Universe Today Podcast

On Thursday, May 23rd, 2019, SpaceX launched one of its most important payloads in the history of the company - 60 satellites that will begin the constellation of their Starlink internet satellite system.

Tony and Dustin brought me back for round two on the Space Junk Podcast. This time to talk about my favorite topic: The Fermi Paradox. Was I able to convince Dustin that we're probably the only intelligent life in the observable Universe? Subscribe to their podcast at: https://anchor.fm/spacejunk

This isn't an interview by me, it's an interview - of me - on the Science News and Questions (SNaQ) podcast from the Carnegie Science Center. Our conversation starts at the 15 minute mark. And if you like the podcast, subscribe at snaq.podbeam.com

This week I was joined by one of my favorite authors, Dennis E. Taylor, the creator of the Bobiverse Trilogy. If you haven't already, I highly recommend you read this series. He was here to talk about what went into the books and his newest book, Outland.

On Monday, May 13, 2019, NASA declared: “We are going to the Moon to stay” by 2024.

It’s an exciting announcement; the return to a place humans haven’t set foot on in more than 45 years. A serious goal that will test the ability of technology and engineering, as well as the bravery of the men and women who will carry out this task.

But we’ve also heard announcements like this before, many times. How will the mission come together? What are the risks? What’s new this time?

In this week's questions show, I wonder why there isn't a standard platform for space exploration, if we could move the atmosphere from Venus to Mars, are there L6 and L7 Lagrange Points and more. Featuring guest answerer Dylan O'Donnell.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope launched on April 24, 1990, and it’s been hard at work ever since, studying the cosmos like no other observatory in human history.

Several times in its journey, astronomers have called upon Hubble to study a single spot in the sky for weeks at a time, staring as far as it can, almost to the edge of the observable Universe.

These are the deep fields, including the most recent Hubble eXtreme Deep Field.

Now all of these data have been mashed together into a single image, spanning more than 250 days of observations.

It’s called the Hubble Legacy Field.

Again no guest this week. Just you and me. Talking about space. In this week's live QA, people waned to know more information about space construction (09:04), if we could catch a future Oumuamua (11:04) and my thoughts on Blue Origin's Blue Moon strategy (18:07).

In this week's questions show, I think about the future of humanity, wonder what would happen if Olympus Mons erupted and how big observatories clean the dust off their telescopes.

I didn't have a guest this week, instead I just answered everyone's questions for an hour. We got through about 40 of them.

Questions about the Sun releasing a killer solar flare, capturing asteroids to mine, and if my wife is into space too.

When we send anything to space, we have to pay an enormous amount of money. That’s because you need to push satellites, water, astronauts up and out of the Earth’s gravity well. Whether you’re just going to orbit, or heading to the Moon, or out into deep space, it makes the most sense to build your structures in space, out of material that you got from space.

In this week's questions show, I wonder if it's cheaper to build things in space, if the Universe is expanding because it's rolling downhill, and do astronauts fart in space?

Notice that you haven’t been hearing much about black holes crashing into each other recently? That’s because the world’s most sensitive gravitational wave hunters have been offline for the last year.

Well, they're back now, with enough upgrades that they should be capable of finding a black hole merger every week, not to mention more colliding neutron stars, and maybe, just maybe, black holes eating neutron stars.

This week's guest is Geoff Notkin, the host of TV's Meteorite Men. He was recently elected to be the President of the National Space Society.

http://www.geoffnotkin.com/

NASA’s Voyager spacecraft are traveling on an escape trajectory from the Sun, and are now on a journey that will take them through the outer reaches of the Solar System and out into the Milky Way Galaxy.