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I have Been and Always Shall Be... Not a Real Planet? · Made of Stars

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Warning. The following podcast contains an entertaining look at astronomy, physics, and
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space news throughout the known universe. Listeners have been known to learn about astronomical
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phenomenon, the scientific method, and expanded vocabulary to include terms like quasar asterism
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and uranus. Listen, that's your own risk. Go ahead. When made
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of stars, made them stars, madies. When made of stars, you
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could be from high they would New Mexicomus. Where a stars? When we
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are made of stars. I'm West Carol, joined by my good friend doctor
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Sean Cruising for Columbus State Universities Coca Cola Space Science Center. Hey Sean,
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Hey, we's good to be here with you again today again broadcasting from Houston,
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Texas. Which is, you know, a little closer to where things
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are happening than where I am at the moment. But you know, you're
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you're not necessarily there for space stuff. You're there for other important stuff.
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But still you're in the vicinity. You're you're closer to where things are happening.
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True, I'm you know, I have been driving down NASA one Parkway
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going to the store. You know, it's kind of fun just to drive
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down a road named NASA something right, So the NASA one anyway, So
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I've been doing that the last few days. And I actually am here kind
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of because of the space program, because that's why my son and his wife
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are here, and they work in the space industry. And yes, I
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had my wife. My daughter in law had a baby recently, so now
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I have a new grandchild and I'm out here just kind of hanging with the
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family. But yes, we're all here in the afterglow of the Central Command
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for the Human Spaceflight Program for NASA, Houston, Texas, the Johnson Space
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Center. Well on behalf of the listening audience. Again, congrats on the
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new grand baby. Even though you and I have had this conversation multiple times
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and we didn't really address it last week, but I figured if you wanted
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to bring it up, we would. I would at least tee you up
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for it and give you the chance to mention why you were there. But
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this is one of those deals where this feels like we've been doing the same
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show about three or four weeks in a row because we have some of the
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same topics. I guess we got to talk about Starliner, we got to
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talk about SpaceX, and then the story that we didn't really talk about a
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week ago, but we talked about it a few weeks ago is kind of
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making its way back in. But let's start with Starliner, because we keep
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saying they're getting ready to launch. They may have figured it out. They're
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closer than they were. Now it looks like we are on the eve a
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couple of eves as we're recording from them actually launching Starliner. So Boeing is
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getting ready to launch. And just as a side note to tee up for
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our next story, because they probably, if they can safely do it,
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need to go ahead and launch because there's another launch that is right on their
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heels that may happen and it would not be a good thing if it launches
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first. But again, the most important thing safety of the astronauts on Starliner.
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Yeah. So it's not often that a that a vehicle that's going to
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carry NASA astronauts at all, but particularly up to the International Space Station.
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It's not often that they can have a leak in their propulsion system and everybody
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says, ah, it's no big deal. So I mean, but that
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does appear to be the case of what's happening now. So really, what
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the story of the story is here. Now. We've been covering the story
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of Starliner, and it's many twists and turns, shall we say, trying
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to get astronauts to orbit. We've been covering that for literal years, so
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that's not new. What's new is that NASA just signed off saying, yeah,
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no problem. We understand there's a propulsion leak. It's a leak in
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the helium system that pressurizes the propulsion systems aboard the actual star Liner vehicle.
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We along with the Boeing engineers, think it's okay, it's not. It's
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a minor enough leak that it doesn't really propose doesn't really pose a safety hazard
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for our astronauts. Therefore, we're going to go ahead and launch this baby.
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And I think I put in the in our show preparation. I put
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in the subtitle kick the tires and light the fires. Let's go, baby,
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Let's get this thing to space. So right now, as we're recording
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the show on a Thursday, as we always do, they are targeting Saturday,
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June first, twelve pm. They're saying, that's our go time.
