This episode cracks open the history and traditions of NASA (ie. Lucky peanuts) to get to the nutty goodness, which includes hard science and looking towards future missions! To explore this Dr. Morgan Cable joins the pod! Dr. Morgan Cable is a research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The Science Lead for the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor concept and Co-Deputy PI of the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) Instrument aboard the Mars 2020 (Perseverance) rover, also apart of the Cassini, Dragonfly and the Europa Clipper missions in various ways. Links and descriptions of things mentioned in the episode supplied by Dr Morgan Cable lightly edited:

Cassini virtual singers: https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/a-farewell-to-cassini-our-friend-at-saturn/

Curiosity leaving ‘JPL’ in Morse code on Mars: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/rover-leaves-tracks-in-morse-code

Perseverance parachute hidden code: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/science/nasa-mars-parachute-code.html

Monoliths for Europa Clipper, represent the team mascot, inspired by the monolith on Jupiter’s moon Europa in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s ironic because in the novel and the film we were told to “attempt no landing” at Europa, but in our first PSG meeting the author (Arthur C. Clarke) actually dialed in and gave us permission, which is really cool! You can hear more about that in an interview with Steve Vance (a fellow JPLer and scientist on Europa Clipper) here. So we make one Monolith and bring it to each Project Science Group (PSG) meeting. Here it is in one of our team photos, and we also have a team award called the Monolith Award and here is a twitter post about a recipient.

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