Universe Today Podcast

Space missions will become longer. It will inevitably become impossible to pack every medication you need and take it from Earth. This means that we'll need a way to produce them in space. Which is the goal of the NIAC award developed by Dr Lynn Rothschild.

Can solar sails change the way we explore the Solar System and beyond? Dr Slava Turyshev definitely thinks so! He assembled an all-star team of researchers in a recent paper about potential science opportunities of using solar sails. In this interview, we talk about the technology behind it, what's its current state, what perspectives it has and much more.

How can we possibly know everything about exoplanets from just a single pixel? Will Mars be a good place for old people? Where does more emptiness come from if the Universe is expanding? Can we ever get to explore Betelgeuse? Answers to all these questions and more in this week's Q&A!

When we fly to Moon and Mars, how hard will it be to deal with dust. It can be a much more difficult problem when most of us think. And why is it so hard to clean it off solar panels on Mars. We discuss all that with Dr Christine Hartzell.

iSpace's Hakuto R fails to land safely on the Moon. China wants to have people on the Moon by 2030. Another problem with James Webb.

The FarView Observatory is a NIAC project that's a giant self-building radio telescope on the far side of the Moon. In this interview, I'm discussing the details of the project with Dr Ronald Polidan who's managing the project. We also talk about the role of the Moon in the future of lunar exploration and how close we are to sending Von Neumann probes all over the Universe.

SpaceX finally tested a fully stacked Starship system on April 20th. Why did they blow it up? What exactly went wrong with the test? How can they fix it in future tests? Discussing all these questions with Scott Manley and Marcus House.

Did Webb prove the Big Bang Theory wrong? Why did nobody test artificial gravity in space yet? What's the purpose of other planets other than Earth? How would eyes evolve under a different star? All this and more in this week's Q&A!

Starship launches but fails to reach orbit. JUICE looks back at Earth one last time. GAIA helps find an exoplanet.

Magnetospheres seem to be a very important factor when considering how habitable a planet is. So it was really exciting when it was announced that an Earth-size exoplanet's magnetosphere was detected using radio telescopes. It can also be a method to look for exoplanets by detecting their magnetic fields.

How big can iron planets get before collapsing into black holes? Why is the Moon floating away from Earth? Will Mars bases have glass domes? How will the asteroid mining race unfold? Will we create rings of satellites around the Earth? All this and more in this week's Q&A!

JUICE launches to Jupiter and its moons. A new JWST image of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. Machine learning cleans up the Universe and improves images of a black hole’s event horizon.

Active volcanism. Plate tectonics. Retaining the atmosphere without a magnetosphere. There's so much to learn about Venus! In this interview I'm discussing all these things with Dr Paul Byrne, Planetary Evangelist and Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Science at Washington University in St. Louis

What are the risks of returning samples from Mars? What happens if you bring two stars together? Which galaxies can be seen with the naked eye? What is the system behind naming stars and exoplanets? All this and more in this week's Q&A!

What are Fast Radio Bursts? Did we get a step closer to answering this question by associating some of them with a Kilonova event? What Cosmology questions can we solve by studying FRBs? Discussing all these things with Dr Clancy James from Curtin University.

Meet the crew of Artemis 2, we might have the perfect date for a Mars mission, and astronomers discover an ultramassive black hole.