Podcast appearances and mentions of john grunsfeld

The Hubble Space Telescope has been one of NASA's most successful flagship missions, recently celebrating 35 years in space. Often referred to as "the gift that keeps giving," the HST has provided not just magnificent science—shared worldwide—but also some of our universe's most significant and stunning images, inspiring wonder and driving countless young people into the sciences and STEM fields in general. And for the general public, Hubble continues to provide a profound sense of the wonders of the universe and our place in it. We are joined this week by Dr. John Grunsfeld, who flew five times on the space shuttle and spent over 50 hours on Hubble servicing missions to keep those incredible images coming. Join us for a fascinating deep dive into this magnificent project. Headlines NASA Budget Cuts: The episode starts with a discussion about proposed budget cuts to NASA, including concerns from future NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, who expressed reservations about the cuts. Hercules-Corona-Borealis Great Wall: The hosts discuss the discovery of the largest structure in the universe, the Hercules-Corona-Borealis Great Wall, and the ongoing efforts to understand its size and implications. China's Tiangong Space Station: An update on China's Tiangong space station and their successful crew rotation operations, as well as their recent agreement to train astronauts from Pakistan. Interview with Dr. John Grunsfeld John Grunsfeld's Background: Grunsfeld shares his early inspirations, including the pioneering Gemini program during the Space Race, and how this influenced his path to becoming an astronaut and physicist. Hubble's 35th Anniversary: The conversation shifts to the Hubble Space Telescope's 35th anniversary and Grunsfeld's unique perspective as someone who flew on the space shuttle and performed multiple Hubble servicing missions. Hubble Servicing and EVAs: Grunsfeld details the challenges and complexities of performing extravehicular activities (EVAs) to repair and upgrade Hubble, highlighting the extensive training involved. Hubble's Scientific Contributions: The discussion covers Hubble's significant scientific achievements, including measuring the age and expansion of the universe and the discovery of dark energy. NASA's Value and Budget Concerns: Grunsfeld emphasizes NASA's importance in driving innovation, inspiring the public, and its positive impact on the economy, expressing concern over proposed budget cuts. Future of Space Telescopes: The episode concludes with a look at the future of space telescopes, including the Habitable Worlds Observatory and the potential for robotic servicing to maintain these complex instruments. Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Guest: Dr. John Grunsfeld Download or subscribe to This Week in Space at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit

The Hubble Space Telescope has been one of NASA's most successful flagship missions, recently celebrating 35 years in space. Often referred to as "the gift that keeps giving," the HST has provided not just magnificent science—shared worldwide—but also some of our universe's most significant and stunning images, inspiring wonder and driving countless young people into the sciences and STEM fields in general. And for the general public, Hubble continues to provide a profound sense of the wonders of the universe and our place in it. We are joined this week by Dr. John Grunsfeld, who flew five times on the space shuttle and spent over 50 hours on Hubble servicing missions to keep those incredible images coming. Join us for a fascinating deep dive into this magnificent project. Headlines NASA Budget Cuts: The episode starts with a discussion about proposed budget cuts to NASA, including concerns from future NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, who expressed reservations about the cuts. Hercules-Corona-Borealis Great Wall: The hosts discuss the discovery of the largest structure in the universe, the Hercules-Corona-Borealis Great Wall, and the ongoing efforts to understand its size and implications. China's Tiangong Space Station: An update on China's Tiangong space station and their successful crew rotation operations, as well as their recent agreement to train astronauts from Pakistan. Interview with Dr. John Grunsfeld John Grunsfeld's Background: Grunsfeld shares his early inspirations, including the pioneering Gemini program during the Space Race, and how this influenced his path to becoming an astronaut and physicist. Hubble's 35th Anniversary: The conversation shifts to the Hubble Space Telescope's 35th anniversary and Grunsfeld's unique perspective as someone who flew on the space shuttle and performed multiple Hubble servicing missions. Hubble Servicing and EVAs: Grunsfeld details the challenges and complexities of performing extravehicular activities (EVAs) to repair and upgrade Hubble, highlighting the extensive training involved. Hubble's Scientific Contributions: The discussion covers Hubble's significant scientific achievements, including measuring the age and expansion of the universe and the discovery of dark energy. NASA's Value and Budget Concerns: Grunsfeld emphasizes NASA's importance in driving innovation, inspiring the public, and its positive impact on the economy, expressing concern over proposed budget cuts. Future of Space Telescopes: The episode concludes with a look at the future of space telescopes, including the Habitable Worlds Observatory and the potential for robotic servicing to maintain these complex instruments. Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Guest: Dr. John Grunsfeld Download or subscribe to This Week in Space at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit

The Hubble Space Telescope has been one of NASA's most successful flagship missions, recently celebrating 35 years in space. Often referred to as "the gift that keeps giving," the HST has provided not just magnificent science—shared worldwide—but also some of our universe's most significant and stunning images, inspiring wonder and driving countless young people into the sciences and STEM fields in general. And for the general public, Hubble continues to provide a profound sense of the wonders of the universe and our place in it. We are joined this week by Dr. John Grunsfeld, who flew five times on the space shuttle and spent over 50 hours on Hubble servicing missions to keep those incredible images coming. Join us for a fascinating deep dive into this magnificent project. Headlines NASA Budget Cuts: The episode starts with a discussion about proposed budget cuts to NASA, including concerns from future NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, who expressed reservations about the cuts. Hercules-Corona-Borealis Great Wall: The hosts discuss the discovery of the largest structure in the universe, the Hercules-Corona-Borealis Great Wall, and the ongoing efforts to understand its size and implications. China's Tiangong Space Station: An update on China's Tiangong space station and their successful crew rotation operations, as well as their recent agreement to train astronauts from Pakistan. Interview with Dr. John Grunsfeld John Grunsfeld's Background: Grunsfeld shares his early inspirations, including the pioneering Gemini program during the Space Race, and how this influenced his path to becoming an astronaut and physicist. Hubble's 35th Anniversary: The conversation shifts to the Hubble Space Telescope's 35th anniversary and Grunsfeld's unique perspective as someone who flew on the space shuttle and performed multiple Hubble servicing missions. Hubble Servicing and EVAs: Grunsfeld details the challenges and complexities of performing extravehicular activities (EVAs) to repair and upgrade Hubble, highlighting the extensive training involved. Hubble's Scientific Contributions: The discussion covers Hubble's significant scientific achievements, including measuring the age and expansion of the universe and the discovery of dark energy. NASA's Value and Budget Concerns: Grunsfeld emphasizes NASA's importance in driving innovation, inspiring the public, and its positive impact on the economy, expressing concern over proposed budget cuts. Future of Space Telescopes: The episode concludes with a look at the future of space telescopes, including the Habitable Worlds Observatory and the potential for robotic servicing to maintain these complex instruments. Hosts: Rod Pyle and Tariq Malik Guest: Dr. John Grunsfeld Download or subscribe to This Week in Space at https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit

John Grunsfeld didn't just ride the Space Shuttle into orbit five times. He accumulated two-and-a-half days of spacewalk time as he worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. The former NASA associate administrator returns to Planetary Radio for a very personal conversation with Mat Kaplan. We'll also attend a screening of the great new documentary, “Goodnight Oppy” about the Mars Exploration Rovers. Sarah Al-Ahmed celebrates the 50th anniversary of the last Apollo moon mission, and Bruce Betts continues that theme with the new space trivia contest. Discover more at  https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2022-john-grunsfeld-goodnight-oppySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jake and Anthony are joined by Kristin Fisher of CNN to talk about Artemis I, and the coverage out there in the world in all the places us space nerds aren't.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 78 - John Grunsfeld's Babysitter (with Kristin Fisher) - YouTubeArtemis I rocket rolled back inside as Hurricane Ian treks toward Florida | CNNVideo: Why NASA had to scrub Artemis I rocket launch due to engine issues | CNN BusinessWatch: The NASA mission that could 'potentially save all of humankind' | CNN BusinessFollow KristinKristin Fisher (@KristinFisher) / TwitterCNN Profiles - Kristin Fisher - Space and Defense Correspondent - CNNFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterOff-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

