National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Come get curious with NASA. As an official NASA podcast, Curious Universe brings you mind-blowing science and space adventures you won't find anywhere else. Exp...
How NASA Found the Ingredients For Life on an Asteroid
How did life begin? It’s one of science’s biggest questions, but it’s impossible to answer on Earth, where ancient clues have been buried by the planet’s shifting surface. Instead, scientists are looking beyond our own planet, to asteroids like Bennu, a distant fragment of a lost world. In 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected a sample of Bennu’s surface and brought it back to Earth. Ever since, scientists have been hard at work studying the fragments of asteroid Bennu. Now, they’re ready to reveal the results—our best look yet at a time capsule from the early solar system that once fostered the ingredients for life.
--------
27:38
Why the Moon’s Icy South Pole is a Hot Target for NASA
The Moon’s South Pole is a bizarre landscape. Mountain ridges glow in perpetual sunlight while deep craters freeze in billion-year-old shade. Yet hidden in the depths of those shadowed craters, under temperatures almost three times colder than the frostiest day in Antarctica, lurks something familiar–water ice. In the future, that ice could sustain human explorers or be broken apart into hydrogen and oxygen to refuel rockets. Join Brett Denevi, Artemis III geology team lead, to learn why NASA plans to land astronauts on the Moon’s South Pole later this decade. Then with Michelle Munk, NASA space technology chief architect, meet the robot Moon landers scouting ahead of Artemis which will drill beneath the regolith and test technologies designed to help future human explorers survive the Pole’s extreme conditions.
--------
36:39
The Mind-Bending Math Inside Black Holes
Black holes are mysterious, far away, and can bend the fabric of reality itself—but we're learning more about them all the time. Ronald Gamble, a NASA theoretical astrophysicist, uses math, computer coding, and a dash of creativity to peer inside some of the universe's most extreme objects. We'll explore what it would feel like to get pulled into a black hole and what people get wrong about black holes. And we'll answer questions from curious listeners, including, "What would happen if a black hole ate nothing but magnetized material?"
--------
25:58
How Open Science and AI Are Advancing Hurricane Research
As climate change drives more frequent and intense tropical cyclones and hurricanes, coastal communities desperately need better tools to predict how bad storms will be and when and where they’ll strike—and to assess the damage afterward. From the air and in space, NASA and NOAA collect critical data as storms roll in. But what happens next? Fly directly into the eye of the storm with daring hurricane hunter pilots, meet meteorologists and data scientists building AI models to improve hurricane prediction, and join the disaster response experts helping cities pinpoint their hardest-hit neighborhoods. Plus, learn how NASA is making data open to everyone—including you, with Transform to Open Science.
--------
32:21
Europa Clipper's Voyage to Jupiter's Ocean Moon
As NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft leaves Earth, it carries a message: we, too, are made of water. Europa—one of Jupiter’s moons—is a top candidate to support life, thanks to its ocean of liquid, salty water capped by a layer of ice. Lynnae Quick-Henderson, a planetary scientist at NASA, explains how Clipper will search Europa for the building blocks of life. The mission is also a message in a bottle, bringing a greeting from one ocean world to another. Hear how Ada Limón, the Poet Laureate of the United States, used NASA’s mission as inspiration for her poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” and why she thinks everyone—even space nerds—should step back and appreciate our connections to the universe and each other.
Come get curious with NASA. As an official NASA podcast, Curious Universe brings you mind-blowing science and space adventures you won't find anywhere else. Explore the cosmos alongside astronauts, scientists, engineers, and other top NASA experts who are achieving remarkable feats in science, space exploration, and aeronautics. Learn something new about the wild and wonderful universe we share. All you need to get started is a little curiosity.
NASA's Curious Universe is an official NASA podcast hosted by Padi Boyd and Jacob Pinter. Discover more original NASA shows at nasa.gov/podcasts
South Africa