Houston, we have a podcast.

Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center,

episode 235, scouting and asteroid.

I'm Gary Jordan, and I'll be your host today.

On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts

all to let you know what's going on in the world of human space flight and more.

In our last episode we talked about NASA's mega rocket, the space launch system or SLS, slated to launch soon on the first Artemis

Mission, Artemis 1.

The primary objective of the first Artemis mission, Artemis 1, is testing the Orion spacecraft and the SLS on a mission around the moon and

returning safely to Earth for the first time.

But this highly anticipated launch is also jam-packed with secondary objectives and payloads, payloads being the stuff we're bringing on the rocket.

A few episodes back, we talked about Bio-Sentinel, a microbiology experiment in deep space.

There are many other secondary payloads like this aboard Artemis 1, so we're going to highlight

another one.

This one has its sights set on an asteroid.

The experiment is called Near Earth asteroid Scout or NEA Scout.

Like Biosentinel, it's another one of those shoebox sized spacecrafts called a cube set that will be deployed from the SLS,

but this one will unfold a massive 925 square foot solar sail as a means to navigate to a near-Earth asteroid and

gather data that can't be collected by observations from the Earth.

How the solar sail works and what kinds of science we're going to do, that's what we find out on this

episode.

We're bringing in the experts on the Solar Sail and on the asteroid science.

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