Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast Cosmic Queries – The Future of the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab with Laurie Leshin About this episode Could there be life under the icy surface of Europa? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic Chuck Nice explore interplanetary missions, asteroid mining, and other exciting launches with the Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Laurie Leshin.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In today's episode of StarTalk, it's a Cosmic Queries where we learn all about the Jet Propulsion Laboratories through the lens of its brand-new director, Laurie Leshin, a geochemist, an old friend, actually. And in there, we learn about, will we ever get to Europa? Is there a mission on the books? Spoiler alert: yes. And how will it get through the ice? Will it get through the ice at all? Could, might we find fish, freeze-dried or otherwise, buried beneath? And is JPL developing another telescope? If it is, what's it gonna do and why? All of that and more on this episode of StarTalk Cosmic Queries
0:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? with my co-host, Chuck Nice.
0:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
1:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And I got Chuck Nice with me. Chuck, my co-host.
1:12 Chuck Nice? What's happening, Neil? How are you?
1:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, we're gonna find out about JPL. It's a storied place. It's been around even since before NASA, yet it is a branch of NASA. And what gives it special attention today is that it has a new director. And I don't mean to brag, but like, I'm personal friends with the new director. When you think of that, yeah.
1:36 Chuck Nice? All right.
1:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so we introduce Laurie Leshin. Laurie, welcome to StarTalk.
1:41 Speaker 02 Thank you, Neil and Chuck. It's so great to be with you. What a thrill.
1:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, you'd like spanking brand-new in that position just a few months. You know, this is like we're starting out the new year, 2023.
1:53 Speaker 02 Yes, Happy New Year.
1:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But you haven't been in there more than six months or so.
1:56 Speaker 02 Just about six months, that's right, just over.
1:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. Well, congratulations.
2:01 Chuck Nice? How's it going so far?
2:02 Speaker 02 It's, every day's an adventure. It's, you know, we have weeks where it's like Mars on Tuesday and Earth on Friday, and it's an astrophysics in between. So, we've got all kinds of really exciting things.
2:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Chuck, you didn't ask the right question. It's Laurie, what debacle did you inherit?
2:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's that. There's a little bit of that.
2:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Little bit of that.
2:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, so when I arrived, we were the first launch we were supposed to do is a mission called Psyche, which is a really cool mission to a metal asteroid. And about three, four weeks.
2:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which Psyche is the name of the asteroid.
2:39 Speaker 02 It is. It's the name of the asteroid and it's the name of the mission because that's how we roll. And, you know, kind of keep everybody on their toes. Wait, which one are you talking about? But talking about the mission, it turned out when I arrived about four weeks later, we realized we weren't quite ready to launch. And so we were gonna miss that launch window.
2:57 Chuck Nice? Psyche.
3:00 Chuck Nice? Chuck.
3:01 Speaker 02 Psyche. Yeah, so it's kind of the perfect mission for that, right? Like Lucy football, Lucy meat football. There you go. Yeah, and unfortunately.
3:11 Chuck Nice? Now, wait, now, this is super interesting, though, because you're going to a metal asteroid.
3:15 Speaker 02 So interesting.
3:15 Chuck Nice? Which we all know there's so many implications kind of wrapped in that. And what are you guys gonna do? Is it just going? Is it?
3:24 Speaker 02 Gonna orbit? It's gonna go into orbit around this metal asteroid and really map it. We have never visited a metal world, right? We've visited rocky worlds, Mars, Earth, you know, other planets. We have visited icy worlds with the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and the outer planets. You know, so-called, you know, icy worlds or ocean worlds. But we've never visited a metal world. That's because there actually aren't that many of them.
3:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Laurie, that's where Iron Man comes from.
3:52 Speaker 02 Well.
3:54 Chuck Nice? It is also where Iron Maiden comes from.
3:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, that group.
3:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, that may or may not be in our level one requirements. I don't really know. Yeah. But we are going. So we're gonna go later this year. We're gonna, we're gonna launch in October.
4:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's not, it's not totally scratched. It's not a canceled program.
4:14 Speaker 02 And you know, COVID had a lot to do with it, honestly. Like, you can't, you can't build spacecraft from your parents' basements. Like, you gotta, you gotta be, we gotta be here and be together. And, and we missed some things and we needed to get that right. It's much, having been involved in missions that launched, that weren't ready to launch and that weren't successful as a result, it's much better to sort of call a timeout and say, let's do this right. And that's what we've done.
4:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So if when you're head, you can call timeout on adults, right?
4:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? When you're a parent, you say to your kids, but you're director.
4:47 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, we're not putting them in a timeout. We're more in the football sense of a timeout. We're calling it. We call the timeout to say we're not going to launch if we're not ready. And let's go fix the issues, which were software issues, it turns out. Hardware is doing great. It's actually already in Florida waiting for, it's going to launch on a Falcon Heavy, which is going to be really rocking.
5:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And Falcon is SpaceX.
5:09 Speaker 02 SpaceX Falcon Heavy. So that's the one with three, like three Falcon 9 cores on it. So it's a big kick out to, out to psyche.
5:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Lori, you're a geochemist. So are you a geologist that does chemistry? Or you're a chemist that does geology? How do, what do we think of you as this, these two professions stapled together in one title?
5:30 Speaker 02 Yes, that's exactly right. I actually studied chemistry as an undergraduate and then sort of switched into geo-science. So I really do kind of sit at the middle and I care a lot about life in the universe. But because I come from a family of doctors, my big rebellion in life was I never took biology in college.
5:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow. Okay.
5:48 Speaker 02 That, that, that was like my big, you know.
5:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. So, so where does, how did the space part of this become interesting to you?
5:55 Speaker 02 For me, it was, I was a 10 year old girl seeing the very first pictures from the surface of Mars, from the Viking missions way back in the seventies. And I grew up in Arizona and I think there was just something about that landscape that really spoke to me. I wanted to reach out and touch those rocks and that has stayed, has stayed with me all these years. And all these years later, I, I get to, we're working right now to bring rocks back from Mars.
6:19 Chuck Nice? Not a very good advertisement for Arizona.
6:23 Speaker 02 I think it's beautiful. I disagree.
