Bonus: Still Curious?

01Awesome.

02Well, our last question is the question we ask everyone we talk to.

03What else are you still curious about?

04Oh, wow.

05That's a really good question because there's a lot of things that I'm curious about.

06Oh, my goodness.

07I think I'm curious about everything.

08That might be why I've been in this job for so long and one of the reasons why I love working for a NASA mission so much.

09I'm innately curiosity driven.

10I think we all are in different ways.

11It could be about what music we like, how we want to look, how we want to play sports, how we want to do art.

12How do we understand to build the things that let us live better, safer, thrive longer?

13The way you work in the U.S.

14and the fire you have in your spirits and the passion you have for space is exactly the same we have here.

15We are really driven by the same fuel on both sides of the Atlantic.

16The fuel is named curiosity.

17This is NASA's Curious Universe.

18Our universe is a wild and wonderful place.

19I'm your host, Patti Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

20Curiosity is all around us, and it can show up in a lot of different ways.

21We here at NASA love curiosity so much, it's in the name of this show.

22And it's at the heart of all the different projects that scientists and engineers take on as we explore our home planet and beyond.

23Science is driven by curiosity and the search for answers.

24We're working on Season 4 of Curious Universe now, but in the meantime, we wanted to release a bonus episode to hear about some of our experts' curiosities, answer listener questions, and share a few updates on missions we've covered in the past.

25At the end of each episode of this show, we like to ask our listeners, what are you still curious about?

26And when we record the interviews to make these episodes, we ask our experts the same thing.

27So let's revisit some of the voices you heard in Season 3 and our James Webb Space Telescope miniseries to learn what NASA experts are still curious about.

28Kimberly Arcand, from our Data Sonification episode in Season 3, found that a deep-seated sense of curiosity drives her work with the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

29I'm learning something new quite literally every day.

30Every time you think you know the answer to one thing, you end up getting 10 new questions to ask.

31And I love the not knowing.

32I'm comfortable not knowing.

33So it's hard for me to predict, like, where I will go from here or what else I will learn after this, because I'll be completely surprised with something new tomorrow.

34In Curious Universe, we like to take listeners on adventures to far-off worlds.

35And we also investigate incredible discoveries here on our home planet.

36In Season 3, we touch down on Venus, with the teams who are sending probes to explore our sibling planet in 2029.

37Here's Giada Arnie, who's working on the Da Vinci mission.

38I think there's an innate human desire to always learn more, and we're just such a curious species.

39So this curiosity has taken us across continents and oceans in the past.

40And it's also driven us to amazing discoveries across science, and also driven us to create amazing pieces of art and literature.

41You know, all the things that humans do are amazing.

42I'm really curious about how planets evolve through time and how habitability evolves through time.

43I'm also really curious about planets beyond our solar system.

44I'd love to know what other solar systems are like.

45I'd love to know if there are planets beyond our solar system that look more like Earth and maybe even host habitability in life themselves.

46One of the questions we're most curious about is what else is out there in the universe, and if we'll ever find life outside of Earth.

47In fall of 2021, we released a miniseries about the James Webb Space Telescope, one of the most ambitious missions ever sent to space.

48This incredible telescope might help us answer some of the biggest questions our experts are curious about.

49In our miniseries, we heard from Antonella Nota, the Webb Project Scientist for the European Space Agency, or ESA.

50We all ask the same question, astronomers and public alike.

51We're all interested to know where we come from, what are our origins?

52Are we alone in the universe?

53Is there life anywhere?

54And James Webb is designed to look for those signs, possibly, on life on other planets outside our solar system.

55So we are really excited to see what Webb will bring us.

56Alex Lockwood is a project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

57We first heard from her in our science episode of the miniseries.

58One of the most exciting things about Webb is the fact that we have an idea of what we're going to learn, but we have no idea how much more we're going to learn.

59We can't even anticipate how big discoveries are going to be made.

