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NASA Is Watching Two Asteroids · 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,
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asterism, and uranus. Listen, that's your own risk. Go ahead.
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When made of stars, made them stars made sizes. When made of stars,
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you could be from high they would New Mexicomus. Where are stars?
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When we are made of stars? I'm West Carol, joined by my good
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friend doctor Sean Cruising from Columbus State Universities, Coca Cola Space Science Center.
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Morning Shawn, Hey, we's good to be here today. Let's talk about
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asteroids. We have stories from time to time where we'll say, oh,
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we're getting kind of a near miss from an asteroid, or we'll have a
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story that will make a big splash on you know, it'll make it to
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the USA Today's of the media world and they'll go, oh, my gosh,
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there's an asteroid. It's coming right for us and we're all gonna die.
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Please buy our newspaper or whatever they say. I don't know some version
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of that that they say. Click on this site is probably more like it.
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And sometimes there's elements of not necessarily we're all gonna die, but there's
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elements of, you know, we have to be a little concerned. And
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you and I have talked about the fact that we had Dart. We've had
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situations like even the Osiris Rex mission. So, but Dart especially being able
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to you know, maybe throw something off course, change direction or whatever.
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They've successfully done that. So there's a real valid reason to be concerned about
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something possibly coming our way. Ask the dinosaurs. Oh wait, so we
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have one that is I guess the one that is at the top of the
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If there was a most wanted list right now, maybe observers would say this
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is the one that's at the top of their list, the one that they're
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the most concerned about. Am I describing this thing correctly? Yes, So
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before we jump too deep into that, let's just say this. There are
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a lot of asteroids in our neighborhood. And the article I'm going to refer
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to today and have you go check it out when you get a chance,
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is on a website called IFLScience dot com. It stands for I Really like
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science, Gonna be honest with you. This is the first time that I've
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ever gone to that site before. So I'm just saying, well, if
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you really like science, go to IFL science dot com. Yeah. I
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see lots of their stories. I see lots of their posts in my feed
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and in social media. I've just never clicked on it before. But I'm
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glad to know there's some actual science going on there. Yeah. I mean,
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the one thing they can say is they really love science. The name
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isn't even what's deterred me from it. I just, you know, I
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just looked at the name and went, I don't know, is is this
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a real site? But I'm glad to know that they've got some real science
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there and that they really really love it. An interesting Yeah, it's an
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interesting story. You know, it's an interesting story from them. I'm going
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to quote them to say a couple of things. First of all, they
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said, quote on the website IFL science dot com. In the article about
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the potentially hazard as asteroids that NASA is most concerned about, they say,
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no need to worry, NASA has it all under control. Now that's their
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words, not mine. I'm not really sure what they meant by that.
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We do know that NASA is tracking them very carefully, and so we do
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know, as you mentioned, that NASA has deployed, shall we say,
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a couple of different types of spacecraft to do some mitigating measures. One of
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those was the Dart spacecraft. Hey, what happens if we just sock an
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asteroid in the eye as hard as we can with a spaceship That proved has
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some pretty potent results, quite honestly. The second one was the the o
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Cyrus REX mission, and we're going to get back and talk about of Cyrus
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Rex in just a moment, But another quote from IFLScience dot com is this,
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we highly recommend heading to NASA's Eyes on Asteroid's website and selecting their closest
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approach. Now, friends, I actually did this, and so I had
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not been to NASA's Eyes on on Asteroids website. And basically what it is,
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it's a plot of all of the asteroids that are in the greater vicinity
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of Earth's orbit around the Sun. And so you can watch and see first
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of all, how many of them there are, which that visualization is already
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very impressive. The second thing you can see is how honestly, how close
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some of them already are to the Earth. And there are literally swarms of
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asteroids moving around the Sun right in the neighborhood of Earth. Now, the
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visualization you're going to see on this website, nothing's to scale. They're just
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kind of giving you points that are markers to show you how close in vicinity
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to the Earth relative to its position around the Sun things are. So they're
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not to scale, so it makes it all look a lot closer than it
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really is. But just knowing the sheer number of asteroids in the immediate vicinity
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of Earth, many of which are far large enough to be able to do
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some very serious regional damage. This according to the NASA website itself, it's
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a little sobering, quite frankly. So, so maybe the best part to
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me is not necessarily which asteroid NASA is most concerned about, just the fact
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that there are so many of them that we should all be concerned about.
