Radiolab - Probing Where the Sun Does Shine: A Holiday Special

This holiday season, we want to take you on a trip around the heavens.First, co-host Latif Nasser, with the help of Nour Raouafi, of NASA, and an edge-cutting piece of equipment, explain how we may finally be making good on Icarus’s promise. Then, co-host Lulu Miller and Ada Limón talk about how a poet laureate goes about writing an ode to one of Jupiter’s moons. And one more thing! It is almost your last chance to make your mark on the heavens. Radiolab and The International Astronomical Union’s Quasi Moon Naming Vote comes to an end on January 1st. Learn more and pick your favorite name here: https://radiolab.org/moon EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Latif Nasser, Lulu MillerProduced by - Matt Kielty, Ana GonzalezFact-checking by - Diane Kelly Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Duration: 28m
Broadcast on: 24 Dec 2024
Audio Format: other

And one more thing! It is almost your last chance to make your mark on the heavens. Radiolab and The International Astronomical Union’s Quasi Moon Naming Vote comes to an end on January 1st. Learn more and pick your favorite name here: https://radiolab.org/moon

EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Latif Nasser, Lulu Miller
Produced by - Matt Kielty, Ana Gonzalez
Fact-checking by - Diane Kelly

Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!

Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.

Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected].

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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- Wait, you're listening to RadioLab from WNYC. Hey, I'm Latif Nasser, and this is RadioLab, and just great. Amazing. Today, I've been looking forward to talking to you for so long. - Thank you. - It's really pleasure to talk to you. - We're doing something a little bit different because this episode is coming out at the tail end of December 2024, and so far this month, we have traced the kind of bogus origin story of Stockholm Syndrome, and our staff went on a bit of a romp, fact-checking, a bunch of the old chestnuts, you know, the adages, you hear all the time. So those were our two new episodes for this month. That's what we do. We make two new episodes a month, but we wanted to do a little something extra. A little sneaky holiday gift, a Christmas-ish offering, you could call it. It's actually two little Christmas-ish offerings, one from me, one from Lulu. They're similar, but also very different, and I'm going to start off with this story. This is the especially Christmas-y one that I heard from this guy, Noor. - I am a Noor Rawafi, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. Noor is part of a project, actually a mission that, I don't know, a few weeks ago, I didn't even think was physically possible. - Noor thinks now I've been on this mission for 16 years, and there are certain aspects for me, the way they work is still like magic. - Okay, but if we back up all the way, like how did you even get interested in all of this? - So my interest in space was as a very young child. - Noor is originally from Tunisia. One in the countryside and being in the countryside, there is no light pollution at all. So the sky is just, in particular in summertime, it's just mesmerizing, it's just captivating. And that's actually probably the first thing that got me interested into space. After that, my interest shifted a little bit on the sun, being really fascinated by it, how much heat in particular we get on the summer, and they did all sorts of experiments. - He says when he was a kid, he actually made his own light prism out of plexiglass. - He started to create the rainbow spectrum from violet to red. - He started playing with lenses, focusing on the sunlight. Some of them, actually, they caused fire, but it's not really a big fire at all. But still, still, the power of the sun was so fascinating to me. - And Noor says that as he got older, he got interested in other fields. - Feels like particle physics, like nuclear physics, like optics, quantum mechanics. He ends up going to study in France, starts working in the states at different observatories, but around 2008, he hears about this mission that NASA's working on. - Put forth in 1958, many, many years before it was born. That is so monumental, that he's going to make history, that he's going to make it first, just in a few weeks from now. - So, to explain, 2008, Noor starts working with NASA on this mission. And then, 2018, Noor and a team of NASA scientists launched this rocket out in this space, and being carried by that rocket was this, about 3m tall, couple meters wide spacecraft. - It's not really a big spacecraft when you look at it. - It almost looks like cone-shaped. - So, once it got into space, this little cone-shaped spacecraft detached from the rocket, and Noor and his team fired it up and sent it to Venus, and kind of slowed the spacecraft a little

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