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The helium leak in the in the star Liner's propulsion system is minor enough that
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we do not think it poses a safety hazard, and we're going to be
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able to launch it quote as is, so we all might finally get to
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see star Line or fly this weekend. Now, if it doesn't fly this
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weekend, if they come up with some other safety concern and it doesn't fly,
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and that's always a possibility. And again we're talking about, you know,
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launching with human beings on board, so every precaution is taken. If
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they do not launch this weekend, there is a possibility that SpaceX may get
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another launch in a of their you know, competing big rocket before Starliner launches,
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and that would not be good optics in the space world. The optics
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are the worst part of it, I would say. And we're in our
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again, and we don't talk about show prep much here, but we actually
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do prepare the show, ladies and gentlemen. We don't just talk off the
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top of our heads. We actually deal a little bit of research and preparation
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with the help of some of our favorite websites out there covering the space industry,
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like, for instance, spaceflightnow dot com, where the first couple of
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stories are coming from. So our friends on Spaceflightnow dot Com have a very
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interesting story about another SpaceX launch that happened on Monday of this week, and
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we're definitely going to be talking about that in a moment. But they are
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also covering the fact that SpaceX down in the state where I am right now,
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in the state of Texas, is fueling up their Starship vehicle for another
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potential best flight in something that could be less than a week now. These
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are not part of scheduled launches at a very busy spaceport like the Kennedy Space
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Center, so they don't actually have hard and fast launch times and dates assigned
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to them. SpaceX has their own launch facility in Texas and Bocachica. They
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can pretty much launch when they want to, and so they have not really
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put out a date and time for that yet, but clearly they are fueling
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up the Starship for another test flight and hope to do so in less than
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a week if they do that. The reason Wes says that that's bad optics
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is because Boeing, the creator of star Liner and ULA, which is United
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Launch Alliance of which Boeing is a partner organization, have been trying to get
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the star Liner launch on an Atlas five rocket again with people on board.
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Literally for years. Their major competitor in the contract they have to launch those
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people to space is SpaceX. SpaceX is launching well, they're launching Falcon nines,
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and they're launching Falcon heavies, and they're working on Starship, and Starship
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is one of the potential vehicles to land people on the surface of the Moon.
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And SpaceX's launch cadence is roughly once a week nowadays. They're reusing boosters,
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which is part of the next story, which I will just only foreshadow
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at the moment. But the point is, if you're Boeing and your largest
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competitor is just pulling off successes after successes after successes, and you failed to
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get this vehicle launched yet again, and they happen to launch successfully, let's
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say their giant moon landing space vehicle. Well West said is true optics within
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the space industry, those are very bad optics, and that could that could
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force potential customers to have more confidence in SpaceX, therefore minimizing bullet Boeing's status
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in the industry. It's just yeah, it's just a bad luck. Now,
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it's worth noting before we move on to the other SpaceX story, We've
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got that again, we're talking about a launch that does not involve humans.
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So just as a little bit of a you know, just to play advocate
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there and say, you know, they're you feel like Boeing and NASA have
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to take that extra precaution because of humans being on board. So there is
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that slight difference there, and it's worth noting that. But again, it's
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hard to shake the optics when they've launched so many successful launches in such rapid
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succession that you think, well, when are we going to get this thing
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from Boeing off the ground. Yeah, well so yes, let's address that.
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So the story we're about to cover about SpaceX feels a bit like apples
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and blueberries compared to the last story we talked about with Starliner, and certainly
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in terms of the vehicles going to space, yes, they're world's apart and
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so let's touch on that. But there is a component of this story that
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does tie back to the human space program. All right, So here we
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go. SpaceX had another major success on Monday. They launched a very important
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Earth monitoring satellite for the European Space Agency. The vehicle's name is EarthCare,
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And I don't know what it is in the European languages, but in the
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English acronym it's the EarthCare Mission. It's an acronym which stands for Earth,
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Cloud Aerosol and Radiation Explorer Earth and then Cloud Aerosol Radiation Explorer CRE. There
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you go, the earth Care Mission. Okay, they gets I'm not sure
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what that is in France, but I was going to say, I know
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what it is in some of the English speaking European countries. If if you
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give it a name like EarthCare, it just one thing I've learned, if
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I've learned nothing else in my time on this blue marble hurling through space.
