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Astronomycast, episode 358. Sandra Favour.

Welcome to Astronomycast, our weekly facts based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand what we know, but how we know what we know.

My name is Fraser Kane, I'm the publisher of university and with me is Dr. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and the director of CosmoQuest. How are you doing?

I'm doing well, how are you doing?

Good, we landed on a comet!

We bounced around on a comet!

It's still there, it's in the end it landed.

It did, it did. But the fact that it bounced around is even more awesome than the fact that we landed there.

Yeah, and like literally as we're recording this, there's some pictures now of Philae's various bounces and movements across the surface of 67P.

So it's just what an amazing week has been in space in astronomy.

It almost makes up for the prior week and as Emily Lackawalla beautifully put it, robots exploring space is human space exploration where the robots are eyes, our ears, our hands.

And we need to celebrate these winds and consider how much more we can do by welcoming our robot overlord.

And if you love this next year, two more missions, right? New Horizons going to Pluto, Dawn reaching series, it's going to be another good year for this kind of robotic space exploration.

So, so hang tough, it's going to be fun.

Alright, let's get cracking with this week's episode.

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