Universe Today Podcast

NASA selects two suppliers for new spacesuits, James Webb reveals the date of first color images, JUICE moves closer to launch and a new kind of solar sail gets to next NIAC round.

James Webb is the most expensive and most advanced telescope in human history. Will it be worth its $10B price? What it will discover? How long will JWST last? Will it ever be serviced? All the answers are in this episode of The Big Q.

This is a special bonus episode on the YouTube channel. I was interviewed on the Street Epistemology Call-In Show to defend one of my beliefs. I chose to defend my belief that we're alone in the observable Universe. We had an interesting discussion about philosophy and other topics in space afterwards, I hope you enjoy it. Here's a link to the original full-length episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy5-ES_2E-E

How did life go from single-celled to multi-celled? Dr. William Ratcliff is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences at the School of Biological Science at Georgia Tech. Dr. Ratcliff and his collaborators are working with single cells of yeast, watching them make the jump to become multi-cellular organisms. It turns out, life has done this many times in the past, and not just the jump that created the modern animals we know of today.

Boeing finally completes a demo mission, scientists grow plants in lunar regolith, NASA will launch a mission to repair and refuel a satellite, space suits are leaking on the ISS again, and more.

In this week's Questions and Answers show, I explain what James Webb will see when it looks at SgrA*, why black holes happen to be facing towards us, and if asteroid strikes can hurl dinosaurs into space.

Dr. Jonathan Jiang is the supervisor of the Aerosol and Cloud Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dr. Jiang has contributed over 220 peer-reviewed papers in a variety of journals. Most recently, he collaborated on a paper that investigates the future of human space exploration beyond the Moon and Mars, even to the outer Solar System.

Dr. Ashish Goel is a Research Technologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the Robotic Surface Mobility group. He has helped develop the plans to build a giant radio telescope inside a crater on the Moon, providing a pristine view to the Universe, using the Moon to block Earth's radio transmissions.

In this week's News Bites segment, I talk about the successful launch of the Boeing CST-100 Starliner, how astronomers watch a nova unfold in real-time, the (not) doorway on Mars, and the chance to see the greatest meteor storm in a generation.

Professor Stephen Sweeney works in the department of physics at the University of Surrey. He specializes in photonics, using lasers and photovoltaics for new types of communication, remote power transmission, and other concepts in space exploration.

Michael Amato is an engineer at NASA and has been a member of the team behind NASA's DAVINCI spacecraft which will be launching to Venus in 2029. The spacecraft will be exploring the atmosphere of Venus with more clarity and detail than has ever been seen before, giving us a better sense about how the world became so different from Earth.

In this week's episode, I talk about how close to the Sun Parker Solar Probe can get, what is the smallest possible star that's turned into a red giant, why do I think aliens will need to adhere to the laws of physics, and more. Oh, and why am I so cynical?

We finally have the SgrA* supermassive black hole image by the Event Horizon Telescope, China announces their plans to launch a space telescope, and Russia threatens to leave the ISS.

Edward Balaban is a research scientist at NASA Ames and the principal investigator of the Fluidic Telescope Experiment, or FLUTE. The idea is to create a giant lens in space out of a fluid that could maintain its shape in microgravity. The technology was recently tested during the Axiom-1 mission to the International Space Station.

In this week's Questions and Answers show, I explain why we don't see much stuff in space unfolding in real time, how long will Musk's Tesla be a recognizable object, and what are some feasible structures we could build to help send payloads to space.

Dr. Kevin Cannon is an assistant professor of geology and geological engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Dr. Cannon has been studying the properties of lunar regolith, developing techniques that could help to mitigate its dangers during long-duration lunar exploration missions.