60And we're probably looking at new pieces of fundamental physics that will be discovered by this telescope.

61Every once in a while, and I mean every once in a while, probably about once a month, I speak with a few of my colleagues and we are simultaneously overwhelmed and completely humbled and honored to be the ones who are really bringing this telescope to the public, to life.

62It is a dream come true.

63John Mather is a Nobel Prize winner and senior project scientist for Webb.

64While speaking with him for the miniseries, he introduced us to a new kind of chicken or egg problem.

65I'm hoping that we find out which came first, the black holes or the galaxies.

66So somehow, a galaxy as big as ours, the Milky Way, has several million worth of stars, all collapsed into one gigantic black hole in the middle.

67And some galaxies are even bigger.

68They have billions of stars all squeezed into one tiny black hole.

69It might be that the Big Bang made the black holes directly.

70It might be that the first generations of stars led directly to black holes and that they just disappeared.

71But nobody knows how that ever got started.

72So we'd like to know about that.

73When we wrapped up our miniseries, Webb was preparing for launch in Kourou, French Guiana.

74Since then, the Ariane 5 rocket carrying Webb successfully lifted off on December 25, 2021.

75And to the video, attention, break the court final.

76One of the hosts of the live launch broadcasts was Nicole Colon, who we heard in our planet hunting episode on exoplanets.

77We have just wrapped the whole broadcast.

78Webb is power positive.

79First, Nicole, how are you feeling?

80I feel much less nervous than I did before.

81I'm feeling very good.

82Nicole is going to use Webb to study the weather of a fascinating exoplanet system.

83So I'm part of a couple programs to study exoplanets.

84One of them is a really interesting system, HD80606b.

85It's actually one we've known about for a long time, since the late 90s or early 2000s.

86And it's one that has a very eccentric orbit.

87So it's almost like a comet.

88So it travels really distant from its star and then comes in really close.

89And it just so happens when it comes in close, we can see it not only transit or pass in front of its star, but we can also see it when it passes behind its star.

90We're going to look for the formation and dissipation of clouds in the atmosphere as it gets heated up rapidly and cools down.

91Like literally trying to see weather on this planet, you know, which is really hard to do, but that's why Webb comes into play, because Webb's going to have the sensitivity for this.

92Over a nail-biting month of space travel, Webb unfolded all of its intricate pieces before arriving at its destination one million miles away.

93John, Antonella, Alex, Nicole, and countless others have continued to support Webb's journey through space and are now awaiting the first cosmic images, coming this summer 2022.

94With so much discovery right around the corner, there's a lot to be curious about.

95I think something that really makes me wonder is, what's out there?

96That's Sharon Cobb from our episode on the Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket.

97The SLS is slated to have its very first flight in 2022 with the Artemis I mission.

98There's a lot to discover as we head back to the Moon and eventually Mars with the Artemis program.

99What are we going to find when we go to Mars?

100What are we going to find when we go beyond Mars?

101What are the things that we just can't even imagine are beyond our reach right now?

102And then, how can we take what we learn from that and make life better here on Earth?

103So, I just, the idea that there is so much to be learned, and I think as a child, I was so curious about how things worked, and I would cut open a flower to see what was inside it.

104And I just think the idea that if we look under things, and we open things, and we see what's there, we'll learn so much and think about what we can do with that.

105No matter what roles we take on here at NASA, many of us work at the agency because we're curious.

106We have a lifelong love of discovery and exploration.

107And still today, there's so much in this universe we don't yet know about, even when it comes to the planets closest to home.

108In his everyday life, David Zahn focuses on the future of flight and aeronautics.

109But he's curious about what his NASA colleagues are going to find on the upcoming missions to Venus.

110Oh my gosh, Venus.

111I was so happy to hear the administrator saying that they're putting two probes back into Venus.

112I think that would be a really cool planet to explore, and it's so beautiful.

