NASA's Curious Universe

Life all over the planet—even far from the coasts—depends on the oceans. A pair of NASA satellites, PACE and SWOT, is giving us a fresh look at Earth’s water. PACE tracks color changes driven by tiny plankton, which give us a big-picture view of ocean life. By measuring sea level height from space, SWOT shows ocean currents and other features in new detail. NASA scientists Cecile Rousseaux, Kelsey Bisson, and Josh Willis dive into new research with a lot of color and a little bit of rock and roll.

NASA is an exploration agency, and one of our missions is to know our home. In the 1960s, NASA astronauts orbiting the Moon captured a revelatory view of Earth. Today, NASA explores our home planet with a fleet of dozens of spacecraft. In this episode–the first in a miniseries all about Earth–we take in the view from space with Karen St. Germain, the director of NASA’s Earth Science Division.

There’s one planet NASA studies more than any other: Earth. With our unique vantage point from space, NASA collects information about our home in ways nobody else can. In this podcast miniseries, celebrate our home planet by learning how NASA studies Earth—including unique views of ocean color and sea level, land data that help farmers improve crop production, and researching our atmosphere from the air we breathe to layers high above us that protect every living thing on the planet.

NASA has a long history of bringing together science, engineering and art. Space exploration is a human endeavor—one that requires creativity. In this special live episode, NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick and comedian and musician Reggie Watts talk flow states, aircraft ejector seats and more. Plus, a new NASA tool that lets you make music from iconic Hubble Space Telescope imagery. 

When it launched in 1990, NASA expected the Hubble Space Telescope to last for about 15 years. Thirty-five years later, Hubble is still showing us the universe as no other telescope can. Go behind the scenes with Morgan Van Arsdall, deputy operations manager for Hubble, on an audio tour of Hubble’s control center. Morgan’s team keeps Hubble operating smoothly, and when something goes wrong, they snap into action to fix it. Plus, hear how Hubble tag-teams with newer observatories—including the James Webb Space Telescope—and continues to push the frontiers of astronomy.

How did life begin? It’s one of science’s biggest questions, but it’s impossible to answer on Earth, where ancient clues have been buried by the planet’s shifting surface. Instead, scientists are looking beyond our own planet, to asteroids like Bennu, a distant fragment of a lost world. In 2023, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected a sample of Bennu’s surface and brought it back to Earth. Ever since, scientists have been hard at work studying the fragments of asteroid Bennu. Now, they’re ready to reveal the results—our best look yet at a time capsule from the early solar system that once fostered the ingredients for life. 

The Moon’s South Pole is a bizarre landscape. Mountain ridges glow in perpetual sunlight while deep craters freeze in billion-year-old shade. Yet hidden in the depths of those shadowed craters, under temperatures almost three times colder than the frostiest day in Antarctica, lurks something familiar–water ice. In the future, that ice could sustain human explorers or be broken apart into hydrogen and oxygen to refuel rockets. Join Brett Denevi, Artemis III geology team lead, to learn why NASA plans to land astronauts on the Moon’s South Pole later this decade. Then with Michelle Munk, NASA space technology chief architect, meet the robot Moon landers scouting ahead of Artemis which will drill beneath the regolith and test technologies designed to help future human explorers survive the Pole’s extreme conditions.  

Black holes are mysterious, far away, and can bend the fabric of reality itself—but we're learning more about them all the time. Ronald Gamble, a NASA theoretical astrophysicist, uses math, computer coding, and a dash of creativity to peer inside some of the universe's most extreme objects. We'll explore what it would feel like to get pulled into a black hole and what people get wrong about black holes. And we'll answer questions from curious listeners, including, "What would happen if a black hole ate nothing but magnetized material?" 

As climate change drives more frequent and intense tropical cyclones and hurricanes, coastal communities desperately need better tools to predict how bad storms will be and when and where they’ll strike—and to assess the damage afterward. From the air and in space, NASA and NOAA collect critical data as storms roll in. But what happens next? Fly directly into the eye of the storm with daring hurricane hunter pilots, meet meteorologists and data scientists building AI models to improve hurricane prediction, and join the disaster response experts helping cities pinpoint their hardest-hit neighborhoods. Plus, learn how NASA is making data open to everyone—including you, with Transform to Open Science.

As NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft leaves Earth, it carries a message: we, too, are made of water. Europa—one of Jupiter’s moons—is a top candidate to support life, thanks to its ocean of liquid, salty water capped by a layer of ice. Lynnae Quick-Henderson, a planetary scientist at NASA, explains how Clipper will search Europa for the building blocks of life. The mission is also a message in a bottle, bringing a greeting from one ocean world to another. Hear how Ada Limón, the Poet Laureate of the United States, used NASA’s mission as inspiration for her poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” and why she thinks everyone—even space nerds—should step back and appreciate our connections to the universe and each other.