My gravity assist was my village.
You always hear, you know, “it takes a village to raise a child.”
When I was about five years old, I went to the
planetarium in London and it just completely opened my mind.
I was nine years old when Apollo 11 landed, and I'll never,
ever forget watching.
A gravity assist is when a spacecraft gets a boost of speed
as it flies by an object like Earth or Jupiter.
But I also like to talk about gravity assist as an inspirational boost.
It's that person, place, thing, or event that propels
people into the careers that they have today.
Hi, I'm Jim Green.
And after five fantastic years
as I have retired from the role of the NASA Chief Scientist,
NASA's Gravity Assist podcast is coming to a close.
I'm so grateful to you, the listeners, for coming on this
journey with me to tour the solar system and beyond,
to investigate the moon, to search for life beyond Earth.
And of course, to interview those that are doing the discoveries
that we are every day.
You know, for this special final episode, we're going to talk about
some of the highlights, some gravity assist
in some of our NASA memories of how we pulled these off.
Now, it's not only me that made these things happen.
And as you know, that takes a team.
And that team is Liz Landau and Manny Cooper,
and they're here with me to talk about the success that we've had
and the workings that needed to make this such
a success behind the scenes at Gravity Assist.
So welcome, Liz and Manny.
Thanks to. Thanks, Jim. Glad to be here.
And it's really
hard to choose favorite episodes or even favorite gravity assists.
But what I thought I'd do is, is have a chat with
with Liz and Manny about what our favorites are.
So without further ado, Liz,
what are your favorite episodes in Gravity Assist?
Oh my gosh, Jim, it's so hard to choose.
I mean, it's been such an incredible journey to learn about
the solar system and beyond, but especially some of the episodes
in the astrobiology season were really compelling to me.
You know, people going out to learn about Antarctica,
finding out that there is life everywhere you look, even
in the most extreme conditions on Earth as well as people
looking at exoplanets for signs of life and how we might do that.
Ravi Kopparupu at Goddard, I really enjoyed that episode,
he talked about the possibility of could we even find pollution on an exoplanet?
That's just so wild.
We can't make this show happen without our audio engineer, Manny Cooper.
Manny, what's what are some of the episodes that really stand out for you?
There are a couple of episodes that really resonate with me.
The first one is the What is
Mars Sound Like episode with Nina Lanza.
That was really cool.
You know,
especially being an audio engineer and getting to listen to sounds on Mars,
the Ingenuity helicopter off in the distance,
and then the metallic wheels on Perseverance, you know, rolling along.
Can we hear the wind on Mars?
We can.
And you know, in many ways, it sounds like the wind on Earth,
but in other ways it doesn't.
So maybe we can take a listen.
Yeah, let's do that.
Another one was the Listening to the Universe,
the Kim Arcand episode was really interesting too.
She worked with an engineer to compose musical pieces.
Yeah, Kim's data sonification are amazing.
Let me play you a clip from one of those.
This is a very classic image.
It's of course, our home galaxy.
We're looking at the inner about 400 lightyear region around
the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A star at the very core of the Milky Way.
Episodes that I
really like are those that come with a surprise.
When Catherine Walker talked about how
she almost fell through a glacier,
I mean, my heart stopped.
You know, another one that I really liked
was Sunny Panjwani, who he was
in the JSC control room
when the Russian module called Science was just connected
to the International Space Station, and one of the rockets turned on.
And that started the entire space station to spin.
It was just surreal
being there my first day and feeling like I was still stuck in the simulation.
It really taught me that our training is there to push us to our limits again.
And and sometimes, you know,
you just you're sitting there and you can't believe what's happening,
but you're calm and you're collected and you're ready to work the problem.
I would go as far as to say that this entire process has been
like my gravity assist.
Yeah, I really feel the same way and that it is really one of my favorite
things that I've ever worked on to be able to be a fly on the wall
and listen to Jim Green talk to such an amazing range of people,
and to learn about the possibilities of what is out there.
We do hope that all of our audience out there
has been inspired by this show in some way, shape or form.
But you can also find out so many other great NASA podcasts
by going to nasa.gov/podcasts.
And in particular, check out things like the Curious Universe
for which more great stories about the agency are being discussed.
I'm Jim Green, and this has been your
gravity assist.
Listen to the full episode at: nasa.gov/gravityassist