113I don't do anything with space, but as far as being a fan, I would say that's probably my most intriguing, captivating idea of getting high-res images from Venus.

114My curiosity is driven about the physical natural world and what it's doing.

115It just grips me.

116And I think as people, we all do care about that in different ways as we go through our lives.

117We first heard from Jim Garvin, principal investigator of the da Vinci mission, in our episode, Journey to Venus.

118Jim has been with NASA for over 30 years, but he's still brimming with curiosity about, well, just about everything.

119I think my curiosity is the local natural world that I get to see every day.

120I take walks in the woods with my dog, and I love to see the blooming of interesting fungi.

121You know, every so often, a giant puffball comes up, and you wonder, how does that thing the size of a soccer ball contain 100 trillion spores, hoping to make a couple more fungi?

122That's a curiosity.

123The rocks we see that, you know, I like to tell my kids have never lied to me.

124You can read a rock like a book, and that's why is geology so much fun?

125And I guess my final curiosity is I'm passionate about primitive trees.

126It might sound really strange.

127I love them.

128I see a conifer, and I cringe in excitement.

129I don't know what it is.

130And I'm saddened by the fact that they're literally going extinct around us.

131Curious Universe spends a lot of time in space, but there's so much here on our complex and beautiful home planet still to discover.

132Brooke Medley took us on a tour of Antarctica in our episode about sea level rise here on planet Earth.

133She studies ice and its effects on ocean levels, both on the ground and with data from satellites.

134My biggest curiosity is what's happening at the surface.

135So I really am curious about snowfall and how that changes and what that means from a sea level perspective.

136I've had a lot of interest in trying to understand historically how has that change in snowfall impacted sea level rise?

137And in fact, we have shown that increased snowfall over the 20th century did actually help remove some water from the ocean.

138Unfortunately, it's not enough to keep pace with the ice losses that were seen.

139There's always a story to tell with the data.

140It's never just been done.

141I think that's kind of the fun part about being a scientist is you can just keep thinking and wondering, can I use that for this?

142And how can I do that?

143And maybe if I combine it with that, you just get to be curious.

144And that's really fun.

145Scientists know Earth's climate is changing.

146And NASA is working to map how it could continue to change in the future.

147This is one of our most pressing questions about our home planet.

148It takes a lot of people working together to investigate these problems and figure out solutions.

149Shivajali Sharma is an aerospace engineer from our episode on the future of flight.

150Her work, like so many people at NASA, has to be careful and precise.

151But that doesn't mean we have to be perfect.

152Perfection is not a key attribute to becoming a NASA engineer.

153Being curious, being able to learn from your mistakes, and being able to always be willing to learn.

154I think that is a key aspect of a NASA engineer.

155I might go into work tomorrow and be faced with a novel aircraft configuration that I've never seen before in my life.

156And I have to learn about how that vehicle operates and how there might be aspects of the vehicle that I have to actually continuously learn and evolve in understanding.

157That desire to learn is, I think, much more important than any perfection.

158And I really don't think anyone is perfect.

159So that's my maybe biased opinion.

160We are so grateful to our incredible experts who shared not only their work, but also their excitement and curiosity with us.

161But we know you're curious, too.

162So let's answer some questions from listeners like you.

163Remember, you can send us questions in audio or written format, and we'll try to find the answers.

164Our producers, Christina Dana and Katie Atkinson, are going to read some of the questions we were sent at curiousuniverseatmail.nasa.gov.

165Thanks, Patti.

166After our Season 3 episode on Plasma, Dante asked, Is it possible to study plasma from its magnetic aspect or magnetic interaction?

167Great question, Dante.

168We checked in with our friends on the heliophysics team, and it turns out magnetic interaction is one of the best ways to study plasma.

169Plasma is an electrically charged gas, which means it is sensitive and reacts to electromagnetic forces differently than other states of matter.

170By looking at the ways plasmas interact with both magnetic and electric fields, we can learn how plasma affects the universe around us, including space weather events and satellite communication.