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If you give it a name like EarthCare, and then you ask people to,
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you know, give you money for it, they'll probably say, yes,
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it just has that kind of a name to it. You know,
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you call it EarthCare. What are you against caring for the Earth? It's
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not earth hate, which that would be a strained acronym, but we could
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probably figure it out if they're great at strained acronyms. I like the name
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EarthCare though. It's got a nice sound to it. But anyway, yeah,
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so well, and what earth Care is is it's designed to examine the
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interaction between the aerosols and our atmosphere, airsols, human emitted kinds of chemicals
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and the atmosphere to better understand impact on climate and improve accuracy of climate models.
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And again, all of these things are important. I'm not trying to
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minimize any of the importance of that. It is important stuff. I will
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tell you this again, high priority European Space Agency mission. But here's the
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interesting part. That same booster, the Falcon nine booster, it's it's not
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its first mission to space. Remember, these things now are coming back down
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and landing and being reused on such a regular basis that it's hard to remember
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the last time one fail. Right, when's the last time SpaceX failed to
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land their booster from the Falcon nine rocket. Don't you do that? But
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I did look it up. It's it's all the way back to February of
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twenty twenty one. Don't you do that. You're you're doing that. This
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kicker hasn't missed a kick in six years. Don't do that. I mean,
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it's kind of true. And hopefully my little podcast, you know,
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won't jink SpaceX entirely, but you know, we'll see what happens with Starship
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next anyway. All right. So, so the point though, is that
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this this same booster that just launched EarthCare for the European Space Agency space also
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launched a NASA payload called pace pace and the pace spacecraft is also ready for
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this a climate and atmosphere monitoring satellite. But it's from the National Aeronyics and
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Space Administration of the United States of America. In other words, In other
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words, this booster from this falcon ied rocket has been around long enough and
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is reusable to the frequency enough that it can launch two different climate explorers from
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two different space agencies in the world. Now here's where I find the headline.
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And again I am not trying to downplay the importance of this climate mission.
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It is an important mission. But that is the seventh liftoff for the
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booster, which has the serial number of B one zero eighty one for SpaceX.
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It's launched seven times and two of those were climate satellites for two different
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space agencies. It returned and touched down safely again at landing Zone number four
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at Vandenberg Air Force Base out in California. That made the nineteenth successful returning
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landing of a SpaceX Falcon nine at Vandenburg, not to mention all the ones
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out at sea and all the ones back at Kennedy Space Center, and all
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those nineteen of those babies have come back and landed successfully at Vandenberg, and
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it makes the three hundred and fourteenth time SpaceX has successfully landed their booster back.
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Now, if we shift back to the Starliners story for just a moment,
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even if everything works one hundred percent successful on that mission, the Atlas
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five Ula rocket is going to land in the ocean and never be seen again.
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So there's that comparison which I feel like has to be made along the
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way. Well, yes, a milestone launch for SpaceX because it's taking important
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payloads for ISA, But three hundred and fourteen booster landings later, Falcon nine
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and SpaceX have made this look routine. But if you want to talk about
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things that are environmental and you know planet aware, you know you're talking about
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a company that has been about sustainability since they started going, maybe we could
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land this booster back down and use it again and again and again and again.
