Pod Insights Radiolab Probing Where the Sun Does Shine: A Holiday Special About this episode This holiday season, we want to take you on a trip around the heavens. First, co-host Latif Nasser, with the help of Nour Raouafi, of NASA, and an edge-cutting piece of equipment, explain how we may finally be making good on Icarus’s promise. Then, co-host Lulu Miller and Ada Limón talk about how a poet laureate goes about writing an ode to one of Jupiter’s moons.
And one more thing! It is almost your last chance to make your mark on the heavens. Radiolab and The International Astronomical Union’s Quasi Moon Naming Vote comes to an end on January 1st. Learn more and pick your favorite name here: https://radiolab.org/moon
EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Latif Nasser, Lulu MillerProduced by - Matt Kielty, Ana GonzalezFact-checking by - Diane Kelly
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Radiolab is supported by Dell. Gifts mean more when they have the power to unwrap more of who you are. This Black Friday, give a gift that goes beyond the box. The Dell XPS 13 laptop. Dell says it is the thinnest, lightest XPS laptop yet, with a long battery life, beautiful design, powerful performance with Intel Core processors. The XPS laptop, according to Dell, unlocks more of what you love. Plus, at dell.com, you will find perks like Dell Rewards, fast free shipping, flexible financing, big savings. Head to dell.com/deals. That's dell.com/deals.
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1:20 Speaker 02 WNYC supporters include Livrite, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.
1:46 Speaker 03 Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right. Okay. All right.
1:52 Speaker 01 You're listening to Radiolab.
1:55 Speaker 03 From WNYC.
2:03 Speaker 03 Hey, I'm Latif Nasr and this is Radiolab. And
2:07 Speaker 04 Yes, very good.
2:08 Speaker 03 Amazing. Today. I've been looking forward to talking to you for so long.
2:13 Speaker 04 No, thank you. Thank you. It's really a pleasure to talk to you.
2:16 Speaker 03 We're doing something a little bit different because this episode is coming out at the tail end of December 2024. And so far this month, we have traced the kind of bogus origin story of Stockholm syndrome. And our staff went on a bit of a romp, fact checking, a bunch of the old chestnuts, you know, the adages you hear all the time. So those were our two new episodes for this month. That's what we do. We make two new episodes a month. But we wanted to do a little something extra, a little sneaky holiday gift, a Christmas-ish offering, you could call it. It's actually two little Christmas-ish offerings, one from me, one from Lulu. They're similar, but also very different. And I'm going to start off
2:59 Speaker 03 with this story. This is the especially Christmasy one that I heard from this guy, Noor.
3:08 Speaker 04 I am Noor Rawafi, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.
3:13 Speaker 03 And Noor is part of a project, actually a mission, that, I don't know, a few weeks ago, I didn't even think was physically possible.
3:22 Speaker 04 There are things. Now, I've been on this mission for 16 years. And there are certain aspects for me, the way they work is still like magic.
3:31 Speaker 03 Okay, but if we back up all the way, like, how did you even get interested in all of this?
3:34 Speaker 04 So my interest in space was as a very young child.
3:39 Speaker 03 Noor is originally from Tunisia.
3:40 Speaker 04 Born in the countryside and being in the countryside, there is no light pollution at all. So the sky is just, in particular in summertime, is just mesmerizing. It's just captivating. And that's actually probably the first thing that got me interested into into space. After that, my interest shifted a little bit on the sun, being really fascinated by it, how much heat in particular we get in the summer. And I did all sorts of experiments.
4:05 Speaker 03 He says when he was a kid, he actually made his own light prism out of plexiglass.
4:09 Speaker 04 To create the rainbow spectrum from violet to red.
4:13 Speaker 03 He started playing with lenses.
4:15 Speaker 04 Focusing the sunlight. Some of them, actually, they caused fire, but it's not really a big fire at all. So, but still, still, the power of the sun is, was so fascinating to me.
4:27 Speaker 03 And Noor says that as he got older, he got interested in other fields.
4:30 Speaker 04 Fields like particle physics, like nuclear physics, like optics, quantum mechanics.
4:36 Speaker 03 He ends up going to study in France, starts working in the States at different observatories. But around 2008, he hears about this mission that NASA is working on.
4:46 Speaker 04 Put forth in 1958, many, many years before I was born. That is so monumental, that is going to make history, that is going to make a first just in a few weeks from now.