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And so, yeah, check out NASA's Eyes on Asteroid's website, and you
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know, just pop that in the Google machine. It'll take you there.
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Check it out. It's pretty impressive. Now, when they say don't worry,
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NASA has it all under control, I'll say this, and I mean,
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I'm gonna I'm gonna take our military aside from what I'm about to say,
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because obviously that's different. But of the government agencies that I would go,
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man, I think that they might have something under control, I kind
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of feel like NASA would be at the top of that list for me.
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So I do feel a certain amount of maybe I'm naive, I don't know,
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but I feel like when they say NASA's got it under control, they
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probably have it under control. There are a lot of really high quality people
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that work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, smart people, smart people
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who can figure things out. And when you take a lot of those smart
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people and you put them in teams and they work together under certain protocols,
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that makes an even more refined machine. So you're right, I kind of
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agree with you. NASA is the one of the few government agencies that I'm
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just going to say, yeah, I trust them to do their job.
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In a pinch. Yeah, I mean, maybe I shouldn't give them my
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complete trust, but I feel pretty confident that they've got an eye on these
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things, and they're you know, prepared for something. Well, they're keeping
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their eye on what are called neo's NEEO near Earth objects, and these are
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in particular, they're watching the ones that are four hundred and sixty feet across
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or larger, because these are the ones that could cause regional, if not
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larger amounts of devastation on the Earth if they hit. And so they're looking
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they're working with astrophysicists to predict how far in the future these objects might come
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close enough to our part of the Solar system that they would cause a real
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problem for Earth. In other words, very minor changes to their orbits around
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the Sun could bring them in contact with the Earth. That's a that's a
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true neo, that's a true near Earth object. That's a potentially hazardous asteroid.
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Friends, and so the site is tracking them. Now. The question
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of the headline though, is you know which one of they most worried about.
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Well, it kind of came down to two, honestly. And there
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are the asteroids. Benuch is going to make a very close pass in about
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fifty years, and then there's the Apophous asteroid. We're just going to make
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a very close pass in twenty twenty nine actually, and so that's not very
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far away, that's a mere five years away, and so it's good to
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know your enemy. And it's very interesting that these are two of the most
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concerning asteroids because these are also two of the asteroids that have been visited by
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the Osiris Rex spacecraft friends. So so NASA is already gathering data on these
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two now I say have been visited. Benu has been sampled by o Cyrus
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Rex. We've already dropped some skin samples from that asteroid out there in the
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desert of the southwestern United States, and that baby's in the lab being analyzed
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right now. And then the Apopous asteroid is to be visited biro Cyrus Rex.
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It's on its way out to that asteroid to take data of that particular
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object so we can understand the physical nature of these two asteroids better. So
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when we read that phrase NASA has it all under control, Well, I
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would say two things. Number one, they're tracking these asteroids very carefully.
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Number two, they're sending space missions Lychosyrus Rex out there to figure out what
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these asteroids are like, so we can understand their physical properties and characteristics better.
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In case number three, we have to hit it with a dart spacecraft,
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punch it right in the eye. So I feel like it should be
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noted that if you have a middle school age kid and I can speak to
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the boys, I don't know it may be the case also with girls.