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So it's it's absolutely relevant to I mean, I would think you'd feel
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pretty good about if you're the European Space Agency going, oh, we're going
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to use to shoot this EarthCare up. How about the one that's recycling rockets
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and not dropping them straight into the ocean every time. So it's got to
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feel good from that standpoint, right, Can you see why? Can you
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why the optics exist? If you're NASA or Issa and you're launching an environmental
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satellite, that you might want to use the reusable rocket, which pointed out
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was founding mission components of SpaceX in the first place, was to create a
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new model for spaceflight that made it more sustainable both financially and environmentally, which
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is to reuse the rocket. Don't throw the airplane away after you've taken a
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flight across the country. Use the airplane again in this case, don't throw
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your rocket away. Reuse the rocket, well said, And I don't know
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why they would want to use anyone else. And as you've got someone who
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you know from the onset was like, I want to do these, you
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know, electric cars, I want to do you know, it's it's been
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a Sustainability has been part of the Musk mission for a long time. Well,
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and let's take one more minor detour, which is this. If SpaceX
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is able to launch Starship successfully and put it in orbit, the plan is
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for Elon Musk and SpaceX to get a starship in orbit around the Moon,
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and for NASA astronauts to launch on the Space Launch System Massive Moon Rocket,
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to then dock in lunar orbit with a starship and then go down to the
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surface. Let's remember that Starship's components are all reusable, and that the SLS,
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well, they're dropping those main boosters in the ocean, never to be
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seen again. So at some point does it not make sense to just ride
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the starship all the way to the Moon with all the reusable components. I
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mean, I love NASA, I am a fan of SLS, but yet
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I see these sort of, as we said earlier, optics of how we're
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doing things, and it just makes you think, huh, wait a minute,
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what if we could just ride Starship from the ground on Earth rather than
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launch the astronauts on a non reusable vehicle. The question just begs to be
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asked. Well, speaking of optics, I'll segue into a story back from
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a few weeks ago. As we everybody, everybody had Aurora borealis fever.
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Right, Oh my gosh, it caught. It was spreading like wildfire or
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you know, northern lights through the southern skies, that's what it was doing.
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It was everywhere, and we saw them here in the Chattahoochee Valley area
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where we record the show each week, and it was just, you know,
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one of those things that everybody thought, Oh my gosh, I can't
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believe this is really happening. You and I included, Wow, this is
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happening. We're able to just see it right outside in our front yards,
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Oh my goodness. And then it was just gone. And then we go,
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oh my, well, maybe it'll maybe we'll get another night of it.
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And it never really happened again. But in other parts of the country
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they were able to see them where they normally see them but not you know,
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like Puerto Rico was able to see that wave, which is just bananas,
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all right. So that happened, and it was caused by you know,
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solar activity AR thirty six sixty four, and it's now it's still going.
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It just you know, they it moves, it moves and then or
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we move however that works, and then it's it's it's making a pass back
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around at us again. What's what's going on here with the good old ar
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thirty sixty before? And do they usually last this long? Yeah? Is
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the answer? They have to be huge, is yes? Correct? So
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yeah, let's begin from the beginning, which is it's not every day that
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you have one of the most powerful auroral displays in the past five hundred years.
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In fact, by definition, how often does that kind of thing happen?
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Not very often in five hundred years. It was roughly a one hundred
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year event. Just if you look at the past three times that northern lights
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have been able to be visible from southern Puerto Rico, right, So that's
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only happened three times in the last roughly three centuries. So that gives you
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an idea. It's not every day. And so for hoping for one of
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those to happen again, I mean, friends, it's a bit of a
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long shot, right because statistics. Okay, So however, as West pointed
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out, the massive sunspot group that caused the last has managed to follow the
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rotation of the Sun as it goes, and it's roughly one month or of
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one month rotation, and it's coming back around what we would call the eastern
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limb of the Sun. Which is bringing that giant solar storm which has survived
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that period of time. Sunspot groups typically do not survive that period of time.
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They don't last that long, but this one has. It's still big.
