The KGNU Science Show
We share the How on Earth team’s picks for of science stories of 2024:
Executive Producer: Shelley Schlender
Show Producer and Host: Joel Parker
Additional Contributions: Shelley Schlender, Beth Bennett
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:00 — 37.1MB)
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Today’s show features NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which launched on October 14th, 2024 on a Falcon Heavy rocket, setting the spacecraft on its 10-year journey to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa. Europa Clipper carries nine instruments to study this ocean world covered by an ice shell to determine if there are places in the watery depths below the surface that could support life. The mission’s goals are to study ice shell, the sub-surface ocean, and the moon’s composition and geology. Our guest is Dr. Bonnie Buratti, a Senior Research Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Deputy Project Scientist for the Europa Clipper mission.
Executive Producer: Shelley Schlender
Show Producer & Engineer: Joel Parker
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:00 — 37.1MB)
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The PUNCH mission (starts at 8:05) NASA’s new mission to study the Sun is called PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere). In this episode of How on Earth we talk with solar physicist Dr. Craig DeForest, the Principal Investigator of the PUNCH mission. Dr. DeForest is a Program Director at the Boulder office of Southwest Research Institute, and he explains how PUNCH will use polarimetry to study the outer part of the solar atmosphere, the million-degree hot corona, and how it interacts and evolves into the solar wind.
Host, Producer, Engineer: Joel Parker
Additional Contributions: Beth Bennett, Shelley Schlender
Executive Producer: Beth Bennett
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:15 — 22.2MB)
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This special edition of How on Earth is produced in conjunction with the Conference on World Affairs. Our guest a participants of the Conference: Dr. Michelle Thaller, assistant director of science at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Her path has taken her from Harvard to Georgia State University to Caltech to NASA. Dr. Thaller has studied hot stars, colliding stellar winds, binary star evolution, evolved stellar companions, and infrared astronomy. She is one of the regular hosts of the Discovery Science Channel shows: “How the Universe Works” and “Space’s Deepest Secrets” and hosts the podcast “Orbital Path” on public radio.
Host / Producer / Engineer / Executive Producer: Joel Parker
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:13 — 24.9MB)
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In 2015, the New Horizons Spacecraft flew past Pluto. Because Pluto is so far away, it took nearly 10 years of travel for the spacecraft to reach that distant dwarf planet — and that was after a decade of work to get the spacecraft to the launch pad. Planetary scientists Alan Stern and David Grinspoon have written a new book, called: “Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto”. The book tells the story of developing and operating the New Horizon mission.
How on Earth’s own Joel Parker is also a scientist on the New Horizons mission, and he had a chance to chat with Alan and David about their book. Last week we heard the first part of this interview. In today’s show, we present Part 2 of that interview. You can also listen to the full extended interview.
Host/Producer: Alejandro Soto
Engineer: Chip Grandits
Add’l Contributions/Executive Producer: Joel Parker
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:38 — 26.2MB)
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Chasing New Horizons (starts 1:00) brings the reader Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto to hear the details and meet the personalities behind building, launching, and flying this audacious mission. How on Earth’s Joel Parker (also an astrophysicist on the New Horizons mission) speaks with authors and fellow scientists Alan Stern and David Grinspoon. (Booktalks at Boulder Bookstore and Tattered Cover). You can also listen to the full extended interview.
GoldLab Symposium (starts 13:00) This year’s symposium theme is Complexity: The Intersections Between Health and Policy. Boulder Entrepreneur and symposium founder Larry Gold speaks with How on Earth’s Shelley Schlender about this year’s annual symposium that explores the frontiers of science and health with an eye toward ideas that will inspire even the greatest world expert, with an ear toward being understandable to anyone in the room.
Host/Producer/Engineer: Shelley Schlender
Add’l Contributions/Executive Producer: Joel Parker
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:07 — 24.8MB)
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Here we provide the full interview by How on Earth’s Joel Parker of planetary scientists Dr. Alan Stern (Southwest Research Institute) and Dr. David Grinspoon (Planetary Science Institute), about their new book: “Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto“. Their book describes the the story of Pluto and NASA’s New Horizons mission, bringing the reader backstage to hear the details and meet the personalities behind building, launching, and flying this audacious mission.
Excerpts of this interview were first broadcast on KGNU on May 15th and May 22nd.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:02 — 38.5MB)
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The Cassini mission to Saturn launched 20 years ago, on October 15, 1997. It took seven years to reach Saturn, and has been orbiting and intensely studying Saturn ever since…until last week when the mission ended in a final dive into Saturn’s atmosphere. The mission studied Saturn, its famous rings, and its many moons using a suite of instruments that observed a broad range of wavelengths from ultraviolet, to visible, infrared, and radio as well as examining dust, charged particles, and magnetic fields. It also delivered the Huygens probe that descended through the atmosphere of Saturn’s giant moon, Titan.
In this edition of How on earth, we have two scientists from the Cassini mission team. Dr. Larry Esposito is a Professor at the Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences department at the University of Colorado at Boulder and member of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at CU. Dr. Carly Howett is a planetary scientist and manager at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder. They share with us some of the science from Cassini-Huygens and experiences working on such a long-term and successful space mission.
Host / Producer / Engineer: Joel Parker
Additional Contributions: Beth Bennett, Shelley Schlender
Executive Producer: Alejandro Soto
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:35 — 26.2MB)
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Today’s show offers the following feature:
Extraterrestrial intelligence? (start time: 6:30): It’s mid-summer, a time when many of us like to spend leisurely time outside at night, gazing at the stars and planets, and asking the big existential questions, such as, Are we alone? Is there intelligent life waaay out there? Our guest today, science writer Sarah Scoles, has pondered these questions for several years. She discusses with hosts Susan Moran and Joel Parker her just-published biography, Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Tarter, an astronomer, directed the Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research. Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact” illustrates Tarter’s astronomical work. In the 1997 movie Contact (stemming from Sagan’s novel) actor Jodi Foster played a character who was loosely based on Tarter.
Hosts: Susan Moran, Joel Parker
Producer: Susan Moran
Engineer: Joel Parker
Executive Producer: Alejandro Soto
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:30 — 25.2MB)
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Rosetta [feature starts at 5:27]
The Rosetta Space Mission has been in flight for ever 12 years and will be ending with a dramatic crash this Friday morning around 10:40 UT (4:40 am Mountain time) – it’s an event that will be watched and talked about by people around the world.
Rosetta is run by the European Space Agency, with contributions from NASA. The mission’s goals have been to study a comet to learn not only about how comets work, but what comets can tell us about the origins of the solar system, and perhaps connections to water and life. Rosetta was the first spacecraft to orbit and escort a comet as the comet approached and flew past the Sun, and Rosetta also carried a smaller spacecraft, named Philae, that performed the first landing on a comet.
The Rosetta mission has a very strong Colorado connection, since one of the instruments – an ultraviolet spectrograph called “Alice” – was operated from the offices of Southwest Research Institute right here in Boulder.We have three members of the Rosetta team here in the studio to talk about Rosetta, comets, and the rather exciting ending planned for the spacecraft in just a few days. Our guests are Andrew Steffl from Southwest Research Institute, John Pineau from Stellar Solutions, and John Noonan who is a recent astronomy graduate from the University of Colorado and is working at Southwest Research Institute.
There’s more information on the Rosetta Blog about how to follow the final events of the Rosetta mission.
Hosts: Joel Parker, Alejandro Soto
Producer and Engineer: Joel Parker
Executive Producer: Susan Moran
Additional Contributions: Beth Bennett, Shelley Schlender
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:34 — 18.8MB)
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