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The Ingenuity helicopter made history on April 19, 2021, with the first powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet. How do engineers talk to a helicopter all the way out on Mars? How about other spacecraft? We’ll hear about it from Nacer Chahat of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who works on antenna and telecommunication systems for a variety of NASA missions. He chats with NASA...

What is a black hole? How do we study them when we can’t see them? Astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center joins NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green for a fascinating conversation about the latest black hole research.

Go behind the scenes at NASA with Chief Scientist Jim Green in the Gravity Assist podcast. We’ll talk to people who work in lots of different areas to make space missions and scientific investigations happen. How does someone become an astronaut, or an engineer working on the Ingenuity helicopter, or a science communicator? Everyone has a gravity assist – that person, place, thing, or event that i...

On Episode 188, Bill Paloski, former director of the Human Research Program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, explores the idea of artificial gravity within a spacecraft for long-duration missions and explains how it may affect the human body from what we have learned through Earth-based studies.

What does it take to drive a rover that’s more than 100 million miles away? Sophia Mitchell at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been driving the Mars Curiosity rover since 2018. In addition to her science and engineering background, Mitchell is also an avid hiker and pilot, and explains how she combines all of these interests and skills in her job. Curiosity landed on Mars on Aug. 6, 2012, and...

Why don’t we go live on Saturn’s moon Titan? What would it mean if we found life elsewhere? How did life get its start on Earth? NASA’s chief scientist Jim Green and astrobiologist Lindsay Hays discuss these and other audience questions from social media.

Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter is a mysterious dwarf planet called Ceres. Its surface is dark and muddy, but has hundreds of patches of bright material. The salt-covered dome and other bright features in Occator Crater are so reflective that they looked like flashlights in distant images. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft got a close look, and pointed scientists to the idea that liquid brine has come...

NASA’s Europa Clipper mission will give us the most detailed look yet at Jupiter’s extraordinary moon Europa. Smaller than our own Moon, Europa is one of the prime candidates for life beyond Earth because it has a deep ocean under its icy shell. The Europa Clipper spacecraft, named for speedy 19th century merchant ships, will map the surface, learn more about the ocean using ice-penetrating radar,...

The Curiosity rover has been probing the secrets of Mars since its arrival in 2012. Its discoveries include chemical signatures that could be related to life – or, alternatively, to geological processes. The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument has found organic molecules, which are fundamental building blocks of life on Earth, but can also be produced in non-biological ways. Scientists have a...

People have long wondered whether there is life beyond Earth, but it is only recently that scientists have been able to apply the tools of space exploration to go after this question. In 1996, the Allan Hills 84001 Meteorite shook the world as scientists debated whether it had tiny fossils inside of it that came from Mars. The consensus is that this rock does not contain Martian fossils, but the q...

High above our heads, even beyond 120,000 feet up, scientists have found tiny organisms called microbes. These high-flyers were swept up from the ground by winds and storms, or spewed out through volcanic processes. While most of these high-altitude microbes are dead, some are still alive, or have produced material called spores that could activate in the future. David J. Smith, an astrobiologist...

If astrobiologists find life beyond Earth in the solar system, it will most likely be in the form of tiny organisms called microbes – nothing that would talk to us. But the galaxy is a big place; the universe even bigger. Somewhere out there, life may have evolved to become as smart, or even much smarter, than us. And the next step in that ladder may be “post-biological,” argues Susan Schneider, t...

How well do you know the Sun? It hasn’t always looked the way it does today. Billions of years ago, the Sun was fainter but also more active, throwing out huge flares of radiation in powerful tantrums. This “young Sun” helped shape the evolution of life as we know it. By understanding what our Sun was like when life emerged on Earth, scientists can look to other stars in the galaxy and think about...

As the Perseverance Rover flies toward Jezero Crater on Mars, which once hosted water, astrobiologists are interested in places on Earth that are similar to the rover landing site. Kennda Lynch, scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, has been doing fieldwork in an ancient lake location in Utah called the Pilot Valley Playa. In this episode she describes her recent discov...

Billions of years ago, life may have gotten started at hydrothermal vents, cracks in the sea floor where hot fluids from inside our planet mix with colder ocean water. Laurie Barge, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, studies how plant-looking mineral structures called chimneys grow from chemicals found at the deepest depths of the ocean. In her lab she has glass vials and bulbs...

As we explore Mars and other places in the solar system that might have life, scientists who work in Planetary Protection are busy making sure that we don’t contaminate them. While engineers prepare the Perseverance Rover for launch, Lisa Pratt, NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer, is making sure that it’s not carrying too many spores — cells that could re-activate and transport Earthly bacteria t...

So far we’ve talked about life in terms of its chemistry and telltale signs of biology. But what if there’s intelligent life out there in the universe that has created technologies just as good, or even more advanced, than our own? Some scientists are thinking about how we would detect the signals that would come from distant civilizations, if they are out there. Those signals are called “technosi...

On Episode 150, Wesley Gordon, program manager for the Materials International Space Station Experiment (MISSE) facility at Alpha Space, highlights the work aboard the station that provides the capability to test materials and technologies to the harsh environment of space. This episode was recorded on February 7, 2020.

Without our Sun, there would be no life on Earth. The Sun gives us exactly the amount of heat we need to survive. But our Sun represents only one type of star in the universe. Smaller, fainter stars called K stars are more common in our galaxy and also have planets, but we know far less about them. Giada Arney, astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, is looking at the potential for K...

With more than 4,000 planets known that orbit other stars, scientists have discovered that many of these exoplanets are quite unlike our own. NASA has a whole fleet of spacecraft that look at different aspects of these planets. Currently TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is checking out nearby stars for possible planets. It is helping to identify candidates that future telescopes wi...

We now know there are more planets than stars in the galaxy. Many of them are very different from ours. How would we know if any of them had life? Shawn Domagal-Goldman, astrobiologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, discusses these strange and wondrous worlds beyond our Sun. He and others at NASA are working on concepts for future space telescopes that could actually find exoplanets that r...

From diving in Antarctica’s ice-covered lakes to exploring Mexico’s Cave of the Crystals, NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay has been searching for life in a wide variety of extreme environments on Earth. He’s also working on an idea to send a probe called Icebreaker to the polar caps of Mars. Beyond merely finding life on another planet, he’s excited about the idea that potential life on a place lik...

Some of the most fascinating targets in the search for life in our solar system are moons of giant planets. Did you know If you had wings, you could fly on Titan, a moon of Saturn? Did you know that Europa, a moon of Jupiter, is thought to have more water than Earth under its icy shell? NASA is planning to send spacecraft to both of these places in the coming years to look for signs and ingredient...

When Earth was just a baby, meteors and asteroids rained down, delivering all sorts of chemicals to our developing planet. These small objects could have delivered the chemicals needed to spark life on Earth for the first time. The OSIRIS-REx mission will collect and return a sample from asteroid Bennu, a 4.5-billion-year-old fossil of the early solar system. By looking at pieces of Bennu in labor...

Imagine a future where the Perseverance Rover actually found definitive evidence of life on Mars. What would happen next? The Explore Mars Society recently held a virtual discussion on this topic with NASA’s chief scientist Jim Green and astrobiologist Penelope Boston from NASA’s Ames Research Center. Hosted by Mat Kaplan of the Planetary Society’s Planetary Radio podcast, the panelists talked abo...