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It's not quite as big as it was before, but it's still very
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angry. And on May twenty ninth, which is yesterday as we're recording the
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show, it launched another giant X class flare from this active region, which
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catalog number is thirty six sixty four. Active regions on the Sun are sunspot
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groups. Sun Spot groups are the ones that can cause solar flares, and
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they have these massive explosions which can trigger an event called a CME coronal mass
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ejection. These coronal mass ejections are charged particles which are like a wave of
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radioactive material that is launched out into space, and if those things interact with
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Earth's magnetic field, you can have what are called geomagnetic storms, and the
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geomagnetic storms are what are responsible for triggering northern light displays. Aurora Borealis or
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Aurora Australis in the south, so friends the X one point four class solar
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flare. By the way, X being the most powerful category of solar flares
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that went off within the last twenty four hours is not directly headed toward the
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Earth. There was a chronal mass ejection associated with that event. That CME
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is traveling out through the Solar System, not directly at the Earth. However,
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it's big enough that certain forecasts have it interacting with Earth's magnetic field.
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We might get a glancing blow. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasts have
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said that yes, we likely will have what they're terming as a stiff glancing
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blow. This again, according to spaceweather dot com, who is relaying this
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information from NAA, a stiff glancing blow could trigger a G two class geomagnetic
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storm, not nearly as powerful as the one that we saw on May tenth,
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but yet enough to trigger northern lights in the usual suspect kind of places
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Canada, Alaska, the northern tier of States. This could happen on June
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first, which, as we're recording this show is about forty eight hours from
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now, so within the next forty eight hours there could be some effects from
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the storm. Now, that's an interesting story in and of itself. However,
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let's keep in mind that the Sun is rotating in such a manner that
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it's bringing this giant sunspot group, which refused to die on the passage of
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the far side of the Sun. It's bringing it back in to direct alignment
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with the Earth while it's still popping off X class solar flares. So this
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thing is not to be ignored. Friends. I'm not saying we're gonna have
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another five hundred year geomagnetic storm, but we could have another incident that could
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produce northern lights in the shall we say, lower latitudes of the contiguous forty
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eight states of North America. So let's all just keep an eye on it.
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And a great place to do that is spaceweather dot com. Coming up,
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after a quick break, we'll talk about Venus and we'll talk about Vulcan.
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We don't get to talk about those two together very often, but we'll
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do that next. All right, let's talk about let's start with Venus.
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We got Venus and we got Vulcan to get to Let's start with Venus because
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it's looking like active volcanoes on Venus, and that means when you say active
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volcanoes does that mean flowing lava. Everything's made of lava. The ground is
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lava that game that kids play. Yeah, yes, it's something like Well,
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if you run Venus, you would feel that way pretty much all the
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time. Anyway, it would feel like and August day. The atmosphere would
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feel like an August day here in the South, That's what it feels like.
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It would be about like that. So it's hot enough to melt lead
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on Venus. It's hot enough to melt lead on the sidewalks of Columbus,
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Georgia. You know, it's it's pretty much the same thing. And breathing
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the air is hot enough to melt our lungs. Still, while I'm in
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Houston, it's not much better here, my friend tell you Houston, Texas.
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It's been on tad warmere as well. All right, So streams of
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flowing lava on the planet Venus would have been fictional. Oh, I don't
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know. A mere two decades ago. When I first started teaching astronomy,
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we were teaching that Venus was a volcanically dead world, at least is what
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we thought. Obviously, times change. How do these things change, Well,
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it's usually because we send up a better instrument and get better data.
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When did we do that? In the early nineteen nineties, friends, we
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sent up a vehicle called the Magellan spacecraft, and the Magellan Spacecraft, using
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its radar which can penetrate the clouds of Venus, made very detailed observations and
26:37
maps of the Venusian surface with radar. So these data sets are vast,
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and our ability to analyze vast data sets has gotten substantially better since the data
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was taken between the years of nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety two. So a
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new group of scientists, a group of Battalion astronomers, began to reanalyze radar
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data from the Magellan mission to Venus and that very interesting radar backscatter that can
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occur and tell you the different kinds of soils that occur on the surface of
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a different planet. They looked at that backscattered data again from Magellan's radar data
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and found out that there were various regions which indicated some recent lava flows.