With Mat Kaplan in London for Planetary Radio Live, we bring back one of the most moving events in the history of our show. The Cassini orbiter plunged into Saturn in the early hours of September 15, 2017. Hundreds gathered to mark the end of this remarkable voyage, including former NASA chief scientists Jim Green, John Grunsfeld and Ellen Stofan. Mat talked with them and many others on that memorable morning. Then we'll check in with Bruce Betts for a brand new What's Up. Discover more at https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/2022-cassini-eom-reprise See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Full Transcript: Captain Janet:Welcome to The JP AstroCast, where we are traveling at the speed of thought. Today's episode is brought to you by Hunt Brothers Pizza. Eyezak, can you come help me tidy up our hologram stage for our guest today?Eyezak:Oh, I'm kind of in the middle of something. Can you come here for just a sec?Captain Janet:Oh, well sure Eyezak, how can I help?Eyezak:Well, captain Janet, after hearing Dr. John Grunsfeld speak about being an astronaut, going out for spacewalks, and fixing things in space, I decided that I want to be an astronaut. (Singing).Captain Janet:That's wonderful Eyezak, but as an alien, aren't you already an astronaut?Eyezak;Not the official NASA kind. I'm just looking for where to start.Captain Janet:Well, maybe let's use the search words, 'Apply to be a NASA astronaut.'Eyezak:Wow, This is the link. I'm going to send my information in. Oh, a master's degree in engineering? I don't have that. Oh, but I am a pretty good pilot. Well, not really, but I am very good on my PlayStation 4. Any special talents? Well, I am an alien that ought to put me way ahead of the pack.Captain Janet:Well, certainly you have some interesting qualities for sure. I'll tell you what, help me get the hologram stage ready and you can ask our guest astronaut Don Thomas, some questions about how he became an astronaut.Eyezak:Perfect. And then I'll become an astronaut for sure.Captain Janet:Well becoming an astronaut can take years of preparation and applying.Eyezak:Years? Like how many years? I'm not getting any younger in alien years, or human years, or dog years.Captain Janet:Let's talk about that later. I think I hear the kids coming.Kids:Eyezak:Captain Janet, the crew is here. We can work on my astro thing later.Captain Janet:Perfect Eyezak! Sounds good. All right my JP space crew, happy to have you gather here at our hologram stage to hear from astronaut Dr. Don Thomas. We have some great snacks for you, so please help yourself, get cosmically comfy and then we'll beam up Astro Don, and talk about his experiences as an astronaut.Eyezak:Hunt Brothers Pizza is proud to support the JP AstroCast, with over 8,000 locations in convenience stores near you, finding a Hunt Brothers Pizza is easy as pie. Choose between Hunt Brothers Pizza's original crust or thin crust, and top your pizza with any of our 10 toppings at no extra charge. With that many options, there's sure to be a topping combo for everyone to enjoy a Hunt Brothers Pizza.Captain Janet:All right, everyone allow me to introduce our guest today. What an honor it is to have Dr. Don Thomas beam up today. Astronaut Don Thomas first got interested in becoming an astronaut when he watched the early astronauts like Allen Shepherd, John Glynn, and Neil Armstrong blast off into space and that made him want to follow in their footsteps, and 33 years later, he would do exactly that.Captain Janet:Don started his professional career as a senior member of the technical staff at the Bell Laboratories Engineering Research Center in Princeton, New Jersey, working on materials issues and semiconductor devices. Ooh, he's super smart. From there, he joined Lockheed's Sciences and Engineering in Houston, Texas as an engineer, working on the space shuttle program. Selected as a mission specialist astronaut in NASA's 13th group of astronauts in 1990, he is a veteran of four space shuttle missions, three aboard Columbia, and one aboard discovery.Captain Janet:He has spent 44 days in space, completing almost 700 orbits of the earth, and traveling 17.6 million miles in the process. After retiring from NASA in 2007, Don became the director of the Hackerman Academic of mathematics and science at Towson University, working to encourage and inspire young Maryland students about the wonders of STEM. Since 2015, Don has been engaged in public speaking, continuing his efforts to excite and inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, and astronauts and encouraging all students everywhere to reach for the stars. Most wonderfully astronaut Don Thomas always says yes to