6:26 Chuck Nice? I saw the surface of Mars and figured, I gotta get out of here.
6:31 Speaker 02 Every day I get to look at new pictures from Mars and they're inspiring.
6:36 Chuck Nice? Yeah, exactly. I'm home.
6:40 Speaker 02 Of course, I'm going to end up probably after I retire in Sedona, which is about as Mars-like as you can get. So yeah, I think it's just the thing.
6:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And what's your relationship with the Mars Curiosity rover?
6:50 Speaker 02 I'm on a team. I've actually been on the Curiosity team since before it was even called Curiosity. It's going all the way back to the initial formulation of the science goals. I'm involved in two of the instruments. I was here at JPL, well before I worked for JPL. I was here when we landed on Mars. It was actually on my birthday in 2012. We landed on Mars with Curiosity. Awesome birthday present, most awesome birthday ever. And yeah, got to have gotten to work on our discoveries around water on the, in the soil and the rocks.
7:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So.
7:23 Speaker 02 Great mission. Still going 10 years later, still going.
7:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so do you get to set priorities for JPL or does that come from up on high? Because you presumably report to the administrator of NASA, the head of NASA. And the head of NASA, I think, reports to the vice president, right? Where someone in the White House. So what is the, what's the chain of command there? How much autonomy do they give you? Or right, I had an answer right. How much autonomy do you take?
7:50 Speaker 02 Yes.
7:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because I know you, I know you.
7:52 Speaker 02 So it's interesting, actually. I mean, there's, that's a multifaceted question, which I won't give you the, the long answer. But first of all, we're unique among, everyone knows about NASA Centers, right? Houston, we have a problem and we launched things from, from Florida Kennedy Space Center. Those are our government labs where all the employees are government employees. We are actually a different kind of a flavor of that. We actually all work for Caltech. We're a federally funded research and development center.
8:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? FFRDC.
8:19 Speaker 02 So we're the, in FFRDC, we are the only NASA center that is such. So, so we have a bit of a dual reporting relationship where we get to sort of, I think, our close connection with Caltech, a storied university, is great for our, our sort of innovation culture.
8:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Who signs your paycheck? That's who we want to, is it Caltech or NASA?
8:38 Speaker 02 They do.
8:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, there it is.
8:41 Speaker 02 But, but all of the money that funds us flows through NASA.
8:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
8:45 Speaker 02 It's, I have multiple. Bosses, shall we say. Okay. So, but, but, so it's really important that we align our priorities with, with NASA's and, and also that the inventions that we're investing in and making help drive NASA's priorities, right? It's a bit of a two-way street. So we get to see kind of what's up and coming, where's the science going? And share that with the science community, share it with NASA, and that helps drive what missions NASA ends up doing, right? So it's, it's two-way.
9:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's, that's beautiful. And so you also are duly appointed. It's not just that Caltech signs your check, you're actually affiliated with one of the departments there.
9:22 Speaker 02 That's right. I'm, I'm a vice president at Caltech and I'm also a professor at Caltech in my old PhD department where I got my doctorate. Oh, wow. They actually gave me an office on campus. It's my old grad student office, if you can believe that. Oh, my God.
9:36 Chuck Nice? That's pretty cool, actually.
9:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Come back, that's good.
9:38 Chuck Nice? You get to go back to your old department and flex your muscles.
9:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:42 Chuck Nice? It's pretty awesome.
9:44 Speaker 02 Unfortunately, this job takes a lot of time, so I don't have a ton of time to spend on campus, but, but the connection to Caltech's super important to us.
9:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Excellent, excellent. And so, just before we get to our Q and A, is there, is there one or more, or what's your top goal for JPL in your, in the tenure that you're about to?
10:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, so it's a really, so much of it's about delivering on our, our really exciting near-term portfolio. We've got, we just launched an Earth, the latest Earth science mission called SWAT, which is all about understanding Earth's water. We are working on.
10:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, thank God.
10:23 Speaker 02 I know, right? What could be more important? Yeah. Forget the name like SWAT. I thought you were gonna take us out. No, SWAT, Surface Water Oceanology. The number thing's an acronym here. My special weapons and tactics.
10:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
10:36 Speaker 02 No.
10:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
10:38 Speaker 02 Surface water. And, and we're going to launch Psyche this year. We're going to launch a mission to Jupiter next year that's going to focus on its icy moon Europa.
10:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I want to get back to that. I have more questions on that too, but keep going.
10:50 Speaker 02 And then Mars sample return. Go to Mars. Come back for the first time ever that Mars round trip. So delivering on those missions is, is our highest prayer.
11:00 Chuck Nice? Get your ass to Mars.
11:03 Speaker 02 And come back. And then come back. That's right. No one way trip here.
11:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Echoing Kurt Vonnegut, Lori, is this one of these situations where you bring the sample back from Mars and the last sentence ever spoken?
11:18 Chuck Nice? Oh no.
11:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In the human species is, "Let's look inside."
11:25 Speaker 02 No, I shouldn't laugh. I'm not laughing about that. No, we're taking it very seriously. It's, as you know, Neil, planetary protection is like a whole thing, right? And, and we're taking it really, really seriously.
11:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm just giving you an excuse to talk about it.
11:36 Speaker 02 They want to have some public hearings about it.
11:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, so planetary protection, you got people looking over your shoulder to make sure what you bring back is properly sealed and contained and everything?
11:44 Speaker 02 Exactly. And boy, you, you should see, I mean, I actually happen to have here a model of one of the, uh, the sample tubes. Each, each sample is about the size of your pinky. So there are little rock cores about the size of your pinky.
11:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So drilled out.
11:58 Speaker 02 And they're sealed in tubes, which are then sealed in, yeah, drilled out, sealed inside things that sealed inside that and sealed inside something else. I mean, like it's, there's a lot of seals.
12:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
12:08 Chuck Nice? Okay.
12:08 Speaker 02 It's like, gonna keep it safe.
12:10 Chuck Nice? A little messy doll of a sample.
12:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, no, here it is. So it's, it has seven seals.
12:18 Speaker 02 I'm, I'm resisting making seal noises.
12:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, no, no. And then she opens the seventh seal and then.
12:23 Chuck Nice? Right.
