of the questions we're most curious about is what else is out there in the universe, and if we'll ever find life outside of Earth. In fall of 2021, we released a miniseries about the James Webb Space Telescope, one of the most ambitious missions ever sent to space.

This incredible telescope might help us answer some of the biggest questions our experts are curious about. In our miniseries, we heard from Antonella Nota, the Webb Project scientists for the European Space Agency, or ISA. We all ask the same question. Astronomers and public alike. We're all interested to know where we come from, what are our origin. Are we alone in the universe? Is there life anywhere?

And James Webb is designed to look for those signs, possibly on life on other planets outside our solar system. So we are really exciting to see what Webb will bring us. Alex Lockwood is a project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. We first heard from her in our science episode of the miniseries. One of the most exciting things about Web is the fact that we have an idea of what we're going to learn, but we have no idea how much more we're going to learn. We can't even anticipate how big discoveries are going to be made.

And we're probably looking at new pieces of fundamental physics that will be discovered by this telescope. Every once in a while, and I mean every once in a while, probably about once a month, I speak with a few of my colleagues, and we are simultaneously overwhelmed and completely humbled and completely humbled and honored to be the ones who are really, bringing this telescope to the public to life. It is a dream come true. John Mather is a Nobel Prize winner and senior project scientist for Webb. While speaking with him for the miniseries, he introduced us to a new kind of chicken or egg problem. I'm hoping that we find out which came first,

the black holes are the galaxies. So somehow, a galaxy is big as ours, the Milky Way has several million worth, of stars all collapsed into one gigantic black hole in the middle. And some galaxies are even bigger. They have billions of stars all squeezed into one tiny black hole. It might be that the Big Bang made the black holes directly. It might be that the first generations of stars led directly to black holes and that they just

disappeared. But nobody knows how that ever got started. So we'd like to know about that. When we wrapped up our miniseries, Webb was preparing for launch in Kuru, French Guiana. Since then, the Arian 5 rocket carrying Webb successfully lifted off on December 25th, 2021. One of the hosts of the live launch broadcasts was Nicole Cologne, who we heard in our planet hunting episode on exoplanets. We have just wrapped the whole broadcast. Web is power positive. First, Nicole, how are you feeling? I feel much less nervous than I did before.

I'm feeling very good. Cole is going to use Webb to study the weather of a fascinating exoplanet system. So I'm part of a couple programs to study exoplanets. One of them is a really interesting system, HD 80606B. It's actually one we've known about for a long time since the late 90s or early 2000s. And it's one that has a very eccentric orbit. So it's almost like a comet. So it travels really distant from its star and then comes in really close.

And it just so happens when it comes in close. We can see it not only transit or pass in front of its star, but we can also see it when it passes behind its star. We're going to look for the formation and dissipation of clouds in the atmosphere as it gets heated up rapidly and cools down, like literally trying to see weather on this planet, you know, which is really hard to do, but that's why Webb comes into play because Webb's going to have the sensitivity for this.

Over a nail-biting month of space travel, Webb unfolded all of its intricate pieces before arriving at its destination one million miles away. John, Antenella, Alex, Nicole, and countless others have continued to support Webb's journey through space and are now awaiting the first cosmic images coming this summer, 2022.

With so much discovery right around the corner, There's a lot to be curious about. I think something that really makes me wonder is what's out there? That's Sharon Cobb from our episode on the space launch system, or SLS rocket. The SLS is slated to have its very first flight in 2022 with the Artemis One mission. There's a lot to discover as we head back to the moon and eventually Mars with the Artemis program. what are we going to find when we go to Mars? What are we going to find when we go beyond Mars?

What are the things that we just can't even imagine are beyond our reach right now? And then how can we take what we learn from that and make life better here on Earth? So I just, the idea that there is so much to be learned. And I think as a child, I was so curious about how things worked and I would cut open a flower to see what was inside it. And I just think the idea that if we look under things and we open things and we see what's there, we'll learn so much and think about what we can do with that.

