Podcats In Space

Nerdette Recaps With Peter Sagal

WBEZ

Tv & Film, Books, Self, Improvement, Pop, Tv, Wbez, Culture, Technology, Society & Culture, Nerds, Nerd, Nerdette

4.6 • 924 Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2019

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Yep. Podcats. Not a typo.

This week we take a journey back to 1994, just after an astronomer named Heidi Hammel — as well as the entire scientific community at large — learned that a fragmented comet named Shoemaker-Levy 9 was going to crash into Jupiter at a speed of more than 130,000 miles per hour.

"We have witnessed other impacts,” Heidi tells us. “What was really special about the Jupiter one was we had warning that it was going to happen.”

This moment was huge for Heidi, who was just a young astronomer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the time. She was asked to lead the team that would analyze photos of the impacts taken by the still-relatively-new Hubble Space Telescope.

Oh yeah, in this podcast episode Heidi also compares planets to cats and herself to a veterinarian so PODCATS!

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still
0:06.1	watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,
0:12.7	soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,
0:18.0	Stories Without End from WBEC Chicago.
0:25.7	Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.
0:28.3	Listen wherever you get your podcast.
0:34.9	From WBEZ Chicago, this is Nerdad.
0:35.7	I'm Greta Johnson.
0:37.8	On Nerdette, we talk to your favorite or soon-to-be favorite people about your favorite or soon-to-be favorite things. And today,
0:43.2	we are talking about exploring outer space. Here to help us with this very exciting goal is Heidi Hamill.
0:56.6	She's worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and the Space Science Institute in Colorado, and she is awesome.
1:03.1	Today on Nodette, we're going to talk to her about the underappreciated gas giants, also known as Neptune and Uranus.
1:09.5	Yes, it is pronounced Uranus. Thank you very much.
1:12.3	We're also going to talk to her about why scientific discovery makes her heart race and what cats have to do with planets.
1:19.0	I have to tell you, I'm very excited about the cat planet situation, but it's all really great. You're going to love it.
1:24.6	But first, we want to start with a huge moment in Heidi's career,
1:28.4	something that happened 25 years ago that still motivates her today.
1:37.3	Back in 1994, Heidi was a young researcher at MIT.
1:42.4	We had found this object. This object was discovered by Gene
1:47.3	Shoemaker, his wife Carolyn Shoemaker, and their colleague David Levy. And that's why the object
1:53.3	was called Shoemaker Levy, nine. It was the ninth object. I feel like it should have been called
1:57.8	Shoemaker Shoemaker Levy, but I say that too. And I also say that the shoemaker they picked was Carolyn, not Jean.
	...

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