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But I know that Luke has come home from school talking about Apophice and like
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the kids talking about I don't know that they said it by name, but
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they're like, oh, in twenty twenty nine, we're gonna die. There's
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an asteroid coming at us. And they've gotten into that hype about it and
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talked about it, and you know, they talk about it. So if
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your kid comes home and is talking about that, that's the one that they're
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talking about. And just know NASA has a eye on it, and you
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can assure them with that, and also know that technically its current orbital projection
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doesn't have it does not have it coming so close to the Earth that it
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actually is going to impact. Something would have to change the trajectory of the
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orbit of that asteroid. But this is one of the reasons why we want
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to know what it's made out of, because here's what can happen. It
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can get close enough to the Sun where if it has any kind of volatiles
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on the inside of that asteroid, in other words, things like carbon dioxide,
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things like methane and ammonia. When it has those kinds of objects on
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the materials on the inside and it gets close to the Sun and heats up,
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you can have some jetting kind of effects, some outgassing that could push
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the asteroid off its known trajectory and put it on a course, well,
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an unpredicted course. That's why if you know it's coming close, you definitely
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want to know what it's made out of to understand whether or not there's a
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possibility for one of these outgassing events that might change its orbit slightly. And
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that should have been the first part of my clarification, because I told Luke,
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no, this thing's not really heading for us. It's just kind of,
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you know, explaining to them that there's a there's a hype that goes
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with it, and one, it's not really coming for us. In two,
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if it does, there, they've got time. They're aware of it,
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they're looking into it. I mean, they got time to figure out
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what to do with it should there become an issue. Let's talk about this
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new star that could be showing up here very soon. Now. This is
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a cool story. You can read about it on NASA dot gov. But
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there are a number of stories out there about this one. There's an object
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out there called T. Coronai Borealis. T. Corona Borealis happens to be
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a star system. It's in the constellation of Corona Borealis, which stands which
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means the Northern Crown. That's the name of the constellation. Well, the
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interesting thing is that astronomers have been watching Ta Corona Borealis for some large number
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of years. That's because back in the year nineteen forty six, we actually
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saw a very bright outburst from this particular star. That star in the sky
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got a whole lot brighter for a short period of time, and astronomers identified
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that thing as actually an object called a nova. Now what is a nova?
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Well, a nova is this? A nova happens when two stars are
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dancing together. These stars are both old stars. One of the stars has
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reached the end of its lifetime and it's actually gone through a phase where it's
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lost all of its outer layers. That star has become a white dwarf.
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So a white dwarf is the nuclear core of a star that used to be
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like the sun, but then again it aged, it lost its outer layers
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and now you just have the core engine of that star proceeding. It's in
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close orbit around another star that's still in the red giant phase, which means
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it's a star again like the Sun, reaching the end of its life,
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but is still in the process of losing its outer layers. Well, what
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you have is you have one really big star with some loose gases on the
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outside. You have one really small star that used to be the core of
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a much larger star. They're orbiting close to one another. They're a binary
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star system, and that small star is feeding off the loose material on the
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outside of the big star. There's an accretion disc around that red giant star.
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The white dwarf is feeding off that accretion disc. It's building up material,
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and then eventually it gets to a point where all that material on the
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surface of that white dwarf, that newly collected material, ignites, It detonates,
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and so it explodes into a bright outburst. You basically create the conditions
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on the outside of that white dwarf for nuclear fusion to take place, something
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very similar to what happens inside the core of our Sun today, and so
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you have a brief outburst of nuclear fusion on the outside layer of this white
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dwarf and it gets very very bright for a short period of time, and
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so that is what's known as a nova event. All right, let's go
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back to T. Corona borealis. Astronomers have been carefully monitoring the behavior of
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that variable star. It's varying because it's eating that material off its neighbor,
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the Red Giant, and it looks like it's going to be in a pattern
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very similar to what preceded the nineteen forty six eruption, so similar in fact,
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that astronomers are predicting that it could go anytime. So what will that
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mean, Well, that will mean this. If this Ta Coronai borealis star
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goes into a nova phase, it's going to be bright enough in our sky
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to be able to be seen with the unaided eye. We call that the
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naked eye. You can walk out and literally see it in the sky without
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a telescope, which means that somewhat unremarkable. Constantly of Corona Borealis, the
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Northern Crown, which is up during the summer, by the way, handily
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enough, it means it's going to have a brand new star in it that
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may be brighter than all the rest of the stars in the constellation. This
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makes it well worth walking out and checking out in the nighttime sky. Here's
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what I would here's what I would suggest. Don't wait till this thing goes
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nova. Go find Corona Borealis now. There are a variety of websites that
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you can use to acquire a star map of constellations in the evening sky.
