NASA's Curious Universe - Introducing Season Five

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

In season five, join us as we fight wildfires, defend the Earth from asteroids, and explore the invisible world of gravitational waves! New episodes every Tuesday.

Hi, curious universe listeners. We are back for a new season exploring our wild and wonderful universe. Join us each week as we protect a spacecraft from a dangerous atmosphere. Defend our planet from asteroids, fight wildfires, and investigate ripples in space time. It's going to be a wild ride. Most of the things we do here, we're never going to get to see again. We've got one hour of descent time and one shot to do this. this, there's no going back and trying again.

We want to know how the universe works. How stars and galaxies and planets evolve over time. I mean, it tells us something fundamental about where we came from, about the history of our galaxy, our solar system. It's brutal work in some ways, right? Because you're hauling heavy packs and you're just doing relay runs through the forest like that. You're always soaking wet from the hose and the fire is so hot and dry that you're always

dry at the same time. The weather was terrible, so it would be like nothing, looks like we're getting close, get down to two minutes in the count, and then a huge rainstorm would open up. There's a lot of design elements in this, and seeing that in front of me, it was awe-inspiring. It felt so right. We know the crew members. We work with the crew members. We want them to come home, and we want them to come home alive. That helps keep that thought in our heads and we aren't designing clothes.

We are designing a life support system. One of the things we've come to understand so far about asteroids is that there's no such thing as just another asteroid. Every asteroid is telling us a different part of the story of our solar system. And you won't see those things if you don't look.