SoT 313: Live With Dr. Pamela Gay

Hosts: Ed Brown, Penny Dumsday, Lucas Randall, Dr. Pamela Gay

00:00:58 What happens when octopuses are given ecstasy? They get... cuddly.

00:07:23 Gene Roddenberry got it right, there IS a planet orbiting the star 40 Eridani. That's where the Star Trek creator said the planet Vulcan would be, homeworld of the pointy-eared logicians.

00:10:23 The Japanese space agency, JAXA, has had a spacecraft orbiting the asteroid Ryugu since the end of June this year. It has now deployed three of its four rovers onto the 1km wide near Earth object.

00:17:00 The failure of a gyroscope onboard the Hubble Space Telescope was a concern for NASA engineers, who scrambled to resurrect a backup gyro. It also raised questions about the future of the telescope, and the its ever-postponed successor the James Webb Space Telescope.

00:33:09 Questions from the audience.

This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the Kathleen Syme Library and Community Centre in Carlton, Melbourne.

Dr. Pamela Gay is astronomer, podcaster, and artist. She is the co-host of the AstronomyCast podcast and the Director of Technology and Citizen Science at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. She is also the principal investigator of CosmoQuest.org.

This episode contains traces of NASA's video detailing all the things that could go wrong with the upcoming InSight Mars landing.