12:24 Speaker 02 Exactly.
12:24 Chuck Nice? You ushered in the entire apocalypse. There you go.
12:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Chuck, you got questions for, for my friend here?
12:31 Chuck Nice? Indeed we do. Indeed we do. I guess we'll just.
12:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And these are from our, from our Patreon supporters.
12:37 Chuck Nice? Yes, they are.
12:38 Speaker 02 Nice.
12:39 Chuck Nice? Hello, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, Dr. Lessin.
12:43 Chuck Nice? Does NASA have any plans for future missions to Europa? Jumping right into it. The fact that the cold, frigid world might have an ocean of water underneath is absolutely fascinating. What are the challenges of a manned or even a robotic exploration of Europa? And what concerns might we have for the potential of life in its waters? My man has all go, he's going full sci-fi.
13:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He went all.
13:10 Chuck Nice? He went all the way. Right on, right on. He was just like, okay, are we going? How are we going to get there? And will it be us? Will it be robots? What about the fish? And if not, yeah.
13:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the guy's all in, and that is a brilliant question, all encompassing, that we will get to when we return from this first break. StarTalk Cosmic Queries with my good friend Lori Leshin, recently appointed as the Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Pasadena, California. Stay tuned.
13:49 Speaker 03 I'm Joel Cherico, and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
14:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back, StarTalk Cosmic Queries. All about the Jet Propulsion Laboratories from the horse's mouth itself. Lori Leshin, recently appointed as Director of those labs in Pasadena, California. And Lori, I would, my life as an astrophysicist does not normally overlap the lives of geochemists, which is what you are. And we were just kind of, sort of merged together now 20 years ago or so, on a commission under then-President George W. Bush to study the future of NASA. And we were assembled, we were sort of handpicked to bring. All of the NASA portfolio together at one table, right?
14:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so you're bringing in the geology and I'm bringing in some astro. We had some other folks. We had an aeronautics person, one of the As in NASA stands for aeronautics. So I greatly enjoyed our time together there and the collaboration that that represented. And, and, and dare I say, when I, you were just a lowly academic at the time, but you were like totally in charge of every one of those meetings. And I said, damn girl, you know, and the next time I turn around, you're like president of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. And now, now head of, of the Jet Propulsion Labs. And I'm trying to think how many other titles are left? Head of NASA. Okay, there you go.
15:38 Speaker 02 I'm quite happy where I am, but you know, I mean, it's hard to believe it's been almost 20 years.
15:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, 20 years, yeah.
15:44 Speaker 02 And that was a really transformative professional experience for me. And I give you all the credit for my future success after, just, I mean, you were there.
15:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What?
15:57 Speaker 02 No, I, it was, it was such a great learning experience for me.
16:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're already on StarTalk. You don't have to butter up the, the host. You're already a guest on the show.
16:07 Speaker 02 It's all true.
16:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But it was my second commission, that's true.
16:11 Speaker 02 Yes, you had done, I was the kid. I was the youngest of the nine commission members. And it was a, it was a huge learning experience for me.
16:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It was just clear that I said, this woman's going to be in charge of something one day. That was very clear, but you're right. We had a, we had a, uh, didn't we have a four star general, Air Force general?
16:26 Speaker 02 We did, General Lyles, yes.
16:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, General Lyles, and it was, it was quite a pedigree.
16:30 Speaker 02 Incredible, incredible leaders across lots of parts of government, industry, academia. And, uh, and it really showed me that broadening my perspective on things. I had been an academic my whole life, uh, and I was feeling the ivory tower. And, and the idea of ditching my tenure and joining NASA, which I did soon after that, um, was really, uh, came from, from that work.
16:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, sometimes it's a calling, right? And not literally a phone call, but the universe beckons and you replied. So excellent, glad to have you there. So we're getting back to the question that we dangled right in front of all three of us. What's the person's name again, Chuck? It's Jonathan Cull or Cule?
17:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? K U H L. Cool, okay. Call or Q. Cool. He's probably Jonathan Cool. Cool. Yeah, I know. I'll get the letter on social media. Chuck, my name is Cool, as in Joe.
17:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Joe Cool. So tell us about Europa, because that question was all about everyone's favorite moon of Jupiter.
17:35 Speaker 02 It is so exciting. So literally right now, as I speak to you, our first dedicated mission to Europa is sitting in our high bay in our big, giant, clean room here at JPL, being put together, being assembled and tested. And it's called Europa Clipper. It's going to launch in October of 2024. So less than two-
17:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A quick question.
17:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
17:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is that room, this room you're describing, I've been in a room where an entire wall was HEPA filters.
18:04 Speaker 02 Filters, yes, yes.
18:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is that what this wall is?
18:06 Speaker 02 Yes, yes, exactly. To keep it quite clean and everybody in there is head to toe in bunny suits, as we call them, to make sure that, you know, none of our schmutz gets on the spacecraft, right? No schmutzing.
18:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You don't want to discover the coronavirus on Europa and say, oh my gosh.
18:23 Speaker 02 Definitely not that. No, nor I know anybody's hair.
18:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Somebody sneezes right before the launch.
18:31 Speaker 02 Exactly, yep. And so we're in there putting that spacecraft together. It's going to go to Jupiter. It's actually going to go into orbit around Jupiter, but do multiple, a couple of dozen, very close flybys to Europa. And with nine different sensors that are going to tell us about the ocean underneath the ice, about the thickness of the ice. So there's some places where maybe the ice gets really thin. If there's stuff spewing out from the surface, we're going to analyze that with a mass spectrometer.
18:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That would be through a crevasse presumably, or some kind of fissure.
19:01 Speaker 02 Right, or some kind of crack, that's right.
19:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
19:03 Speaker 02 But again-
19:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So how thick are we talking here? How thick?
19:06 Speaker 02 Um, many kilometers, probably even tens of kilometers thick in places.
19:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow. How you wanna see if there's water? How do you, how, how?
19:14 Speaker 02 That's the question, right? So if we can find some spots where the ice is thinner, that helps you with the follow-up mission, which should be a landed mission, right? We don't have that approved yet, but we've been working on the technology to make it possible to go land on a moon of Jupiter. Mind blowing, are you kidding me? Um, by the way, this is a solar-powered mission at Jupiter. You know Neil, how much further from uh, the sun Jupiter is than the Earth, five times further, right? So the solar panels are giant. They would stretch from the toe to the crown of the Statue of Liberty. Those are big. So it's the biggest thing we've ever built at Jupiter.
19:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Jupiter is five times farther away, so it's receiving 1/25th.
19:56 Speaker 02 Exactly right.
19:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Of the sun's intensity. So if you're gonna try to get the same power you would have hanging out at Mars, but at Jupiter, you're gonna have, your panels have to be 25 times bigger.
20:07 Speaker 02 Big.
20:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Pure and simple.
20:08 Speaker 02 Right. So it's a, it's a, it's a beast. It's a beast. And then the spacecraft itself with nine different sensors, which of course the scientists want all nine to be running every time you fly by Europa. So it's quite complicated and the um, radiation environment at Jupiter is really harsh and nasty, which is one reason why probably the surface of Europa is not a very habitable environment. But down in the ocean, you know, who knows? Could there be something swimming around?
20:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Where it's shielded, it's shielded.
20:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's shielded. Nice and, you know, ocean-y.
20:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I heard, you know, I've seen close-up photos of the surface of Europa where, where the ice looks like it has cracked.
20:46 Speaker 02 Yes.
20:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And then refilled and then froze again, right? So if it had cracked, that means water from below seeps up.
20:54 Speaker 02 That's right.
20:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To, to the surface and then freezes again. So could you have like freeze-dried fish right there in those cracks?
21:00 Speaker 02 You could. You could have freeze-dried, organic-based something, organic fish.
21:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Fish.
21:05 Speaker 02 Life.
21:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Say it.
21:07 Speaker 02 Fish is pretty advanced. I'd be happy with algae, like pool algae underneath the ocean and then you freeze some algae.
21:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Raise your expectations. Yeah.
21:15 Speaker 02 All right, fine serpents, eels, whatever you want. Loch Ness monster. Yes.
21:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There you go. Oh, that'd be cool. That'd be totally cool. So that seems to me that if you can't dig through kilometers of ice, you could at least scoop up something from one of the fissures.
21:29 Speaker 02 Exactly. And so even from orbit, we think there is some outgassing going on that we can, we can look for organic molecules and try and understand what's happening there. And then with a lander, hopefully you can, again, dig into the surface and, and understand what's happening.
21:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I, I don't mean to brag, but I was in, in, I had a very brief cameo in a movie called The Europa Report.
21:50 Speaker 02 Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
21:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it was a movie and what they did, they just asked my permission to quote me from a media interview that I was in. So I didn't have to like perform for it. And, and, and they just got me saying, I want to go to Europa, dig through the, dig through its surface and go ice fishing. That's what I said. Nice. And they liked that. Yeah, I think I got like a thousand dollars for that. That was nice.
22:18 Speaker 02 It's hard. That's going to be a challenge to get through that ice for sure. So we're already working on technology to help us do that.
22:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. So that, just to, just, just to give a shout out to the film, it was like, like an indie budget kind of film. And it was called The Europa Report because they go to Europa and the entire movie are just mission cameras positioned in the cockpit and on the exterior of the vessel and on the helmets of the crew. So every next scene it says camera three, camera seven. And so that was like sort of the, the, you had to buy into the fact.
22:53 Speaker 02 The vibe.
22:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This was a report given to Congress to the sum of this mission. So it was an interesting premise. So, so yeah, people, but when science fiction is all up in your, in your situation, you know you're on to an interesting subject.
23:08 Speaker 02 It is, and it's one of what we think now are many, what we would call ocean worlds in the outer solar system. Back when you and I were growing up in science, Neil, that we were not thinking about habitable environments that far from the sun, right?
23:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Certainly not on moons. Moons were like, who cares about moons?
23:26 Speaker 02 Right.
23:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Go to the planets themselves. So it's a whole other world.
23:29 Speaker 02 So it's the beginning. I really believe this is the beginning of a sort of new wave of exploration in the outer solar system. We've got to figure out how we go there more often than every 20 or 30 years, right? We've got to figure out how we go there faster.
23:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm a little older than you. To put it in context, when I was, when we were first going out to the solar system, everything was a flyby.
23:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right? No one went into orbit around the planets.
23:52 Speaker 02 Voyager.
23:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it was tours of the Voyager was Voyager 1, 2, Pioneer 10.
23:56 Speaker 02 Still going.
23:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Were all just flybys. So you had to like, get your camera ready, you know, right?
24:02 Speaker 02 There goes. Missed it, no.
24:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck, give me some more, more questions.
24:08 Chuck Nice? All right, let's keep it going. Fernando Colon says this. Dr. Lessen, greetings from San Diego. My question is simple. Now, with the achievement of fusion ignition at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, will fusion energy play a role in space travel? And if so, how long will it take until it becomes viable as a main energy source for rockets?
24:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I love it. I love it.
24:35 Chuck Nice? Yeah, let's get this done.
24:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
24:37 Chuck Nice? That's what he's saying.
24:38 Speaker 02 So, so that's a great question. I mean, it's so, huge congratulations to the NIF team up, up at Livermore. That, that is a huge achievement. And it's like step one, step 0.1 on the road to doing what is being asked about because it got a long way to go to try and get that scaled. But you got to start somewhere and and they've been working towards this milestone for years. So, congrats to them. So, in in space, we now use fission energy. We do use nuclear energy, but it's it's of a different kind, right? We use radioactive things like plutonium that actually produce energy when they split apart into other atoms.
25:20 Speaker 02 So, that is today available to us and we, in fact, use it extensively. Our Mars rovers use it. We use it out beyond Jupiter. You really can't do solar power. So, we we've used it on missions like Cassini and Saturn.
25:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But you're getting that energy a little bit for free because the plutonium naturally decays.
25:40 Speaker 02 Correct.
25:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, you just send the plutonium.
25:42 Speaker 02 Right.
25:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the and the and the blob of it gets hot.
25:45 Speaker 02 The hard part about that is just concentrating the plutonium, right?
25:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, that's right.
25:50 Speaker 02 You separate it out and get it ready.
25:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But you don't need to. Those are not sitting in a nuclear reactor.
25:54 Speaker 02 That's right.
25:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're just their own thing.
25:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
25:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, that's kind of like free.
25:56 Speaker 02 That's right.
25:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Free. So, now, but with the fusion, it seems like you gotta you gotta get that to happen.
26:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I think it's gonna be a while, is the honest answer to the question.
26:07 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
26:08 Speaker 02 Because nobody quite knows how to scale beyond the little tiny bit that they were able to do yet. But but you gotta start somewhere and and the sun knows how to do it. So, you know.
26:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Your son never had any trouble making that happen.
26:21 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
26:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, Chuck, time for another one. Keep going.
26:24 Chuck Nice? Here we go. This is Alan of Wales.
26:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh.
26:27 Speaker 02 Excellent.
26:28 Chuck Nice? And so Alan says, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Leshin, and Chuck, it is amazing to see the Space Launch System successfully orbit the Orion capsule and to see it safely return to Earth. But really, what grounds does NASA have to continue to build expandable launch systems? Agreed, massive profits, no doubt, made supplying this one-time throwaway equipment. But does NASA have any plans to build reusable systems like commercial companies have already successfully deployed?
27:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, Lori said she's not using a NASA vessel. She's.
27:08 Chuck Nice? That's right.
27:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're getting launched on a Falcon.
27:11 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How much of the Falcon heavy is reusable?
27:13 Speaker 02 So, it depends on what you're launching. So, in some cases, they actually will fly like two of the boosters back. They've done that with heavies. In some cases, you want. To take every last bit of fuel out of that reusable rocket. And so you actually use it in an expendable mode. So that's an option for us as well. Um, so, you know,
27:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, just to be clear, in case people don't realize, if you're going to bring the boosters back.
27:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They are killed. You launched them with fuel.
27:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That did not participate in continuing to send your payload.
27:50 Speaker 02 Correct.
27:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To its destination. So, so you're using up weight.
27:54 Speaker 02 Yes.
27:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? In order to bring the thing back. So there's quite the interesting economic trade off there.
27:59 Speaker 02 Right.
27:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Between the reusability and the cost of your mission.
28:03 Speaker 02 But I think, um, you know, I think Artemis was a huge success and it's just great to see that launch. I mean, in some ways that program saw its origin from the, from the work that Neil and I did together.
28:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, yeah.
28:15 Speaker 02 On the commission back in the day, right?
28:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It was a commission on the future.
28:18 Speaker 02 That was all about what's going to come after the shuttle.
28:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? On the future of the US.
28:21 Speaker 02 Space exploration program.
28:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Exploration program, right?
28:24 Speaker 02 So we're proud to see that flying.
28:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, right.
28:27 Chuck Nice? Nice little humble brag happening here.
28:29 Speaker 02 Dang right. Take a little credit.
28:32 Chuck Nice? There you go.
28:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, Chuck, slip in another question before we go to break.
28:37 Chuck Nice? All right, here we go. Uh, this is Adam Akra who says this. Hello, Dr. Laurie, Neil and Mr. Nice. I've always been fascinated by the thought of going to another planet. Do you think that this is feasible in our lifetimes? Well, Adam, we don't know how old you are, but, uh,
28:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If he's 89, you bet he's saying, the answer is no.
29:01 Chuck Nice? He says, at least, at the minimum, to see another human being make it to Mars. And for your reference, I'm 50 years old.
29:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, oh, good, good. Okay. But so Laurie,
29:14 Chuck Nice? That's what I give for not reading the whole thing.
29:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? JPO is completely.
29:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Um robotic. Right. So you could, you could say, we're already on Mars.
29:24 Speaker 02 We are.
29:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And these size are over. But, um, so do we need people on Mars? Are you, where do you, what do you, what do you do with people? And, and do we, do the people learn anything from all of your efforts and orbital trajectories?
29:37 Speaker 02 Hundred percent.
29:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And inserts to, how much shared insights is there?
29:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, hundred percent. I mean, if you look at the history of JPL, I mean, there's a lot of ways to answer this, but one of the, our very first, you know, forays into deep space was on missions like Ranger and Surveyor, which paved the way for astronauts to go to the moon 50 years ago.
29:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, of course. Yes.
29:55 Speaker 02 And so we, and today that, that way is.
29:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which for those who don't know, those two missions photographed in high detail the surface of the moon. So that we could judge what might be the best place to land.
30:06 Speaker 02 We had no idea.
30:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No idea.
30:08 Speaker 02 Like, we just tried to crash it in. We missed a bunch of times, by the way, as we were getting.
30:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, I didn't know that.
30:13 Speaker 02 Like, what's missed the moon? Darn it. Uh, and, and, and.
30:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Plus, there's.
30:19 Speaker 02 There's a lot of good stories around here.
30:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You want to land safely, plus you want to land where there's some interesting geology, right?
30:25 Speaker 02 That's right.
30:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Like, what's the point?
30:26 Speaker 02 But we didn't even know, you know, where the lander's going to sink into the lunar dust. Like, there was all kinds of stuff, the basic stuff. And, and our rovers on Mars are, and landers are paving the way today, um, for human exploration. And Mars Sample Return, which is actually going to be the first mission to make the round trip to Mars, is a big one. And, you know, actually launching something from the surface of Mars that comes back to Earth. So, so you're absolutely paving the way. I'm optimistic that, uh, in, was it Adam? I'm sorry. Adam's lifetime?
30:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's right.
30:57 Speaker 02 That we will see people on Mars. And, and I'm bullish on what they can do. As a geologist, if we look at what one of our rovers does in a day, and they've actually done some tests around this, a human could do that in a minute or two, right? Kind of go somewhere, look around a bit, try to figure. It's, it's.
31:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And how fast do the rovers rove?
31:16 Speaker 02 Oh, you know, curiosity goes about as fast as a human can walk. So it's reasonable, but not very fast. Um, perseverance, who's there now, is is a bit, um, zippier. So can go a little bit faster. It's still going to be slow on like, it's not race car time, right? So, yeah.
31:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Rover races, that's how you know we're in the future.
31:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Laurie, we've got to take a break, but when we come back, we'll continue. And we might even go into a lightning round. Ooh. Cosmic queries on StarTalk with the freshly minted director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Laurie Leshin. We'll be right back.
32:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries, Neil deGrasse Tyson here. We've got the newly minted head director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, a branch of NASA, which is a, also, in a way, a branch of the California Institute of Technology, Caltech, in Pasadena, California, ensuring that it has an unending, uh, access to academic excellence.
32:26 Speaker 02 Brilliance, yeah.
32:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That that Caltech only knows is academic excellence. So, so Laurie, is, um, do they let you, uh, jump onto social media all by yourself? Or you have to vet what you post? Because if people want to follow what you do, how do they do that?
32:43 Speaker 02 I am at Laurie of Mars on Twitter.
32:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, wait, wait. Laurie what?
32:47 Speaker 02 Laurie of Mars.
32:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Laurie of Mars?
32:50 Speaker 02 That is my Twitter handle. Oh, my God, I love it, yes. Yeah.
32:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Laurie L A U R I E of Mars.
32:55 Speaker 02 Yes, of Mars. I'm still on Twitter. I'm like hopeful.
33:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You didn't get, you get bumped off, okay.
33:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. Uh, and, yeah, and then there's a ton of JPL social media, too, on almost every platform you can imagine.
33:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so what's JPL's handle?
33:13 Speaker 02 Uh, at NASAJPL.
33:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? NASA JPL. Okay. All right.
33:16 Speaker 02 And then there's all, lots of our missions are tweeting, you know, actually Mars insight is a good example. We just came to the end of mission of Mars insight recently and it put out kind of a last tweet. My power's getting low. I mean, honestly, I get a little teary eyed.
33:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It speaks in the first person.
33:35 Speaker 02 It does. It does. So, I'm exploring Mars. Our, our rovers are tweeting. There you go.
33:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mark Watney, we're coming for you.
33:44 Speaker 02 Yes. Always hard to see one come to an end, even though it lasted, far outlasted its, uh, its mission design.
33:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Its expiration date. Yeah. So Chuck, let's maybe do a lightning round this segment.
33:57 Speaker 02 Sure.
33:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Laurie, you just have to answer quickly. Okay?
34:00 Speaker 02 All right.
34:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And shut me up if I interrupt. Okay? So Chuck, go.
34:04 Chuck Nice? All right. Our friend Kevin the Semenier says, congratulations, Dr. Lasson, on your directorship. Having a background in geochemistry, I'm sure the asteroids and comets are of great interest to you. How likely is it to capture one and to harness its resources within the next 25 years? And to celebrate your new role, I would recommend a bottle of Laurent Perrier Rosé.
34:30 Speaker 02 Well, thank you for the recommendation.
34:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Laurent Perrier, it's a sparkling wine.
34:35 Speaker 02 It says sparkling rosé.
34:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, it's a sparkling, and so the
34:38 Speaker 02 Oh, I love that.
34:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's, it would be rosé because it's made from the Pinot Noir grape.
34:42 Speaker 02 Yes.
34:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But not left too long in contact with the skin.
34:45 Speaker 02 I'm a, I'm a huge fan of the brute rosé, I will tell you. So, thank you for the recommendation.
34:52 Chuck Nice? He's a great, he's a great Semenier.
34:54 Speaker 02 Perfect.
34:55 Chuck Nice? He knew this without even meeting me.
34:57 Speaker 02 Exactly. It's fantastic. Perfect. God, I could use a personal Semenier. No, I'm actually married to one. And so, that's good. Hey, um, asteroid. So, you know, capturing
35:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, when are we gonna get rich off of asteroids?
35:10 Speaker 02 Oh, look, I think, um, near earth asteroids, exploring them for resources and learning to live more off the land, out in space is really important to keep pursuing. It's, um, it's a huge challenge. 25 years is probably about the right kind of timeframe to be thinking about.
35:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. And how about comets? Any value to the water that's on them?
35:30 Speaker 02 Boy, am I, you know, we don't know enough about the surface of comets yet, but, but probably somewhat less valuable would be my initial.
35:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Relative to the, to the.
35:40 Speaker 02 To the metals and other things. But we've got so much more to learn.
35:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Unless you're thirsty in space, then.
35:47 Speaker 02 You might want some water, that's true. Or just bring some brute rosé.
35:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or you do what they do on the space station, just recycle your pee.
35:56 Speaker 02 Well, I think we'll be doing that.
35:59 Chuck Nice? That's a whole different kind of rosé.
36:01 Speaker 02 That's a different question.
36:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, Chuck, keep it coming.
36:04 Chuck Nice? All right, this is.
36:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Good answer there, Laurie.
36:06 Speaker 02 Thank you.
36:07 Chuck Nice? Our friend Y. Cos says this with quite an attitude, I might admit. From the Russian Luna and Two Three missions in 1959, which landed and crashed and orbited the moon and the manned Apollo program in the 60s to the Chinese Chang'e Five capstone orbiter and the Korean Dornori orbiter, there have been many, many moon missions. What makes the Artemis program so particularly interesting? Ooh.
36:43 Speaker 02 Oh. Well, I think the goal of Artemis, and again, JPL doesn't have a huge role there, although we're involved, we did all the communications with Orion once it went beyond near Earth. So we run the Deep Space Network for NASA. So we're the ones who are talking to Orion. Those beautiful pictures you saw coming back of the Earth and moon, those came through our Deep Space Network. But the goal of Orion is that, is that, you know, the presence that isn't just about flags and footsteps, it's about learning to really live on other worlds. And none of those robotic missions have done that. And really to have a sustained presence out in the solar system, the moon is a great training ground.
37:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, the blunt answer is Artemis is putting people back on the moon. Everything else is a robot, so.
37:27 Chuck Nice? There you go. There you have it.
37:29 Speaker 02 Humans.
37:29 Chuck Nice? Great answer.
37:30 Speaker 02 And the first one.
37:31 Chuck Nice? Great answer.
37:31 Speaker 02 And first.
37:32 Chuck Nice? He thought he had you. He thought he had you.
37:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, he was coming at it like, I got her now.
37:36 Chuck Nice? Yeah, it was a great answer. All right. This is Christopher Bax. He says, howdy, everybody. My question is about the future of spacecraft propulsion. Are there any promising new technologies in development that you think will revolutionize future space missions?
37:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So fusion, we've agreed, is pretty far off.
37:52 Speaker 02 Not so much, yeah.
37:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? At least as an engineering solution. But NASA's been involved in some stuff, right?
37:57 Speaker 02 Sure. I mean, you know, we're continuing to do more things like solar electric propulsion. There actually is, we're testing some green propulsion technologies on one of our very small lunar robotic missions that we just launched called Lunar Flashlight that, you know, I think that's an interesting thing to think about, especially with the number of launches that that we're doing as a, as a planet.
38:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is that a solar sail?
38:22 Speaker 02 No, it's not. It's different kind of chemical propulsion.
38:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
38:26 Speaker 02 Which is, I think, as much as I know.
38:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
38:29 Speaker 02 Rocks, I study rocks. Did I mention that?
38:32 Chuck Nice? That's hilarious.
38:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Stationary rocks.
38:34 Speaker 02 Yes.
38:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, but the point is NASA does presumably have an entire sub-industry within itself, thinking about propulsion.
38:45 Speaker 02 You bet, you bet. Absolutely. We work a lot on solar electric propulsion here.
38:48 Chuck Nice? There you go. All right, there you go, Christopher. Your answer is, we're working on it.
38:52 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:53 Chuck Nice? All right. So this is Corey Allen, says, hello, Dr. Leshin. This is Corey from Minneapolis. If we parked a satellite with a high-powered laser in orbit around an icy moon like Europa or even Enceladus, could the laser burn a hole into the surface in which a small probe could be dropped? Would this not be easier and less intrusive than drilling into the ice? Thank you all, love the show. First of all, let me just say this, Corey, you would make a great Bond villain.
39:31 Speaker 02 Space laser, giant space laser.
39:34 Chuck Nice? Giant space lasers.
39:35 Speaker 02 The laser, yeah. Uh huh. Yeah, so the interesting, so good one, Corey. Thank you. Very creative. And we, we love those kind of creative ideas at JPL. We like to think about them. Turns out getting through the ice at a place like Europa is really hard because it tends to want to close up on itself, right? And so you need something that's going to kind of hold open the hole once you've made it, just like on Earth when they are drilling, they, they put casing inside the hole, right? And, and doing that down through lots of deep ice is hard. So a from space solution there, I don't think would work. I'd have to think about it a little bit more, but I love the creativity.
40:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I'd like that, Lori, the way you said that, because thinking about it in real time.
40:16 Speaker 02 Yeah.
40:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You can melt the top little bit, like, let's say a few centimeters, and there's a little puddle, right? But it wants to refreeze.
40:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
40:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so you have to keep heating it to prevent that from refreezing while you melt the next few centimeters.
40:31 Speaker 02 Right.
40:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right?
40:32 Speaker 02 Right.
40:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And now that you've got that melted, you need the heat to keep that liquid while you melt the next few centimeters. So I don't know if just a single laser pointing down would accomplish this. Because you're fighting against nature, which just wants to freeze the whole damn thing over.
40:46 Speaker 02 Right. And just, and once you get deep enough, the pressure, you know, it just wants to close up on itself. So.
40:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
40:52 Speaker 02 We actually have some, some colleagues at Kel-Tec working on this. It turns out to be a really challenging problem.
40:57 Chuck Nice? Mm hmm. You need a perfectly vertical lightsaber. That's what you need.
41:03 Speaker 02 Right through there, yeah.
41:04 Chuck Nice? Lightsaber, just let it keep going down.
41:06 Speaker 02 Yeah.
41:06 Chuck Nice? All right. Tagan Messier says this, hello, Lori Neal and our personal haha physicist. Don't do that.
41:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. Haha physicist, right?
41:22 Chuck Nice? Yes, the haha physicist. Tagan here from British Columbia was wondering, since gravity affects light, how does the Earth's gravitational field not affect the way we see Earth looking from outside of our own gravitational field? And vice versa, from inside gravity when we're looking from another planet? So.
41:43 Speaker 02 That sounds like a Neal question to me.
41:44 Chuck Nice? Yeah, that is.
41:45 Speaker 02 I think that's an astrophysicist's question.
41:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Earth, as big and as massive as it is. It is vanishingly small in its effect on gravity and its effect on the light in its vicinity.
41:59 Chuck Nice? Right.
42:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To not have that matter at all. To either we looking out from Earth or
42:03 Chuck Nice? Right.
42:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? From outside Earth looking in. As we start getting more and more dense and massive, like towards a black hole, then it completely distorts the visual environment, not only looking out, but also looking in. But so, yes, that happens, but you have to be way more
42:20 Speaker 02 Massive, yeah.
42:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Massive than Earth is. So, yeah, don't worry about it. Yeah.
42:24 Chuck Nice? Wow. Great answer.
42:26 Speaker 02 Good.
42:26 Chuck Nice? Cool, cool, cool, cool.
42:28 Speaker 02 Thanks for, thanks for jumping in on that one, Neil.
42:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's funny.
42:32 Speaker 02 You're my first astrophysicist today.
42:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I got, I got your back, Lori. Okay.
42:36 Chuck Nice? All right, here's Stephen Smith. Stephen Smith, man, we are, we are moving along. This is the fastest lightning round we've ever had.
42:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, no, Lori's badass. That's why, I knew that. We knew that.
42:45 Speaker 02 Maybe you'll have me back.
42:47 Chuck Nice? Yeah, Stephen Smith says this, "Hey y'all, it's Steve here from just outside Wusta."
42:53 Speaker 02 Oh.
42:53 Chuck Nice? I guess that's Massachusetts, right?
42:55 Speaker 02 Wusta. Wusta is how they say it.
42:56 Chuck Nice? Wusta. Is that how you say it?
42:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wusta.
42:58 Speaker 02 Wusta.
42:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, wait, wait. That's Lori's old stomping ground.
43:00 Speaker 02 It is. I lived there for eight years. Wonderful Wusta.
43:04 Chuck Nice? Wicked cool. All right, so.
43:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No.
43:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wicked.
43:09 Speaker 02 Wicked.
43:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Very good.