No matter what roles we take on here at NASA, many of us work at the agency because we're curious. We have a lifelong love of discovery and exploration. And still today, there's so much in this universe we don't yet know about, even when it comes to the planet's closest to home. In his everyday life, David Zahn focuses on the future of flight and aeronautics. But he's curious about what his NASA colleagues are going to find on the upcoming missions to Venus.

Oh my gosh. Venus! I was so happy to hear the administrators saying that they're putting two probes back into Venus. I think that would be a really cool planet to explore, and it's so beautiful. I don't do anything with space. But as far as being a fan, I would say that's probably my most intriguing, captivating idea of getting high-res images from Venus. My curiosity is driven about the physical natural world and what it's doing. It just grips me.

And I think as people, we all do care about that in different ways as we go through our lives. We've first heard from Jim Garvin, principal investigator of the Da Vinci Mission, in our episode Journey to Venus. Jim has been with NASA for over 30 years, but he's still brimming with curiosity about, well, just about everything. I think my curiosity is the local natural world that I get to see every day. I take walks in the woods with my dog, and I love to see the blooming of interesting fungi.

You know, every so often, a giant puff ball comes up, and you wonder, how does that thing, the size of a soccer ball, contain 100 trillion spores hoping to make a couple more fungi? That's a curiosity. The rocks we see that, you know, I like to tell my kids have never lied to me. You can read a rock like a book. And that's why is geology so much fun. And I guess my final curiosity is I'm a passionate about primitive trees. You might sound really strange. I love them. I see a conifer and I cringe in excitement. I don't know what it is. And I'm saddened by the fact that they're literally going extinct around us. Curious Universe spends a lot of time in space,

but there's so much here on our complex and beautiful home planet still to discover. Brooke Medley took us on a tour of Antarctica in our episode about sea level rise here on planet Earth. She studies ice and its effects on ocean levels, both on the ground and with data from satellites. My biggest curiosity is what's happening at the surface. So I really am curious about snowfall and how that changes and what that means from a sea level perspective.

I've had a lot of interest in trying to understand historically how has that change in snowfall impacted sea level rise, and in fact, we have shown that increased snowfall over the 20th century did actually help remove some water from the ocean. Unfortunately, it's not enough to keep pace with the ice losses that were seen. There's always a story to tell with the data. It's never just been done. I think that's kind of the fun part about being a scientist is you can just keep thinking and wondering,

can I use that for this and how can I do that? Maybe if I combine it with that, you just get to be curious, and that's really fun. Scientists know Earth's climate is changing, and NASA is working to map how it could continue to change in the future. This is one of our most pressing questions about our home planet. It takes a lot of people working together to investigate these problems and figure out solutions. Shivangeli Sharma is an aerospace engineer from our episode on the future of flight. Her work, like so many people at NASA, has to be careful and precise. But that doesn't mean we have to be perfect. Perfection is not a key attribute to becoming a NASA engineer.

being curious, being able to learn from your mistakes, and being able to always be willing to learn. I think that is the key aspect of a NASA engineer. I might go into work tomorrow and be faced with a novel aircraft configuration that I've never seen before in my life. And I have to learn about how that vehicle operates and how there might be aspects of the vehicle that I have to actually continuously learn and evolve in understanding.

That desire to learn is, I think, much more important than any perfection. And I really don't think anyone is perfect. So that's my maybe biased opinion. We are so grateful to our incredible experts who shared not only their work, but also their excitement and curiosity with us. But we know you're curious too. So let's answer some questions from listeners like you. Remember, you can send us questions in audio or written format.

and we'll try to find the answers. Our producers, Christina Dana and Katie Atkinson, are going to read some of the questions we were sent at Curious Universe at mail.nasa.gov. Thanks, Patty. After our season three episode on plasma, Dante asked, Is it possible to study plasma

from its magnetic aspect or magnetic interaction? Great question, Dante. We checked in with our friends on the heliophysics team, and it turns out magnetic interaction. is one of the best ways to study plasma. Plasma is an electrically charged gas, which means it is sensitive and reacts to electromagnetic forces differently than other states of matter.

