When Mars Was Like Earth: Five Years of Exploration with the Curiosity Rover

08/02/22 • 90 min

Speaker: Dr. Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
For five years, Curiosity explored Gale Crater, one of the most intriguing locations on Mars -- once the site of an ancient lake. In this talk, the mission's Project Scientist discussed what the rover was capable of and the many things it discovered on and about the red planet. In particular, he fills us in on the evidence that ancient Mars, billions of years ago, was much more like the Earth -- with a thicker atmosphere and flowing water on its surface. (Recorded Feb. 28, 2018)

Previous Episode

Rubble Piles in the Sky: The Science, Exploration, and Danger of Near-Earth Asteroids

with Dr, Michael Busch (SETI Institute)
Near-Earth asteroids are a population of small bodies whose orbits around the Sun cross or come near our planet’s orbit. They turn out to be unusual physical environments: essentially rubble piles. They represent a natural hazard we ignore at our peril, because some of these bodies have the potential to impact Earth. Dr. Busch reviews the near-Earth asteroid population, programs to track and characterize such asteroids, and current efforts to address the danger of asteroid impacts.

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Colliding Neutron Stars, Gravity Waves, and the Origin of the Heavy Elements

with Prof. Eliot Quataert (University of California, Berkeley)
In the previous decade, one third of the world's astronomers became involved in a single project -- observing a distant and violent event, when two "star corpses" called neutron stars collided and exploded. This represented the first time in the history of astronomy that a cosmic event was observed with both gravity waves (first predicted by Einstein) and light. We now call this event the birth of "multi-messenger astronomy." Dr. Quataert gives a non-technical history of how we are now able to find gravity waves, what happens during such a merger, and why we now believe that much of the gold, platinum, uranium and other heavy elements in the universe is assembled in such "star corpse" mergers. Recorded Jan. 24, 2018.