Blue Dot

On this episode of Blue Dot, we talk to two of the many providers of science education content on YouTube – it’s a place that I love to go to find interesting and entertaining takes on the world of science. It’s more fun than your average documentary…we talk to Joe Hanson from It’s OK to Be Smart and Jabril Ashe from SEFD Science .

The year 2016 was noted for the number of celebrity deaths but in the sciences, there was one loss that was particularly notable. On this episode of Blue Dot we look back at the life of astronomer Vera Rubin – her pioneering work on the rotation of galaxies led to the discovery of Dark Matter. She also blazed a trail for other women to follow in the male dominated field of astrophysics. We are joined by her colleague and former student Risa Wechsler.

Drought-busting atmospheric rivers? Hard freezes? Snow in them thar hills? It is dark and cold – that time of year – winter in Northern California, and with it some of our most interesting weather. We talk about it with forecasters Michelle Mead and Brooke Bingaman from the National Weather Service.

On this edition of Blue Dot, we talk to one of the brightest young stars in astronomy and astrophysics – Vikram Ravi. He’s a Millikan Fellow at the California Institute of Technology and he’s investigating some of the most mysterious and awesome forces in the Universe, enigmatic fast radio bursts emanating from beyond our Milky Way.

David Grinspoon is a prize winning author and gifted science communicator. He was the first Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair of Astrobiology. His new book, " Earth in Human Hands: Shaping our Planet’s Future," is a look at how we as a species have been shaping the evolution of our planet and where that may be headed in the future. He also won the Carl Sagan Medal for Science Communication – which is pretty appropriate and cool as you are about to find out on this episode of Blue

If there is one thing that really floats my boat it is the history of the U.S. Space Program. Especially the part that I grew up in from when I watched my first broadcast space flights of the Gemini Program in the mid-1960s to the end of the Apollo Moon program in 1972. If you are interested in something, there is probably a YouTube channel for that! And man oh man, is there a cool one for my passion – Vintage Space with Amy Shira Teitel .

It launched from Cape Canaveral in 1997 and entered orbit around Saturn in 2004. Now, after nearly two decades exploring the ringed planet as our most distant scientific outpost, the Cassini orbiter is about to embark on its final journey – a death plunge into Saturn.

Mars is the most intensively explored planet other than our own. 44 missions have been sent to explore the red planet and 17 have been reasonably successful. The US has been triumphant with the twin Viking Landers in the 1970s, the Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner Rover in the 90s, the twin rovers Spirit and Curiosity in the 2000s and of course Curiosity Rover which is currently exploring Gale Crater. But there is one mission that, for me at least, really stands out as the big science payoff

Our guest is Mike Massimino. He is the veteran of two space shuttle missions, STS-109 on Columbia in March of 2002 and the STS -125 aboard Atlantis in May of 2009. Both were missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope and the final flight was the one that literally saved the Hubble so that it could make dramatic discoveries about the mysterious existence of Dark Energy and determine the age of the Universe itself. His memoir, Spaceman: an Astronaut’s Unlikely Journey to Unlock The Secrets of

He was a giant among planetary scientists of the 20 th century. He revolutionized our understanding of the role of cosmic impacts in the evolution of the solar system, including Earth. His ashes are on the moon and he has a fascinating connection to the home of this show – Chico, California. Gene Shoemaker has been described as the father of planetary science. Perhaps that title is a bit much for any one person, but he certainly played a central role in our modern understanding of the