Podcats In Space
Happy To Be Here
Greta Johnsen
4.8 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 22 February 2019
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ 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!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This fall, W bez invites you to our upcoming live events. |
| 0:05.0 | Join us in person for smart discussions, heartfelt storytelling, and more. |
| 0:09.0 | Check out the full calendar now at W be easy.org |
| 0:12.6 | slash events. |
| 0:13.6 | From W be easy Chicago this is Nurdett |
| 0:19.5 | I'm Greta Johnson. |
| 0:20.5 | On Nurdett we talk to your favorite or soon to be favorite people about your |
| 0:24.7 | favorite or soon to be favorite things and today we are talking about |
| 0:28.8 | exploring outer space. |
| 0:33.0 | Here to help us with this very exciting goal is Heidi Hammel. |
| 0:41.0 | She's worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and the Space Science Institute in |
| 0:44.9 | Colorado and she is awesome. Today on her net we're going to talk to her about the underappreciated |
| 0:50.9 | gas giants also known as Neptune and Uranus. Yes, it is pronounced Uranus. Thank you very much. |
| 0:56.5 | We're also going to talk to her about why scientific discovery makes her heart race and what cats have to do with planets. I have to tell you I'm very |
| 1:04.8 | excited about the cat planet situation but it's all really great you're going to love it. |
| 1:08.6 | But first we want to start with a huge moment in Heidi's career, something that happened 25 years ago |
| 1:15.2 | that still motivates her today. |
| 1:22.1 | Back in 1994, |
| 1:23.0 | 1994, Heidi was a young researcher at MIT. |
| 1:27.0 | We had found this object. |
| 1:30.0 | This object was discovered by Jean Shoemaker, his wife Carolyn Shoemaker, and their colleague |
| 1:35.4 | David Levy. |
... |
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