4:58 Speaker 03 So, to explain, 2008, Noor starts working with NASA on this mission. And then.
5:04 Speaker 05 Status check.
5:06 Speaker 03 2018.
5:10 Speaker 03 Noor and a team of NASA scientists launched this rocket. Out into space. And being carried by that rocket was this.
5:19 Speaker 04 About three meters tall.
5:20 Speaker 03 Couple meters wide.
5:22 Speaker 04 Spacecraft. It's not really big spacecraft when you look at it.
5:24 Speaker 03 It almost looks like cone shaped. So, once it got into space, this little cone shaped spacecraft detached from the rocket. And Noor and his team fired it up and sent it to Venus.
5:35 Speaker 04 And kind of slowed the spacecraft a little bit down.
5:37 Speaker 03 So that the spacecraft would get caught in Venus's orbit. And then, as it swung around Venus, they hit the jets. And it just went. Out toward the sun, then around the sun, then back to Venus, where again, it goes. Slingshots around Venus, out around the sun, and back again, and again, and again. And as it's yo-yoing back and forth between Venus and the sun, it's getting faster and faster and faster.
6:13 Speaker 04 More than 430,000 miles per hour.
6:17 Speaker 03 Like, that's just so fast, you can't even comprehend it.
6:20 Speaker 04 Yes, it's the fastest human object flying in space.
6:23 Speaker 03 And as it gets faster, that orbit around the sun and Venus, it gets tighter and tighter and tighter, to the point that this little spacecraft will get so close to the sun that we will basically, for the first time ever, touch it.
6:43 Speaker 04 Nobody has ever done this. Nobody has ever gone so close to a star.
6:48 Speaker 03 This is the mission. The mission that Noor became obsessed with, the mission that NASA spent decades developing.
6:54 Speaker 04 Generations who invested into this mission.
6:57 Speaker 03 To try and understand our sun.
7:00 Speaker 04 Because there are certain phenomena that are happening on the sun or in the environment of the sun that are so puzzling that for decades now, we don't really have a full understanding of them.
7:11 Speaker 03 For instance, Noor says, take the surface of the sun.
7:14 Speaker 04 That we see with the naked eye. The temperature is about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
7:19 Speaker 03 But, he says, if you move just a couple thousand miles away out from the sun.
7:23 Speaker 04 The temperature will jump to 2 million or 3 million degrees Fahrenheit.
7:27 Speaker 03 It's more.
7:28 Speaker 04 It's way, way, it's over 300 times hotter.
7:30 Speaker 03 So nobody knows why that is?
7:32 Speaker 04 No, no.
7:33 Speaker 03 He said there's all these other mysteries as well, like solar wind or something called the dust-free zone.
7:39 Speaker 04 These mysteries and about the sun, how the sun works.
7:42 Speaker 03 The hope is to solve some of these mysteries.
7:44 Speaker 04 Basically rewriting textbooks for us about the sun.
7:50 Speaker 03 But, I mean, how could you possibly send something? And now, and now what you're telling me is that not even touching the sun, but even even further away from the sun, it's even hotter than the surface of the sun. So how can you get something even remotely close to that without it just melting into a puddle?
8:08 Speaker 04 The spacecraft, when you look at it in terms of technology, it's really a marvel of technology.
8:14 Speaker 03 So, for instance, Noor says NASA had spent decades trying to make a heat shield for a solar spacecraft.
8:20 Speaker 04 But the heat shield was so heavy. So basically, it's not really doable. You cannot do it.
8:24 Speaker 03 So what is the solution?
8:26 Speaker 04 The solution is, you will be surprised. It's basically a piece of carbon foam.
8:31 Speaker 03 What?
8:31 Speaker 04 That's, it's a piece of carbon foam.
8:33 Speaker 03 How? How does that work?
8:35 Speaker 04 This is, this is not any carbon foam. This is a very sophisticated carbon foam.
8:40 Speaker 03 Okay, tell me about the sophisticated carbon foam.
8:42 Speaker 04 So the, the heat shield, it is 4.5 inch thick.
8:47 Speaker 03 That's it?
8:48 Speaker 04 And basically, all of it is a carbon foam. On top of it, we have also ceramic coating. That is why, to reflect as much light as possible. But that's, that's the heat shield.
8:58 Speaker 03 Okay.
8:58 Speaker 04 And when we are closest to the sun, the heat shield side facing the sun will be glowing at more than 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
9:08 Speaker 03 Oh my god.
