Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

I'm Kyle Risdahl, Tuesday, May 13th today. We are taking a break from all the happening down here on Earth.

And we're talking about space.

One of the things that Kimberly and I love to talk about.

We're going to talk about an exoplanet that is 124 light years away.

It's called K218B.

Right.

And it was recently in the headlines because researchers claim to find possible signs of life in the planet's atmosphere.

But there are some other scientists who are a little bit more skeptical.

So here to make us smart about K-218B and where the search for extraterrestrial life goes from here is Dr. Michaela Musilova.

She is an astrobiologist and analog astronaut. She's worked at NASA and

observatories all over the world. Welcome to the show, Dr. Musilova. Thank you very much. It's a

pleasure to be here. Hi, everyone. Hi. So first off, what does an analog astronaut do?

An analog astronaut is someone who lives and works under conditions of being on the moon or Mars to prepare humans to actually be able to go on such long-term missions one day.

And so in reality, what that means is we get quote-unquote locked up in these small stations

in very remote areas, usually around the planet, for sometimes weeks or over a year.

And we live inside these small stations where we have limited access to water, food, and other things necessary for survival.

And to go outside, we can only go while wearing a space suit and only with the permission of something like a mission control center.

So similar to NASA, Houston, you might know from movies and books.

And yeah, there's a number of these

facilities that exist in different parts of the world, so for example, on volcanoes or in deserts,

in the Arctic, and so on. And they have been used for the last couple of decades to test both

...