171Next, from our Season 2 episode on the physics of black holes, Remsha asked, Is there a possibility that we can send satellites into a black hole to see what's inside them?

172I understand that us humans won't survive.

173How will a satellite survive?

174Another great question.

175The first problem is that the closest black hole to Earth is thousands of light years away.

176We haven't yet sent a probe that far and don't currently have the technology, not only to send a satellite there, but also receive information back.

177The second problem is that once something goes into a black hole, it's really hard to get any information back from it.

178It's hard even to get near it.

179The satellite would be stretched like a spaghetti noodle by the black hole's massive gravity, and none of the methods we currently use to transport information, like radio waves, would be able to escape.

180Thanks, Patty.

181And we have an audio question about gas giant planets.

182Hi, this is Derek.

183I am an engineer and long-time space enthusiast.

184My question is, why do the photographs of the gas giant planets show them with what appears to be a hard horizon?

185If they're gas giants, you would think that the horizon would be very soft as the density of the air got less and less and less.

186I have wondered this for many years, and hopefully you can answer my question.

187Thanks.

188Hi, Derek.

189Thanks so much for your question.

190It really got us thinking.

191From pictures of gas planets, they do look solid, like you could almost step on them, but you can't.

192So we checked in with one of our planetary experts on why these planets look so solid.

193This is Heidi Hamill, who we heard from in the James Webb miniseries.

194It's an interesting question, Derek.

195The super short answer is that the atmospheres of the giant planets are soft.

196They are made of clouds.

197But from a distance, they look hard.

198To think about this, imagine if you've ever been in an airplane that is flying up through the clouds and is then above the clouds.

199When you look down, you see what looks like a surface, but actually that Earth cloud landscape is all just misty water vapor.

200You know, the plane just flew right through it.

201The same thing is true for the surface, I use that in quotes, of a giant planet.

202It is just clouds.

203And in case you're wondering why the clouds and the gases don't just float away into space, it's the gravity of these planets that holds them there, holds them tight.

204And the largest planets, like Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, they have a really strong gravitational force.

205So strong that they hold tight to their atmospheres, even though these large planets are spinning much faster than the Earth.

206Finally, Patty, as an ever-curious scientist yourself, besides the work you do on astrophysics and exoplanets, what are you curious about?

207In addition to exoplanets, I'm really fascinated by black holes at all size scales.

208And when we look at the universe around us today, every galaxy we see, which is composed of hundreds of billions of stars like the Sun, each of those has a supermassive black hole at the core.

209Its mass is a million, and sometimes even up to a billion times the mass of our Sun.

210But what we don't know is how these supermassive black holes got there.

211That's a mystery that we're waiting for the James Webb Space Telescope to help us unravel.

212And I'm so curious to find out what the answer really is.

213Curiosity is a beautiful part of the human experience.

214And there is so much out there still to discover.

215We've had a great time in this episode revisiting some of the experts we featured on the show.

216And we are so grateful to you for coming on the journey with us and sending your questions along the way.

217Thank you for listening.

218We're excited to continue sharing NASA's discoveries with you.

219This season, you'll hear about supersonic flight, the science of spacesuits, the mysteries of the moon, the moon, and more.

220In the meantime, if you'd like to be featured in a future Q&A episode, check out nasa.gov slash curious universe for more information about how to submit a question.

221If you're still curious about what work we're up to here at NASA, you can visit nasa.gov slash podcasts for even more information.

222This is NASA's Curious Universe.

223This episode was written and produced by Christina Dana.

224Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson.

225The Curious Universe team includes Maddie Arnold and Michaela Sosby.

226Our theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida of System Sounds.

227If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show at NASA, and sharing NASA's Curious Universe with a friend.

228All right.

229I'm going to do it again.

230Page nine.

231Oh.

232Ugh.

233This is stressful.

234Ha ha ha.