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Skymaps dot Com happens to be one of my favorites. Go out and find
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a star map that shows your Corona Borealis, so you know what it looks
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like now, so that way you can recognize the new star when it shows
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up. Now, astronomers are actually predicting September so early fall for the star
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to go supernow, or to the star to go nova rather not super nov
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that's a different phenomenon. So being watching for this star, you know now
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throughout the summer, throughout the next few months, probably going to go the
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rest of the way in September. That's at least if it follows the same
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patterns it did in nineteen forty six, but it really could go at any
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time. So here's your two steps. Number one, go out and find
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Corona Boreality. You recognize it, and then number two just begin to watch
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that night after night and also kind of follow the space media. They're going
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to tell you the status of that particular object. But you could see a
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brand new star in the sky, a really cool nova phenomenon by September early
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fall of twenty twenty four. Part of what is always fascinating about this and
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anytime we're looking at something that in this I guess about three thousand light years
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away what we're talking about. So we're talking about all of this happening now.
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They're observing it happening now. Obviously this happened a long time ago,
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but we're just now able to see it, and it's fascinating we're talking about
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it in present time like we're seeing. It's like having a friend who you
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know, you you find out that they've got a newborn, but the newborn
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is now fifteen and you're like, oh, well, I just met the
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kid. He's fifteen. He's not really a newborn at all, but to
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you, they're they're new to you, right. It is it is that
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exactly, and you know it's it's an object which even though it's far away
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in terms of you know, it's a lot of light years away, it's
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still relatively close in our own part of the Milky Way, which is why
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it will be bright enough to be seen with the unaided I when it goes
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nova. So so even though yeah, you're looking anytime you're looking deep off
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into space, you're looking back in time because of the finite light travel speed.
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So that's always something that's kind of fascinating. When you look up at
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different objects in the sky, you're really looking at time capsules from some much
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earlier time, and depending on how far away they are, they could be
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really old time capsules. So this is it's an interesting component to the store.
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But yeah, so be watching for for the star that's far away but
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yet still close enough to get bright bright in our sky, bright enough to
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be seen at night with the unaided eye, in the constellation of Corona Borealis.
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Let's talk about the slowest spinning neutron star ever. Yeah, so we
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usually talked about the biggest, the brightest, the fastest. We rarely talk
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about the slowest of anything in space. But you gotta talk. I mean,
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if you're gonna talk about the fastest, sometimes you gotta occasionally acknowledge the
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slowest. I mean, you know, it's you just have to do that
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every every every pitcher can't be throwing you know, one hundred and three miles
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an hour fastballs. You know, you got to appreciate the good change up.
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Guys. It's it's hard to remember who ran the slowest time in the
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one hundred meters in the Olympics the year that Usain Bolton, right, I
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mean everybody remembers Usain bolt because because that was amazing. He sent in new
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Olympic records fastest human being ever alive. But yet there was somebody that same
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Olympic season that ran the slowest hundred meters and I can't tell you who that
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was. I can't either. I don't think they're getting the proper respect that
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they deserve. It should be getting some sort of acknowledgment. But the only
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I will say that the only reason they were slowest is because I personally didn't
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run in that one hundred meters. That's fair. You know. I've joked
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before. I've played golf at Callaway Gardens on the course there before, and
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I think I'm the worst person to ever play there. I feel like I
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would challenge anyone to tell me that they're not as bad as I am,
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so I think I hold that record. So that's kind of like this,
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right, I mean it's sort of like this. So so here it is
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friends the slowest rotating neutron star in history. That's what's been discovered. So
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astronomers have found more than three thousand radio emitting neutron stars, and most of
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them spin within seconds to milliseconds. That's how long it takes them to spin
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around one time. Let's talk about this for a second. First of all
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story Universe today dot com. You can check it out there in back.
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The next couple of stories have come from that very great website, Universe today
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dot com. So what is a neutron star? Well, a neutron star
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is this. It's similar to the white dwarf in the sense that it's the
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it's the thermal nuclear engine of a once great star, in fact, even
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bigger than our own son. But the star went supernova some time ago,
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and as the outer layers of that star were ripped away by the supernova explosion,
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what was once that fire breathing thermo nuclear fusion core of that star collapsed
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and very similar to how another Olympic reference, when an ice skater pulls their
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arms in during a spin move, they speed up. This is due to
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something called the conservation of anger momentum in physics. The pulling the arms in
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makes their overall radius smaller, but anger momentum must be conserved, so their
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rate of rotation spin speeds up, and that way it can conserve anger momentum.