By looking at the ways plasmas interact with both magnetic and electric fields, we can learn how plasma affects the universe around us, including space weather events and satellite communication. Next from our season two episode on the physics of black holes, Rimsha asked, Is there a possibility that we can send satellites into a black hole to see what's inside them? I understand that us humans won't survive.

How will a satellite survive? Another great question. The first problem is that the closest black hole to Earth is thousands of light years away. We haven't yet sent a probe that far and don't currently have the technology. Not only to send a satellite there, but also receive information back.

The second problem is that once something goes into a black hole, it's really hard to get any information back from it. It's hard even to get near it. The satellite would be stretched like a spaghetti noodle by the black hole's massive gravity, and none of the methods we currently use to transport information, like radio waves, would be able to escape. Thanks, Patty.

And we have an audio question about gas giant planets. Hi, this is Derek. I am an engineer and long-time space enthusiast. My question is, why do the photographs of the gas giant planets show them with what appears to be a hard horizon? If they're gas giants, you would think that the horizon would be very soft as the density of the air got less and less and less. I have wondered this for many years, and hopefully you can answer my question. Thanks. Hi, Derek. Thanks so much for your question. It really got us thinking. Pictures of gas planets, they do look solid like you could almost step on them, but you can't. So we checked in with one of our planetary experts on why these planets look so solid. This is Heidi Hamel, who we heard from in the James Webb miniseries. It's an interesting question, Derek. The super short answer is that the atmospheres of the giant planets are soft.

They are made of clouds. But from a distance, they look hard. To think about this, imagine if you've ever been in an airplane that is flying up through the clouds and is then above the clouds. When you look down, you see what looks like a surface, but actually that Earth cloud landscape is all just misty water vapor. You know, the plane just flew right through it. The same thing is true for the surface, I use that in quotes, of a giant planet.

It is just clouds. And in case you're wondering why the clouds and the gases don't just float away into space, it's the gravity of these planets that holds them there, holds them tight. And the largest planets, like Jupiter and Saturn Uranus and Neptune, they have a really strong gravitational force, so strong that they hold tight to their atmospheres, even though these large planets are spinning much faster than the Earth. Finally, Patty, as an ever-curious scientist yourself, besides the work you do on astrophysics and exoplanets, what are you curious about?

In addition to exoplanets, I'm really fascinated by black holes at all size scales. And when we look at the universe around us today, every galaxy we see, which is composed of hundreds of billions of stars like the sun, each of those has a super massive black hole at the core. Its mass is a million and sometimes even up to a billion times the mass of our sun. But what we don't know is how these supermassive black holes got there. That's a mystery that we're waiting for the James Webb Space Telescope to help us unravel. And I'm so curious to find out what the answer really is. Curiosity is a beautiful part of the human experience. And there is so much out there still to discover.

We've had a great time in this episode, revisiting some of the experts we featured on the show. And we are so grateful to you for coming on the journey with us and sending your questions along the way. Thank you for listening. We're excited to continue sharing NASA's discoveries with you. This season, you'll hear about supersonic flight, the science of spacesuits, the mysteries of the moon, and more.

In the meantime, if you'd like to be featured in a future Q&A episode, check out NASA.gov slash Curious Universe for more information about how to submit a question. If you're still curious about what work we're up to here at NASA, you can visit NASA.gov slash podcasts for even more information. This is NASA's Curious Universe. This episode was written and produced by Christina Dana. Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson. The Curious Universe team includes Maddie Arnold and Michaela Sosby.

Our 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 at NASA, and sharing NASA's curious universe with a friend. All right. I want to do it again. Page nine. This is stressful.