Universe Today Podcast

Dr. Sonny White is a physicist and mechanical engineer. He previously worked at NASA's Eagleworks Lab testing advanced propulsion systems, and developing ideas for faster-than-light travel. He's now working with Limitless Space, founded with the vision of advancing human space exploration beyond the Solar System by the end of the 21st century.

FAA finally gave its approval to SpaceX for Starship launches from Boca Chica, Gaia released its third data drop, China stars continuous space presence, Perseverance finds another weird rock on Mars.

Annika Rollock is a Ph.D. student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is studying next generation space habitats and recently published a paper about how future space stations can remain self-sufficient, especially when support and communication from Earth are far away.

In this week's questions and answers show, I explain how JWST and other telescopes see color, how images from observatories are released to the public, and how much of the sky can JWST see. Also, a bunch of non-Webb questions too.

Dr. Paul Hickson is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Hickson is overseeing a team that built a telescope out of liquid mercury in India. The International Liquid Mirror Telescope is 4 meters across and built on top of a 3,000-meter mountain in India. This will prove the technology and allow for larger and larger liquid mirror telescopes on Earth (and eventually in space).

Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra is a geologist and astrobiologist with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. He studies the conditions that allowed life to spread across the Earth and searches for similar environments across the Universe. In a recent paper, Dr. Haqq-Misra suggests methods that we could search for technologically advanced civilizations across the Universe.

Here's an interview with me on the Spaced Out Podcast from the Center for Astro, Particle, and Planetary Physics at NYU Abu Dhabi. We talk about my career as a space journalist, how I approach the news, what my role is as a science communicator.

JWST got damaged by a micrometeoroid but seems to be okay, NASA buys more Crew Dragon flights, Mars rovers see interesting stuff, ESA confirms a comet hunter, UFOs get official NASA investigations, all planets get into order in the night sky and more.

Dr. Zach Putnam is an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He's part of a team developing navigation techniques that use the signals from pulsars to always know your location, anywhere in the Solar System.

In this week's Questions and Answers show, I answer what it would take to build a telescope as big as the Earth's orbit around the Sun, why SgrA* seems to have been rolled over on its side, and how we know the age of stars.

Einstein's Theory of General Relativity has been tried and tested many times, and so far, Einstein was right. But we know his theory must be incomplete, as it still doesn't integrate with quantum mechanics. Where are physicists searching next for the future of cosmology and relativity? Dr. Leah Jenks is a PhD recipient from Brown University, and will become a KICP Fellow at the University of Chicago.

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.