9:08 Speaker 04 You know, at that temperature, you can melt almost all metals we know of. So the nice thing about this, that the backside of the heat shield, which is just four inches and a half thick, it will be at 700 degrees Fahrenheit.
9:22 Speaker 03 Huh, so way less.
9:23 Speaker 04 So in a way, in four inches and a half, we already lost 1,800 degrees.
9:27 Speaker 03 Holy cow.
9:28 Speaker 04 About a yard or a meter behind that.
9:31 Speaker 03 Yeah.
9:31 Speaker 04 It is almost room temperature.
9:33 Speaker 03 No.
9:35 Speaker 04 Yes.
9:36 Speaker 03 How does it do that?
9:37 Speaker 04 Well, that's actually the magic of engineering.
9:40 Speaker 03 And that's just the heat shield. Like, the spacecraft also has solar panels to power it. But of course, if you get that close to the sun, those could, like, vaporize. So they develop these, like, radiator pipes that go on the back of the solar panels.
9:53 Speaker 04 Can you guess what is the liquid we use to cool the sun off panels?
9:56 Speaker 03 Like liquid nitrogen or something?
9:58 Speaker 04 It's simply water.
10:00 Speaker 03 Water?
10:00 Speaker 04 And it's just a gallon of water.
10:02 Speaker 03 They also angled all the solar panels so they could be, like, in the shadows of the spacecraft so they also don't overheat. I mean, I mean, it's really, it's just wild.
10:12 Speaker 04 Every piece of it is basically edge-cutting technology.
10:16 Speaker 03 And so, on November 6th, this little spacecraft full of edge-cutting technology and sophisticated carbon foam and a gallon of water rounded Venus and began its nearly 67 million mile journey to the sun.
10:33 Speaker 04 And on December 24, 2024, which is the Christmas Eve, will be this historical moment.
10:39 Speaker 03 Where for the first time ever, we will basically reach out and touch a star.
10:45 Speaker 04 We will be basically embracing a star. To me, that's like magic.
10:59 Speaker 03 So that's the quick conversation I had with Noor. And why I was so excited to play it for you now is that I really, I have this image in my mind of, of you, the listener, just sometime over the holiday, you'll be doing something holiday related, like maybe lighting a candle, or gathering with friends around a fire, or even just like, like microwaving your mom's leftovers. It'll be a heat-related thing. And then boom, it'll just hit you that at that very moment, up in the firmament, this little probe is moving faster than any human-made object has ever moved, putting
11:42 Speaker 03 itself and by proxy, all of us, closer to the sun than we have ever been before. That's what I hope happens. I will, I plan on checking back with Noor at some point in the new year to hear how everything went down, what he and his team learned. And that is the, exactly the kind of bonus update that we like to put in our Lab member feed. So if you're already a member of the Lab, keep your eyes peeled for that. If you are not a member, that is the best way to help us do the things we love to do, like dig up buried archival tape, like when we did that for the NYPD psychologist who literally coined the term
12:22 Speaker 03 Stockholm syndrome. Or, you know, when we like to go out and add a live dimension to a historical story, like when we cooked up a thousand-year-old fish sauce recipe with some mean nostrat, or even just, I mean, the standard stuff we do, like just hours and hours of labor on immersive soundscapes that make you feel like you're really at the center of the action. We need your support to keep doing this work. If you're already a member of the Lab, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. You are vital. If you are not a member, well, just know that joining the lab is the best way to make sure that we can keep reliably bringing you deeply researched, carefully
13:02 Speaker 03 produced, rigorously fact-checked, edge-cutting radio journalism. So, consider going to radiolab.org/join and becoming a lab member today. If you already are a member, we just did introduce a new premium level that you could join. It also makes a great holiday gift. Radiolab.org/join. As a member, you get extra content, ad-free listening, all kinds of extra little benefits. And we are actually, this month, as a reward for joining, we're giving out this very cool poster, which comes from an episode of our sibling show, Terrestrials, hosted by Lulu Miller. And after we come back from a short break, we're going to play a little bit from the episode that inspired the poster, where Lulu,
13:44 Speaker 03 kind of like myself, also became very, very obsessed about a tiny little spacecraft that, in her case, was heading out in the opposite direction, saddled with a little less edge-cutting technology, but carrying a much more emotional payload. And that's after the break.
