Blue Dot

In this episode, Dave talks to Dr. Gordon Telepun. An Alabama plastic surgeon, Gordon's other passion is chasing eclipses. Based on his experiences with eclipse photography in Africa, Gordon saw the need to develop an eclipse timing device and did it himself. Now he has taken that concept and turned it into an app for both iPhones and Android devices. It lets you know when significant events are going to happen from wherever you are along the eclipse path using GPS. It is designed to help rather

In this week's episode, Dave talks with Kate Fullam, the communications director for The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science . It's a completely unscripted and natural conversation about her work at the center in general and The Flame Challenge in particular. The Flame Challenge is designed for scientists to create a four-minute video or write a short essay on a theme. This year's was "What is Energy?" What makes the contest so unique is that the contestants have to be scientists and they

Dave talks to Dave Hill, emeritus scientist for the United States Geological Survey and Margaret Mangan, director of the California Volcano Observatory . They talk about the history of volcanic unrest at Long Valley Caldera near Mammoth Lakes in the eastern Sierra Nevada. A series of earthquakes in the late '70s and 1980, coupled with the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens in May of 1980, led USGS scientists to issue volcanic hazard warnings. When picked up by the LA Times, the story caused social and

You know the story of Icarus – the unfortunate fellow who flew too close to the Sun on wings made of wax? Well NASA is planning to send a much more robust probe into the very atmosphere of the Sun. How do you protect a spacecraft from such an extreme environment? And what do we hope to learn about our star? Find out on this episode when we are joined by Dr. Nicky Fox from The Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. She is the Project Scientist for The Parker Solar

Dave talks to Time Magazine's Science Editor Jeffrey Kluger about his new book, Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon . His previous book, Apollo 13 was co-written with Jim Lovell, who was an astronaut on both missions. Apollo 8 takes place during the dramatic events of 1968 against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy and riots at the Democratic Connvention in Chicago. After the traumatic events of that

Today on Blue Dot, we talk with Rico Gagliano, cohost of The Dinner Party Download , about the show’s upcoming hourlong podcast and live event at Lassen Volcanic National Park called “ Look Up and Listen .” Both the audio program and the in-person listening party are designed to encourage you to go outside and reacquaint yourself with the natural world. Dave asks Rico about the origins of The Dinner Party Download and gets the 411 on the guest lineup and the get-back-to-nature theme of the “Look

It’s been several months since we last talked about the astronomical event of the year and maybe even our lifetimes – The Great American Total Solar Eclipse is coming on August 21, 2017. You don’t want to miss it – but neither will anyone else – we talk to Mr. Eclipse Fred Espenak.

Dave talks to film makers Michael Barnett and Michael Mahaffie about their new Netflix documentary The Mars Generation . Their film traces the past and future of the United States Space Program by following a group of young people attending Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. Many of them have attended Space Camp numerous times and are using their experiences to try and set themselves up to be a part of future missions to Mars from astronauts to flight directors, engineers and software designers.

Plans are on the drawing table at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to explore the hottest scientific target in the solar system — Jupiter's icy moon Europa. Recent findings indicate that it has all the ingredients needed to support life — oceans of liquid water, heat coming from deep within the world and the basic organic chemistry of life. We talk to Andrew Shapiro about missions to explore Europa as well as other fascinating new technologies that are on the cutting edge of astronomy and space

The search for life beyond Earth is one of the driving forces behind NASA’s exploration of the solar system. Two moons of the outer solar system have been the targets of intense scrutiny as well as plans for future missions – Jupiter’s giant moon Europa and Saturn’s tiny satellite Enceladus both have subsurface oceans of liquid water. In 2005, the Cassini orbiter discovered geyser plumes erupting from Enceladus’ south polar region and recent Hubble Space Telescope observations have indicated