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Anyway, something along those lines, well, imagine something the size of
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a star's core being suddenly shrunk down to something smaller than the city limits of
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Columbus, Georgia. And I know there's a whole city county government thing there's
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you go to say, well, what's the city limits? Okay, yeah,
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anyway, it's it's smaller than the downtown area of most mid sized cities.
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How about that. And so, in the process of taking that very
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large object and having its own gravity squeeze it down to something that's very small,
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it shrunk its orbital radius, it's radius of spin, and therefore the
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momentum had to be conserved, so it speeds up. So these objects tend
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to spin very very fast. You know, even hundreds or thousands of times
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per second is not unusual as a rotation rate. All right, So then
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if you find one that's spinning lazily at once every hour roughly what every fifty
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four minutes. Well, that doesn't really fit the model of what we just
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described on how neutron stars are formed in the first place. So something,
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according to astronomers, something likely had to slow this rotation down in kind of
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a non standard way. And one of the things that astronomers quickly thought of
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as well, what if it has a really strong magnetic field, and then
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it was some force of magnetism interacting with the plasma around that star that caused
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it to slow down. It was like a drag, a magnetic drag on
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that object. So when they see these very slow spinning neutron stars, astronomers
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have begun to hypothesize that they could also have very strong magnetic fields. Now,
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this is an interesting idea. More research needs to be done. The
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astronomical community has not come to a consensus on why you would have slow period
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neutron stars. But remember, friends, they've never found one that's slow before
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a fifty four minute rotation period, which is a very long time to spin
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around. So they're in the realm of new physics. They're trying to come
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up with new answers, and we'll keep it on our eye on it.
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But yeah, in the meantime, check out the story on Universe today dot
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com the slowest spinning neutron star ever. Coming up after a quick break,
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a cosmonaut has reached a thousand days cumulative in space. We'll talk about that
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next. All right, we're just talking about Hussain Bolt and his uh,
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you know, incredible speed and then the person who was you know, dead
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last. We don't know who that was. Uh, and I'm curious,
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do we know who the person is that spent the least amount of time and
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spent now I'm just kidding. We have a new record for most time in
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space cumulatively, and that's a Russian cosmonaut who has now broken the one thousand
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day mark. Yeah. I mean, his name could be Shatner, but
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that's what I was thinking. It could be shattered, could be straight hand,
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straight hand might have been probably a little heavier. He might not have
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gotten quite as high. I don't know. It's it's entirely those are two
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really good candidates, so perhaps one of them anyway, Yeah, so uh,
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let's talk about Commander Oleg Cononenko. Oleg Cononenko a cosmonaut has surpassed the
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one thousand days of cumulative space time in his career. It's a one thousand
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day mark. He is the first person to ever reach one thousand cumulative days
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in space. So it's a it's a pretty cool record. Uh. He
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just passed that on Wednesday of last week, and so he's still up there.
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He's still adding days. Who knows if he'll run into a Frank Rubio
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type situation and have to stay much much longer than he thought. I mean
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that could be hundreds of days more potentially for Oleg Cononenko. So he's actually
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scheduled to come back down in September of this year. He's coming back down
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with Nikolai Chubb, who is not related to Nick Chubb cosmonaut. Say what's
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he doing enough to? I mean, I say he's not related to Nick
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Chubb. I don't know that. I don't think the name makes the assumptions
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there. I think it's missing a B. I don't know. It seems
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anyway, I'm making some assumptions about American football players and Russian cosmonauts that perhaps
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I shouldn't jump to. I'll retract that statement. To my knowledge, he's
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not related to Nick Chubb. But but Nikolaichubb is is is a cosmonaut.
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He's up there right now with old Leg Cononenco and Tracy Dyson among other astronauts.