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Now, when scientists are particularly planetary scientists and geologists, when they talk about
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recent flows, that could be in the last million years, because the Solar
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System is very old, about four and a half billion years old, so
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recent compared to the age of the Solar System could be within the last million
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years. So you have to be a little bit cautious when you say,
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oh, well, there were recent volcanic activity on Venus, that's already very
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interesting. That means, in geologically recent time, there had to be some
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reason for this planet that does not have plate tectonics to be spewing volcanoes out
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onto its surface, right, very very long time after the planet form,
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a very very long time after what we call the heavy bombardment period when larger
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lots of large asteroids were running into protoplanets. Okay, so there already had
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to be an interesting scientific reason. But if you tell somebody somethings recent a
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million years ago, they probably will yawn at you if they're an average member
28:33
of the public. But how about this. What if these scientists found that
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some of these terrains of lava flows that were apparently geologically recent, what if
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they actually changed in between the years of nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety two while
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the Magellan vehicle was actually taking the data. Well, now that's a whole
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different version of recent. Right. That means there's a process taking place on
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Venus that's basically still happening now where there is the presence of volcanism in the
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modern era. And that's what this new reanalysis of radar data from the Magellan
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mission has told us. That is what these Italian astronomers are putting forth.
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If you want to check out the story, by the way, it's on
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astronomy dot com. But it looks like that the lava flows were actually flowing
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during the Magellan mission itself in the early nineties, providing new evidence of ongoing
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volcanic activity in the current day on Venus, which means Venus is a volcanically
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active world. We have taught many many times at the Space Science Center that
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the only two volcanically active worlds we know about in our own Solar System are
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the Earth and the moon Io around the planet Jupiter. Well, we would
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have to add Venus back to that list and again comparing it to Mars,
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which has been volcanically inac active or dead for literally millennium. Now. Now
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Venus is being added to the volcanically active list of worlds today. Now that's
30:10
if this study holds up. This is how science is done. One group
30:14
puts out these pieces of data, other groups argue about it. We will
30:18
see. We will follow the story in the coming months and years and see
30:22
whether we still believe that Venus is volcanically active today. Side note, the
30:26
song Volcano by you two is underrated, all right, that's just my side
30:30
note. Speaking of vulcanism, Let's talk about the planet. So they thought
30:36
they had found Spock's homeworld and then it disappeared, and then now they don't
30:41
know what's going on. Is is it an optical illusion or was there really
30:45
a planet there at all? Or did the Vulcans figure out a way to
30:48
hide themselves. Ah, this coliking device, Yeah, that I would guess.
30:52
That's a good guess, right. And by the way, Joe versus
30:56
the volcano is overrated, So we're talking about anyway. That's a side point,
31:00
all right. So let's talk about Spock's home world Vulcan. Vulcan was
31:06
a Roman god, and so that's where we got the name. But it's
31:10
not the first planet to have that name. There was a speculated planet in
31:15
our own solar system that early scientists thought was orbiting between the planet Venus and
31:21
the Sun. So a planet extremely close to the Sun was postulated to exist
31:29
at one time and found later to not exist. So this is not the
31:33
first time that a planet Vulcan has turned on its cloaking device. So all
31:37
right, so there was a possible detection of an exoplanet that had a tie
31:45
to Star Trek. By the way back in twenty eighteen, the planet was
31:51
nicknamed Vulcan. It was a planet around a star, and the stars catalog
31:56
name is forty Era. Now Aridonis is a river. It's a constellation in
32:04
the sky. This was sort of the fortieth brightest star in that constellation.
32:09
A means it's one of a pair of stars. So this star has been
32:14
known for a long time. But this was what Star Trek writers picked up
32:17
on to use as the home world for mister Spock in the Star Trek series.
