This week’s episode takes us to the outer edge of the Solar System as we chat with two scientists studying Kuiper Belt Objects like Pluto and other small bodies. We’ll talk about the New Horizons mission to Pluto and Arrakoth, what’s next for the ongoing mission, and what kinds of things we can learn about tiny objects billions of miles away just by using small ground-based telescopes.

Ryder Strauss is a recent graduate of CU Boulder and is a project lead for RECON (the Research and Education Collaborative Occultation Network). He uses small backyard telescopes to observe tiny objects like asteroids at the far ends of the solar system using a technique called occultation. With each occultation only lasting a fraction of a second, how much can we learn about these far away objects that we can’t even see? Turns out...quite a lot!

Dr. Fran Bagenal is a Professor Emeritus at CU Boulder and has been involved in a number of planetary science missions, including Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, New Horizons, and Juno. She has sat on or chaired a growing number of NASA assessment groups, advisory councils, and review boards, and has received numerous awards for excellence in research and teaching. Dr. Bagenal is also a long-time proponent of a mission to Pluto, and her work as a co-investigator for the New Horizons mission makes her a prime resource for understanding the environment of the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Her enthusiasm for teaching and lecturing is legendary, and she may be the only CU APS faculty with an IMDB page!

This week is all about The Red Planet, and we’ll be talking to two experts about Mars’s climate, atmospheric history, and surface geology. We’ll also discuss an upcoming mission by the United Arab Emirates to send a spacecraft to Mars, and what sort of amazing things they are planning for their first venture into the Solar System.

Dr. Dave Brain is a professor at CU Boulder and researcher for the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. He specializes in atmospheres and magnetospheres, at Mars and elsewhere in the solar system, and is a member of the MAVEN spacecraft team which is currently studying Mars’s atmosphere. He is also a science advisor for the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM), a new and exciting mission originating in the United Arab Emirates that plans to provide a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere at high altitudes and close to the surface.

Andrew Wilkoski is a graduate student at CU Boulder studying geophysical and atmospheric processes on Mars’s polar ice caps. His current work looks at how the ice caps change over time due to weather, atmosphere, and even the location and orientation of the planet.

This week’s episode focuses on the strange and fascinating objects found at the centers of galaxies: BLACK HOLES. We’ll be speaking with two local experts about how these black holes are formed, what happens to the material around the black hole, and what observations of galactic centers can tell us about these otherwise invisible objects.

Dr. Andrew Hamilton is a professor in the department of astrophysical and planetary sciences at CU Boulder, as well as a fellow of JILA (formerly the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics). He's interested in relativity and black holes, cosmology, and astrophysics; and most recently published a paper regarding the interior of astronomically realistic black holes. Dr. Hamilton was a major contributor to the film Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity shown frequently at Fiske and other planetariums around the globe.

Jimmy Negus is a PhD candidate at CU Boulder studying Active Galactic Nuclei with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. With this survey, he can analyze the light from 10,000 galaxies to identify signatures of movement and composition in their bright centers.

Our first episode! This week we try out podcasting for the first time with Fiske Planetarium’s director Dr. John Keller. We talk with him about his journey to becoming our director and lessons that he’s learned along the way. We also talk with him about his research in astronomy and science education (more info on his research can be found at https://star-web.csm.calpoly.edu).

Dr. John Keller is a professor in the department of astrophysical and planetary sciences at CU Boulder and serves as Director of Fiske Planetarium. He is currently Co-PI for the Research and Education Cooperative Occultation Network (RECON), an NSF-funded citizen science astronomy research project involving communities across the western United States to measure the sizes of Kuiper Belt Objects. He is also a leader for the Collaborative Around Research Experiences for Teachers (CARET) and active with 100Kin10, an organization of over 280 stakeholders committed to preparing and recruiting 100,000 science, math, engineering, and mathematics teachers by 2021.