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National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Come get curious with NASA. As an official NASA podcast, Curious Universe brings you mind-blowing science and space adventures you won't find anywhere else. Explore the cosmos alongside astronauts, scientists, engineers, and other top NASA experts who are achieving remarkable feats in science, space exploration, and aeronautics. Learn something new about the wild and wonderful universe we share. All you need to get started is a little curiosity.

NASA's Curious Universe is an official NASA podcast hosted by Padi Boyd and Jacob Pinter. Discover more original NASA shows at nasa.gov/podcasts

NASA's Curious Universe

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

The Mind-Bending Math Inside Black Holes

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

Why the Moon’s Icy South Pole is a Hot Target for NASA

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

How NASA Found the Ingredients For Life on an Asteroid

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

Inside the Team That Keeps Hubble Flying

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

Curious Universe Live: Art and Science with Astronaut Matthew Dominick

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

Welcome to Earth

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

Earth Series: How NASA Sees Our Blue Marble

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

Earth Series: The Ocean, Now in Full Color

Earth has an incredibly varied and ever-changing landscape—jagged mountains, arid deserts, lush rainforests, rolling wheat fields. Before NASA came on the scene, no one was keeping a systematic eye on the ground from above. NASA scientist Brad Doorn explains how one long-running satellite program collects the data farmers need to grow the crops that feed the world.

Earth Series: From Space to Your Plate

Take a deep breath, and you’re inhaling oxygen from Earth’s atmosphere. Take a walk outside, and the atmosphere is shielding you from harmful radiation. NASA research provides crucial data to understand air quality and the intricate processes happening in the sky above us. In this episode, hear the inside story of NASA’s research into the ozone layer. Left unchecked, our reliance on ozone-depleting chemicals threatened to expose the entire planet to dangerous UV radiation. We’ll also fly along with Laura Judd, a NASA scientist studying air quality in the U.S. and around the world.

Earth Series: Monitoring the Air We Breathe

The James Webb Space Telescope is doing something astronomers dreamed about for decades: peering into our universe’s early past, a period known as cosmic dawn. A new NASA documentary—also called Cosmic Dawn—chronicles the inside story of Webb’s design, construction, and launch. John Mather, who won the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics, proposed the telescope and led its science team for decades. In this interview, Mather talks about his life, his research, and the pre-dawn phone call telling him he had won the Nobel Prize.

Find more at nasa.gov/cosmicdawn

Cosmic Dawn with Nobel Laureate John Mather

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