Our Sun lights up the solar system, but it’s as not calm or predictable as it may seem. Flares and explosions called coronal mass ejections unleash fast-moving particles and radiation that pose dangers to spacecraft and astronauts alike. Yaireska Collado-Vega leads a team at NASA’s Goddard Spacecraft Center that is studying the solar weather environment so that robots and people exploring space can be protected. In this episode of Gravity Assist, she describes the excitement and challenges of understanding space weather, and how she got to be a NASA scientist.

Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment Principal Investigator Mike Hecht discusses the MOXIE technology demonstration that's generating oxygen on the Red Planet.

The planets of our solar system didn’t have such stable orbits a few billion years ago. The giant outer planets moved around chaotically in their orbits, and Uranus and Neptune may have even switched places. To get a more complete understanding of the full history of our solar system, NASA is sending a spacecraft called Lucy to investigate the Trojans, mysterious small objects that share an orbit of the Sun with Jupiter. Principal investigator Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute’s branch in Boulder, Colorado, discusses this exciting mission, launching Oct. 16, 2021.

Lucy Deputy Project Systems Engineer Mike Sekerak discusses the first space mission to study Jupiter's Trojan asteroid swarms.

Parker Solar Probe Mission Scientist Adam Szabo discusses NASA's journey to the Sun.

NASA Lessons Learned Program Manager Michael Bell discusses the agency's Lessons Learned Information System.

Janelle Wellons likes to say that she operates “fancy space cameras.” At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she creates commands that allow spacecraft to take valuable scientific data in our solar system and here at planet Earth. She also monitors the health of spacecraft, like a space robot doctor. She has worked on the Cassini mission to Saturn, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Sentinel-6/Michael Freilich, and more. In this episode, she reflects on her experiences at JPL and why outreach and diversity and inclusion efforts are so important.

The creation of a market for supersonic commercial aircraft requires eliminating the sonic boom as a barrier for over land flight.

NASA believes that changing that standard will open up the market for commercial supersonic transports. And that'll be a game changer for transcontinental and international flight.

NASA Convergent Aeronautics Solutions Project Manager Keith Wichman discusses mapping problems and solutions to transform aviation.

The laws of physics get very, very weird in the realm of particles too small for the eye to see. Aboard the International Space Station, an experiment called the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) is exploring how the universe works on a fundamental level by cooling atoms down to a billionth of a degree above the coldest temperature possible, absolute zero. By using special lasers and magnetic fields, CAL is making unusual structures called Bose-Einstein condensates almost every day. Ethan Elliott of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory talks about the exciting possibilities that this experiment offers for the future of physics.