32:23
The planet Vulcan orbited the star forty erodney A. All right, so
32:29
there's the Star Trek tie. Now. Just a few years ago in twenty
32:34
eighteen, when this planet was announced an exoplanet. Even then, the authors
32:40
of that paper said, we think this is here, but it could be
32:45
that there's some jittering going on in the parent star with some kind of regularity.
32:52
So why did they think the planet was there at all? Well,
32:53
they were using what they call a Doppler detection method. They're looking at the
32:59
star and the way the star moves red shifts and blue shifts, and they
33:05
use that detection method to extrapolate the presence of the planet. But that's not
33:09
the only thing that can cause these red and blue shifts. You can actually
33:15
have activity on the surface of the star itself, and if it occurs with
33:19
any periodicity, scientists might confuse it with the existence of an exoplanet. All
33:25
right, So only five years later, another group of astronomers came out and
33:30
said, yeah, we think that that forty erodney a detection which we all
33:34
called vulcan. We think that that is probably not really a planet, but
33:38
it could be some extreme variability on the surface of the star, and so
33:45
we think that planet doesn't exist. Well, now proof positive has come out.
33:49
Friends. This story is from NASA dot gov. There has been a
33:52
new instrument turned on at Kitpeak National Observatory in Arizona. It's a new instrument
33:58
funded by NASA and the It's called the ANYID, which is a strained acronym,
34:04
but it's basically an instrument to measure the variability of red and blue shifts
34:08
on stars to help detect exoplanets. So once this new, much more sensitive
34:14
instrument was turned on, it confirmed that the moving in and out of the
34:20
surface of forty erod in the A was indeed caused by stellar activity and not
34:27
by the presence of an exoplanet named Vulcan. And therefore Vulcan has been kicked
34:32
out of the planet club yet again. So this Vulcan like world was really
34:39
just kind of an astronomical illusion by the pulses and jitters of the star itself
34:45
and not by the presence of an exoplanet. Stupid science, proven things,
34:51
disproven things. Come on, science, what are we doing? Can't we
34:53
have some fun? Can we just have Vulcan? Can we have Vulcan and
34:58
Pluto? Please? What is going on here? Science? Come on,
35:01
man, let's change gears into what you guys have going on at the co
35:07
Cola Space Science Center for the summer. And I know you like your partnership
35:12
with Callaway Gardens because it's a great opportunity to get a really good look at
35:16
the nighttime sky for a road trip version of Astronomy Night. Yeah, so
35:24
we're scheduled to start our Astronomy Nights this Monday night and we'll be out of
35:29
Callaway Gardens each and every one of those Monday nights. Also, friends,
35:32
if you want to know the entire observing schedule where we're going to be putting
35:36
our telescopes to let you see the nighttime sky, simply check out our website.
35:39
Go to www dot cc SSC dot org, and we'll be posting up
35:45
all of the coming events there. I will tell you also that we have
35:47
a variety of things to do right at the Space Science Center in some nice
35:52
cool air conditioning. Yeah about that, but it's as hot as the planet
35:54
Vulcan outside. Come on into some good ac check out a new show in
36:00
our new Atmosphere theater, our newly installed projection system inside our planetarium down there,
36:07
we have some great shows taking place this summer. In addition to that,
36:10
we have a brand new display called the Guzzle Vortex. It's great for
36:15
the youngest kids, the youngest visitors to come down and have a great time
36:17
with as they play with an air maze and learn about the habitability of exoplanets,
36:22
as it turns out, exoplanets not named Vulcan. And then also you
36:28
can jump in and take a ride to space aboard the Space Shuttle Odyssey and
36:30
check out all of the fantastic artifacts from NASA and the Space Exploration Program.
36:37
Check all of these fun things out. Come down and visit us at the
36:39
Space Science Center. Visit us on the website first www dot cc SSC dot
36:45
org. Plan out your visit, Come and see us this summer, have
36:50
a great time indoors and your feet won't be melting on vulcan Sean and I
36:54
thank you for listening, and we'll do this again next week. Overhead Door
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