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14:40 Speaker 00 This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. I live far from my family. Every year at Thanksgiving, I get the same question: Where am I going for the holiday? After years of getting caught at airports, or spending tons of money, or getting the seasonal flu, my answer: Nowhere. I have finally said, no more, to travel at Thanksgiving. But it did take a lot of guts to call it off. Because when it comes to the holidays, there are all these expectations of how to celebrate, where to celebrate, and who with. Going against the grain can be hard. Therapy can help. BetterHelp says it has therapists that are licensed, experienced professionals, bringing at least three years and over 1,000 hours of hands-on experience to people.
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17:56 Speaker 03 Latif Radiolab. So we're now leaving behind the spacecraft that was going to the sun and turning to a spacecraft going out the opposite direction to Jupiter, in particular, to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons that has an ocean of water, is a possible other place in our solar system that can sustain life. Now, again, this was a story that was part of our Kids and Family podcast, Terrestrials, hosted by Lulu Miller, my co-host. This spacecraft that this episode is about, it launched just recently in October 2024. And the reason why Lulu became obsessed with it is because on the side of the spacecraft, there was going to be a poem etched into it.
18:40 Speaker 03 And tasked with writing that poem, this message to represent all of us here on Earth, was US poet laureate Ada Limone.
18:49 Speaker 01 But she was stuck, like, real stuck, terrified. So we resume with the tale of what she did to move through that. Well, I had about three months to write the poem, and I was going to Hawaii to a town I'm not Kidding, named Haiku.
19:07 Speaker 01 And I was staying in the house of a former US poet laureate, W. S. Merwin. And so my husband and I went there. It's inside an incredible palm forest, all of these beautiful, different varieties of palm trees. And so I got to watch all of the different species of birds and all the geckos inside and outside the house. And I had this real space to think and sit with the idea of what I wanted to offer. And so I began writing the poem.
19:46 Speaker 01 I was trying to imagine the audience being sort of out in space, right? Whether there were other beings out there, whether the audience was the stars themselves.
20:00 Speaker 01 I kept imagining a loneliness.
20:05 Speaker 01 And I would read a draft to my husband and he would say, "Mm, you know, I think you need to stop writing a NASA poem." What do you think your husband heard when he said that? I think he was hearing maybe more of a scientific approach, more stiff and formal type of writing, maybe more of following the assignment, thinking of it as presenting facts about Europa. Poets have one really beautiful way of procrastinating. And let me tell you about it. Okay. What we love to do is research. And it means that instead of writing the poem, I think, you know what?
20:49 Speaker 01 I'm gonna go Google everything about this moon of Jupiter. And it's a wonderful distraction and it's a great way of learning.
21:00 Speaker 03 But it often doesn't actually help you make the poem. But it is our way of just not writing. So I think that that's part of what I was doing was thinking, oh, I'm going to teach people about Europa. And that's what he was hearing. And so what I needed to shift was, oh, no, I need to speak to Europa and have this be a reaching out.
21:25 Speaker 01 Was there anything that like a bird or a tree or a moment that led you down the right path or the rabbit hole that would then turn into the more us poem? Was, I don't know, there might not be, but was there, do you have anything in your head?
21:42 Speaker 03 Yeah. I was in Hawaii and I was staring at this palm frond. And the palms really move. They sort of glow and move. They have a bounciness to them in the wind. And there was a little gecko that was stuck on the underside. It was completely upside down. And he was hanging on this palm frond. And I thought, how amazing. That little dude is just, you know, bouncing in the wind back and forth. And I thought of the line, we too are made of wonders.
22:19 Speaker 01 We too, meaning like both Europa and Earth are made of wonders?
22:24 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's where the poem shifted.
22:29 Speaker 03 Then I realized that really the audience was us here on this beautiful planet. And it includes everyone on Earth. And it also includes plants and animals. So it needed to be from all of us, to all of us. And the I, me, Ada, had to be taken out of it. And that's where the poem really reached momentum where I could follow it through. But I think that What I struggled with the most was how to use a "we."
23:10 Speaker 03 To be honest, I am someone that's always been a little suspicious of a "we." You know, as a Latina, as a woman, there are times where I even think of "we, the people," and I think, "Am I included in that 'we'?" I want to know if I'm included in that "we."
23:28 Speaker 01 And that, of course, is from our Constitution.