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Uh, they're up there on the International Space Station. Tracy Dyson and
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nickel Laichubb not to be confused with Nick Chubb, will be coming back in
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September. So at that time he will have added some cumulative days in space
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to his record. This is not talking about Nick Chubb, by the way,
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We're talking about Oldlake Conanenko. He will added some days to the cumulative
27:53
time there, and so he'll be returning with an even larger record for some
27:57
future astronaut or a cosmonaut to beat. By the way, the previous record
28:03
holder was also not a member of the Cleveland Browns, but another cosmonaut named
28:08
Gannadi Padalka. So Gannadi Padalka had eight hundred and seventy eight days in space
28:15
that was surpassed now by hold A Cononenko with a thousand days in space,
28:21
and Cononenko's meter is still running. I'm curious, and im probably asking a
28:26
question you don't specifically know the answer to. But I'm just this is just
28:30
me, you know, doing my job on the show, is just asking
28:33
the questions. But I guess it just I kind of wonder there has to
28:38
have been an astronaut or several that have just said, send me up there
28:44
and just let me die up there. Just just leave me up there.
28:47
I won't come home. I don't have a reason to come home whatever,
28:51
I'll just stay put. There have to have been volunteers for that, and
28:55
obviously they don't think it's in their best interest, but at some point,
29:00
I mean, maybe that can happen. Right Well, I mean, look,
29:06
let's talk a little bit about colonization, because we're in an era where
29:11
our Federal Space Agency is telling us that they're going to colonize the Moon,
29:18
and we have other groups who say they're going to colonize Mars. And when
29:25
that begins to happen, I mean the notion of you know, maybe people
29:30
in Europe several hundred years ago, a few hundred years ago, colonizing a
29:37
new world, you know, a different continent. I don't think that they
29:41
planned on coming back, right, And so we're not in that mindset yet.
29:47
We're still dipping our toe into spaceflight, but certainly what you've just described
29:52
is going to be something that's going to happen where somebody's going to say,
29:56
hey, send me on a one way trip. I mean, we have
30:00
already had people who have volunteered for one way trips to Mars, by the
30:06
way, and so that's not something that is you know, in the realm
30:11
of fantasy or science fiction or whatever. Certainly is those things, but we've
30:15
had actual people say, yes, I would go. I would volunteer for
30:19
a one way trip to space, to go to be the first person on
30:22
Mars, or even among the first people on Mars. You wouldn't have to
30:27
bring me back. I would live out my days there. So yeah,
30:32
these kinds of things have already occurred. I don't really know if I have
30:36
any official references for NASA astronauts who volunteered that, but certainly, you know,
30:41
humankind being what it is, those people are out there, and as
30:47
we begin the process of colonizing other worlds, we're going to need some of
30:51
those kinds of people, right, You really are going to need people who
30:53
are going to say I'm going to go and I'm just going to go in
30:56
Definitely, maybe I'll come back, maybe I won't, But my trip is
31:02
it doesn't have a return date. I'm gonna go and be there for some
31:06
unknown, indefinite period of time. I feel like I want to say it
31:10
was a buzz Aldron, but I may be misattributing the quote, but it
31:14
was buzz Aldron who had the line about six feet under on Mars is like
31:18
the next great destination. Yeah, I can't remember if that was Buzz or
31:25
not. I have to admit, sorry, I don't remember that quote.
31:26
I have heard that quote before. Yeah, I feel like it was him,
31:30
but whoever said it. I mean it's profound and it's true obviously,
31:33
and it relates to what we're talking about. So yeah, I just feel
31:37
like at some point there would be some some astronaut who would and obviously,
31:41
you know this is a cosmonaut who has no problem with being up there,
31:45
so at some point you would think there would be And maybe China gets the
31:48
space station up and says we're just going to leave somebody up there and they're
31:52
going to stay put and just ride it on out. I don't know.
31:55
Yeah, I mean these kinds of things sound very inhumane to the people who
31:59
would never want to do that, and that's fair that's fine, But there
32:06
have been a number of people in human history and even in the history of
32:09
our own country, who said, yeah, sure, I'll go out west
32:15
and I'll help settle what Arizona yep, right, yep. And they didn't.