43:10 Chuck Nice? He says, "Uh, Dr. Lori, has there been any progress in creating an ion space engine for interplanetary?" So, which is pretty cool.
43:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
43:26 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
43:27 Speaker 02 Um, I don't know about the engine side, but we are thinking a lot about missions that go beyond the solar system. I do think it's on the frontier. I think you'll see in the coming year, um, you know, more discussion about that. And of course, I have to use this opportunity to give a shout out to our interstellar voyager's voyager.
43:49 Speaker 02 Right, the Voyager missions are on the edge of the solar system right now. They're the farthest human-made thing that's that has ever been sent anywhere. And we still talk to them every single day. They launched forty. Oh, I thought they cut the, I thought they stopped that. They launched forty-five years ago. Oh, my God. There are gonna be fifty in another four years or so. That is so sweet. And they are still going. They got that golden record on there, Neil. You know about it, right? And, and if, if any aliens are out there, you know, spinning the disc, they'll find out about us. So, interstellar travel, I think, is, you know, interstellar exploration is definitely on the horizon.
44:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, by the way, but the question actually asked interplanetary, but I think they meant interstellar.
44:35 Speaker 02 Oh, that's how I interpreted it. Sorry.
44:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As did I, as did I.
44:38 Chuck Nice? No, that's cool. But interplanetary is cool. And I just love the idea of the aliens finding that disc and playing it and going, this is the worst damn album I have ever heard.
44:48 Speaker 02 I could have a record player right here. That would be so nice.
44:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, you gotta go back to the, to the Saturday Night Live skit, because on the, on the albums, like Mozart, Beethoven, Heartbeats, Chuck Berry was on there. It's a melange of human culture and Saturday Night Live did a skit back in the seventies, back in the seventies, where the aliens found the ship and sent a message, and it says, "Send more Chuck Berry."
45:14 Speaker 02 That's right. Totally. Chuck Berry actually came and played on the steps right outside my building here at JPL.
45:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, yes.
45:21 Speaker 02 The eighties, you know?
45:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? As a celebration event. Yeah, yeah.
45:24 Chuck Nice? Damn, that's so cool.
45:26 Speaker 02 I know.
45:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah. All right, Chuck, maybe time for like one more.
45:30 Chuck Nice? Here's one more. And it comes from our friend Alejandro Reynoso.
45:36 Speaker 02 Okay. Wow, good voice, Chuck.
45:39 Chuck Nice? He says...
45:43 Speaker 02 Easy buddy.
45:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The fact that he keeps writing back means he's not offended by what you've done.
45:49 Chuck Nice? He's not offended by what I do, so, but anyway.
45:51 Speaker 02 He's a regular.
45:52 Chuck Nice? Back to.
45:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, he's a regular.
45:54 Chuck Nice? Alejandro Reynoso from Monterrey, Mexico.
45:59 Speaker 02 Okay.
46:00 Chuck Nice? He says, hello.
46:05 Chuck Nice? Or should I say, hola?
46:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, go on.
46:10 Chuck Nice? My question is, what is the most important thing that you are working on that we do not know about?
46:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, I'd love that question.
46:20 Chuck Nice? What a great question.
46:21 Speaker 02 Okay.
46:22 Chuck Nice? What a great question to end on.
46:24 Speaker 02 I have two. I'll be really, really fast, because everybody knows about our Mars rovers and all the coolest planetary stuff we do. But we also do amazing things in astrophysics. We are building the first major chronograph, an instrument that's going to block the light of stars. So we can image planets around them that will launch on the next big space telescope called the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named after a woman who. And, um, and the other thing we do a ton of.
46:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, just to be clear, all of our knowledge of exoplanets comes from their influence on the host star or because they block out the light. And so we don't actually see them. We don't actually see them.
47:03 Speaker 02 We want pictures.
47:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're going to build a telescope that is taking light away so that you're not, you can image the planet, it's not lost in the glare.
47:14 Speaker 02 Correct. It's like the size of a grand piano, this thing. It's amazing. So, and then the other big thing we do that I really want to mention is earth science, eyes on earth.
47:21 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
47:22 Speaker 02 We are driving the future technology that helps us measure and understand where our home planet is headed. And we care really deeply about that as well. And so we've got a lot of new missions coming up in earth science, whether it's working on aerosols and their connection to asthma, or looking at the radiation budget at the poles, or understanding, you know, earthquakes and biomass. And then we just launched, of course, SWAT to look at earth water.
47:48 Chuck Nice? Wow.
47:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Very cool.
47:50 Chuck Nice? Excellent.
47:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, okay, now tell us what's classified. We want to hear that, too.
47:55 Speaker 02 I could tell you, but I'd have to kill you. So, you know, that's not gonna work.
47:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, we won't tell anybody. Just our fan base, that's all. We can all keep a secret.
48:05 Chuck Nice? That is the sweetest way I've ever heard anybody say, I'll have to kill you. Like, your tone is like, you know, it was so inviting and warm.
48:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, it was so loving, yes. But I'll kill you, dear.
48:18 Chuck Nice? Yes, he's a, you're a dangerous woman, Laurie.
48:24 Speaker 02 No comment.
48:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, Laurie, thanks for being on StarTalk. Oh, my gosh. And we wanted to get you right when you started. And then I realized retrospectively how bad an idea that was because you're just trying to get up and running.
48:37 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so catching up with you six months later in the new year 2023, we look forward to all that you will bring to the Jet Propulsion Labs, maintaining and extending the legacy that is so storied for that institution. So.
48:53 Speaker 02 Thank you. It was a thrill to be with you. Yeah, thanks.
48:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, all right. Everybody, it's been a delight once again. And Laurie, we'll try to, can we have like a red phone hotline to your office for like, if something else happens in the future, you could like?
49:10 Speaker 02 As long as I can have a personal astrophysicist's line where I can call you.
49:16 Speaker 02 Two ways, my friend, two ways.
49:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, just that JPL, we all know JPL does the coolest stuff and we don't want to be too far from it.
49:23 Speaker 02 We do.
49:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We know we're not because you're there. So, all right. This has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition, all about JPL, past, present, and future, featuring Laurie Leshin, its new director. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, bidding you to keep looking up.
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