Third Pod from the Sun

Venus, Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor, is a rocky world close in size to our own. In our solar system, it is the planet most like Earth. But Earth and Venus have taken different developmental paths, creating curious contrasts for scientists interested in planetary evolution. Conditions on Venus are not friendly to exploration. The thick, reflective atmosphere that makes Venus the brightest planet in Earth’s sky also obscures its features. Under that warming blanket of clouds, visiting spacecraft found a hot, dry surface inimical to Earth life and electronics.

Siddharth Krishnamoorthy, a physicist and engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, is a part of a team seeking to learn more about the geology of our sister planet by listening for quakes…Venusquakes. To avoid the 460-degrees-Celsius (860 Fahrenheit) heat and 90 atmospheres of pressure at Venus’ surface, they plan to loft their sensors high in Venus’ atmosphere by mounting them on a modern version of eighteenth-century state-of-the-art flight technology: the balloon.

In this episode, he describes what we know about Venus and its mysteries, the benefits of ballooning for Venusian exploration, and how the weather at 60 kilometers (37 miles) above Venus’ surface is like a mild December night in Washington, DC—except for the sulfuric acid.

This episode was produced by Liza Lester and mixed by Adele Coleman.

Ryan Zeigler has a one-of-a-kind job: He’s the guy in charge of the Moon rocks.

Starting with Apollo 11 in 1969 and ending with Apollo 17 in 1972, astronauts brought back more than 800 pounds of samples from the Moon – from micron-scale motes of dust to boulders weighing more than 25 pounds. In the 50 years since the Moon rocks arrived back on Earth, scientists all over the world have used these samples to peer back in time to the early days of our solar system, making major discoveries about the formation of the Moon and the Earth.

Today, the Moon rocks are safely stored in a windowless, hurricane-proof building at Johnson Space Center. It is Zeigler’s job to oversee the samples and review proposals from scientists who wish to study them. Earlier this year, NASA announced that they will open up a new cache of never-before-studied Apollo samples, which they hope will reveal even more insights about our nearest neighbor and our own planet.

In addition to the planetary science discoveries the Apollo samples have yielded, the Moon rocks have also taught scientists how to safely handle, store and study samples from other planetary bodies, including asteroids being sampled as part of the Hayabusa and OSIRIS-REx missions.

In this Centennial episode of Third Pod from the Sun, Zeigler provides an insider’s view of his unique career – a job that is equally parts exciting, humbling and nerve-wracking. He details how astronauts obtained samples from the Moon, how the Apollo samples are stored and provided to researchers, the discoveries the rocks have yielded over the past 50 years, and what it is really like to hold a Moon rock in your hand.

This episode was produced by Nanci Bompey and mixed by Collin Warren

To those of us on land, the world underneath the oceans seems quiet and serene. But scientists who study ocean acoustics will tell you it is anything but tranquil underwater. Our oceans are home to a cacophony of sounds – from the songs of marine mammals to the cracking of icebergs to the rumbling of earthquakes to the roar of ships.

In this episode, Bob Dziak, head of NOAA’s acoustics program, describes the sounds scientists study with their underwater microphones, including the noises they’ve heard at the deepest part of the ocean in the Mariana Trench and a mysterious “bloop, and how they use that information to understand natural processes and the impact from human activities.

This episode was produced by Nanci Bompey and mixed by Kayla Surrey.

At Third Pod, we often talk with researchers about how they grew up to become scientists. But how does an actor become a scientist on screen?

In this special episode of Third Pod from the Sun, we talk with actor Anthony Rapp about inhabiting the character of Lt. Commander Paul Stamets on “Star Trek: Discovery.” Rapp, best known for playing Marc Cohen in the original Broadway cast of the Tony Award-winning musical “Rent,” has been on stage since childhood. On “Discovery,” he plays the prickly lead scientist on the eponymous experimental ship. The USS Discovery, on a mission to test a mysterious “spore drive” that operates on an intangible, fungus-like mycelial network strung throughout the universe, has been conscripted into a space war on the Federation’s frontier. Rapp and castmate Wilson Cruz also took Star Trek to new frontiers portraying the first gay couple depicted in Starfleet.

We caught up with Rapp at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference, co-hosted by AGU and NASA in Bellevue, Washington, where he spoke at the opening plenary on June 23. Rapp talked about his geek cred, what it’s like to play a scientist on TV and how he researches the real scientific elements of the show to create his character.

To hear more from Anthony Rapp about the science of Star Trek, check out planetary scientist Mike Wong’s interview with Rapp for his podcast Strange New Worlds.

This episode was produced and mixed by Lauren Lipuma.

Few natural phenomena are more difficult to study than tornadoes. They’re short-lived, their locations are notoriously hard to predict, and getting close enough to observe them is both challenging and extremely dangerous.

In this episode, Ohio University meteorologist Jana Houser describes what it’s like to chase these monster storms. Listen to Jana describe the terror and excitement of her first chase and hear her first-hand account of the 2013 El Reno, Oklahoma tornado, the widest tornado ever recorded. Learn how chasing this behemoth storm taught meteorologists that tornadoes form from the ground up – not the other way around – and hear just how much of the 1996 action movie Twister was based on real life.

A special thanks to storm chasers Jeff Snyder and Skip Talbot for providing footage of their chases to Third Pod for this episode. Watch Skip’s original footage here and see Jeff’s videos on his YouTube channel.

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Tim Samaras, Paul Samaras, and Carl Young, the three storm chasers killed by the El Reno tornado, and the first chasers to die while actively chasing a storm in the 50-year history of storm chasing.

This episode was produced by Lauren Lipuma and mixed by Adell Coleman.

In the early years of the 20th century, several groups of explorers attempted to be the first to reach the South Pole, as Antarctica was one of the last unexplored places on Earth. A team of Norwegian explorers led by Roald Amundsen was the first to reach the Pole on December 14, 1911. A competing British party led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott reached the Pole roughly a month later. Amundsen’s team returned safely home but Scott’s team perished on the ice in March 1912.

Recent research has suggested that Antarctica experienced unusually warm weather during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer of 1911-1912, and this weather may have influenced the outcome of Amundsen and Scott’s race to the South Pole. In this episode, Ohio University atmospheric scientist Ryan Fogt recounts the journeys of Scott and Amundsen during this fateful summer and discusses how the extraordinary weather affected the two polar parties in vastly different ways.

This episode was produced by Lauren Lipuma and mixed by Robyn Murray.

In this bonus clip for our most recent episode, Science Turns to Search and Rescue, David Babb describes the incredible wildlife of the Arctic.

The Arctic Ocean is topped with a layer of frozen sea water – sea ice – that grows every winter and shrinks every summer. To study the ice in detail, researchers hop aboard an icebreaker ship that can plow through the sharp, cold ice floes without being damaged.

But two years ago, the Canadian icebreaker Amundsen was called off its scientific mission to assist the Canadian coast guard with search and rescue operations in the North Atlantic Ocean. In May and June of 2017, an unprecedented amount of sea ice was choking the normally open waters around Newfoundland. The thick ice trapped many unsuspecting ships and sunk some boats when the ice punctured their hulls.

In this episode, University of Manitoba sea ice expert David Babb recounts the 2017 rescue operations the Amundsen took part in. David discusses what it’s like to live and work on an icebreaker and describes the unusual conditions that allowed a record amount of Arctic sea ice to flow south and wreak havoc on ships in the North Atlantic that year.