32:22
They didn't make it back to the east coast of the US, right,
32:25
they didn't. They didn't make it back to family and friends on the
32:30
other side of the appellation. How many how many people died of dysentery on
32:35
the Oregon Trail. I mean, we know it's not just a computer game,
32:39
but not nearly as many people as died in the computer game. I
32:43
think if you had if you took all the cumulive people who died in the
32:45
Oregon Trail computer game, it's far greater than the actual number of people who
32:50
died on the Oregon Trail. But that's that's a subject for a different show.
32:52
So, but the notion is that we as human beings are explorers,
32:57
and we we have people among us who were perfectly willing to commit what might
33:02
to the rest of us seem to be an unreasonable amount of dedication to pursuing
33:09
these kinds of efforts to explore, to investigate, and to find new worlds
33:15
and new new areas, right, and so so yeah, sometimes I think
33:20
we get a little overconcerned with the choices of others if people choose to do
33:24
these things. I think, honestly, the human species needs these pioneers,
33:31
right, we really do to help push us forward. Because the timid among
33:36
us, which by the way, I'm one of those the timid among us,
33:38
would never do it, and so we would. We just wouldn't have
33:42
those growth opportunities. But yet brave souls decided, you know, I am
33:45
going to go to Alaska and I am going to look for gold in the
33:50
Yukon or whatever. Right, I'm just trying to think of times where there
33:53
were you know, I am going to jump on the ship with Shackleton and
33:58
see if we can get to the South Pole. Why. I know I
34:00
might never come back, but yet I'm willing to go do that, right,
34:05
So yeah, I think it's a it's an important characteristic of human bravery
34:08
quite frankly, and just a driving need to explore that pushes our species forward.
34:16
And so yeah, we maybe we shouldn't be so provincial in our thinking
34:22
about those people who are willing to take these great steps and jump in and
34:25
do these amazing things. Let's talk about what's going on at Columba State University's
34:30
co Cola Space Science Center. We're in the really truly into June into summer
34:37
now so and we often reference the it comes with the cost of admission air
34:42
conditioning that you guys have there in the facility, But it's more than just
34:45
a place to cool down. It's a way to keep kids' brains engage this
34:49
during the summer and get them away from screens. Just for not that you
34:52
guys don't have some screens in there, they're just different kinds of screens.
34:57
Yeah, we try to keep our screens entertaining an edge occasional both, but
35:00
we also understand that if you want to skip all the screens in the Space
35:04
Science Center because your children have been looking at screens far too much, there's
35:07
still plenty of other things to do. Friends. They can drive some Mars
35:12
rovers for instance. They can see some meteorites that have fallen from space.
35:16
They can check out artifacts components of the Space Shuttle that have actually flown missions
35:22
down or space. They can have very tactle experiences in our Space Shuttle Odyssey
35:28
and in our flight simulators and so these are all great things. They can
35:30
feed aliens in our guzzle vortex, or at least would be aliens or comic
35:36
book aliens with our guzzle vortex machine. So these are all fun things for
35:39
the kids to do friends. You know, as if you've been listening to
35:43
the podcast, you might have heard Wes and I chat about the fact that
35:45
I've been doing a kind of coming and going set of trips to Houston,
35:50
Texas. This is because I have a new addition to my family. I
35:52
have a new grandson. I was in Houston again today and we've visited the
35:58
Houston Museum of Natural History. It's a great thing to do, just take
36:02
the family and go to a cool museum because there's all kinds of fun things
36:07
inside the museum that not they're entertaining, sure, but they start so many
36:12
great conversations with your kids, and your kids will ask you all kinds of
36:15
questions that maybe you don't even know the answers to, but it's okay because
36:20
you can begin the conversations that spark the curiosity that have your children wanting to
36:25
learn. That's what the Coca Cola Space Science Center in Columbus, Georgia is
36:30
dedicated to to having those kinds of experiences with you and your family that inspire
36:35
kids to want to learn about space, about space exploration, and about their
36:39
universe and their world around their friends. So check out the website www dot
36:44
c c s SC dot org. Charlie Charlie SamSam Charlie dot org, Sean
36:50
and I thank you for listening, and we'll do this again next week.
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