23:30 Speaker 03 Exactly. And so I think that as a poet, I often don't use "we." And so I think the most difficult thing I had to do was actually surrender to the "we" and remember that the "we" had to represent everybody and to try to include trees and animals and plants.
23:56 Speaker 03 And so I had to really release that idea of the "I" and make room for my most communal voice.
24:06 Speaker 03 And that was where the poem took hold.
24:09 Speaker 01 Really took hold. That poem is now engraved into the spacecraft, and Ada's words are literally touching the cold of space, collecting stardust as they blast toward Jupiter's moon.
24:25 Speaker 01 She did it. She found a way to write a message from all of us here in this water world to Jupiter's water world in under 200 words. All right, well, would you be up for reading it?
24:42 Speaker 03 I would be honored.
24:47 Speaker 03 "In Praise of Mystery, A Poem for Europa."
24:54 Speaker 03 "Arching under the night sky, inky with black expansiveness, we point to the planets we know. We pin quick wishes on stars."
25:07 Speaker 01 From earth we read the sky as if it is an unerring book of the universe, expert and evident. Still, there are mysteries below our sky. The whale song, the songbird singing its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree. We are creatures of constant awe, curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom, at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow. And it is not darkness that unites us, not the cold distance of space, but the offering of water.
25:52 Speaker 01 Each drop of rain, each rivulet, each pulse, each vein. Oh, second moon, we too are made of water, of vast and beckoning seas. We too are made of wonders, of great and ordinary loves, of small, invisible worlds, of a need to call out through the dark.
26:28 Speaker 01 Do you feel like a part of you is going to space? I do. I do feel like a part of me is going to space. And because I made the poem and the line breaks and the stanza breaks, that you have my own breath in it, the way that I read it, the way that I, you know, made the poem. And so in some ways, it is my
26:58 Speaker 01 little human breath is going.
27:13 Speaker 03 So like I said earlier, we made a poster inspired by this episode of Terrestrials. It is beautiful. You can check it out on our website or on Instagram, and it can be yours if you go to radiolab.org/join and become a lab member. Like I said, lab members are a critical part of how we fund the show, how we get to do the work that we do. So please, considering if you haven't already, joining. You get all sorts of stuff, bonus content, ad-free episodes, this amazing poster. If you are already a member, a small additional one-time gift will also get you the poster. Now, whether you are a lab member or are about to become one, or, you know, whatever, you can't afford to do it this time of year,
27:56 Speaker 03 I want to tell you about one more way that you can sort of join our little party here at no cost to you. Because as some of you might know, we are in the last week of our global contest to name one of Earth's quasi-moons, a little rocky buddy that'll be with us for the next 600 laps around the Sun. We partnered with the official namers of things in space, the International Astronomical Union, and we solicited thousands of names from nearly 100 countries. We winnowed them down to seven finalists. And now, for the next week only, you get to choose the one you like best. The name with the most votes will be the official name for this thing in space that will outlive us all. Vote for the name you like best at
28:37 Speaker 03 radiolab.org/moon before the end of the year. That's radiolab.org/moon. It'll take two minutes, and you can say you made your mark in the heavens. Our little solar probe journey, by the way, was produced and sound designed by Matt Kielty, and of course, the bit of Terrestrials you just heard was produced by the Terrestrials team: Anna Gonzalez, Mira Burtwin-Tonic, and Lulu Miller, with help from Tanya Chaula, Alan Gofinski, Sarah Sandbeck, Valentina Powers, and Joe Plord. Fact-checking by Natalie Middleton. You can hear that whole episode of Terrestrials, which is packed full of just gorgeous, spacey stuff about Europa, and not to mention, questions being asked by adorable children. You can hear that whole episode. It is called "An Ocean in Space"
29:22 Speaker 03 over on our kids feed at terrestrialspodcast.org.
29:27 Speaker 03 That's it for today. That's it for this year. So I will see you in 2025 when we will be diving into the darkest place on the planet. We will be getting high huffing apples and we will be untangling quantum entanglement inside a bird's eyeball. Something to look forward to. Yeah, happy holidays. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.
29:57 Speaker 00 Hey, I'm Lemon and I'm from Richmond, Indiana. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Zoran Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasr are our co-hosts. Dylan Keith is our Director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gabel, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sundjun Yannan Sambandan, Matt Kielty, Rebecca Lacks, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Sarah Sandback, Anissa Vitza, Mary Anne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.
30:41 Speaker 05 Hi, my name is Teresa. I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, the Samons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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