speaking to the students of Janet's planet. Welcome Astro Don, thank you for being here today.Kids:Hello Dr. Don!Dr. Don Thomas:Oh, that's the way to do it there.Captain Janet:Eyezak has a question. Eyezak, can you ask about how one becomes, what you want to become?Eyezak:Yeah. How do you become an astronaut?Dr. Don Thomas:Yeah, that's a great question, Eyezak. I wanted to do this since I was just six years old, and when I was six years old, back in 1961, that's when we launched the first American into space and I watched the launch at my kindergarten class there. And as soon as our astronaut was in space, I knew I wanted to do that as well. So this was the dream my whole life, and one thing I recognized early on was, it was going to be really difficult to do this. I knew there was a lot of competition, thousands of people apply to be astronauts and then just a small handful gets selected. So I knew the key, had to be working hard and doing my best in school every single day.Dr. Don Thomas:I never knew if I was good enough, if I could get selected, but I figured I'm going to give it a try, and to do that I got to work as hard as I possibly can and do my absolute best. So that's what I did all through school, and after high school, I went on to college and got my bachelor's degree in physics, one of the sciences. And then I went on to graduate school and got my master's and Ph.D. in engineering, just because I knew that would help me become an astronaut. I also learned to fly. I got my private pilot's license. I learned to skydive, and I taught a university course.Dr. Don Thomas:These are things that are not requirements to be an astronaut, but I noticed that they seemed to really help. I looked at the people that they were selecting, and most of the people had flying experience, skydiving or maybe had taught a university course. So I watched who NASA was selecting and tried to model my career, a little bit around those requirements and what everybody was doing that was getting selected, and the key also for me becoming an astronaut was persistence.Dr. Don Thomas:I dreamed of this when I was six, and I started applying to NASA when I was in my late twenties, and I applied four times, and I got turned down the first time, the second time and the third time. And I felt like giving up on it all, but I really wanted to do this. So the key in any dream you have in life is to never give up on it. You want to keep improving yourself, keep making yourself a better candidate. You don't have to be a A++, 100% perfect student, you just have to work hard and do your absolute best, and nobody will ever argue with that ever. And if you don't give up, you work hard, you keep going on your journey, on your dream. I'm convinced that you can become anything you want to in your lifetime.Captain Janet:One of my favorite stories is how deep they went into looking into Dr. Don's past when he applied to NASA. And wow, can you imagine being investigated by the FBI? Maybe you might think twice before you post something that isn't so nice on social media. Dr. Don, can you tell us more about that?Dr. Don Thomas:Yeah, that's a great question there Miss Janet. The third time that I applied, NASA invited me down to the Johnson Space Center for a week of medical testing in an interview. And out of the thousands of people that apply NASA selects a hundred individuals. They bring you to Houston and again, you spend a full week, most of it is on a very thorough medical exam, and then there's a one hour interview. The interview is very simple, they just ask me, "Hey, tell me what you did since high school? Why'd you major in physics." They're just asking... They want you to talk about yourself and asking general questions.Dr. Don Thomas:And I went through all that and it went really well, and then a week later, some of my friends started calling me up from across the country. And they were calling me up and they said, "Hey, Don, the FBI's been calling about you." So usually when the FBI is calling about you, it's either really good or really bad, right? In this case, it was really good. NASA was doing a security background check on me and they looked into my background. They checked the police records in every city, wherever I lived.Dr. Don Thomas:They met with all my former bosses, every company that I worked for, from high school on. They would talk to my bosses and ask, what kind of worker was I? How did I treat the customers and coworkers? And did I show up to work on time? And then they went up and down the streets in all the neighborhoods, wherever I lived talking to the neighbors, and asking what kind of person was I in the neighborhood? How did I treat people? And had we had social media, we didn't have social media 40 something years ago when I was going through this but had we had social media, can any of you guess what they might have been doing?Isaiah:Stalking it?Dr. Don Thomas:They would've been looking at every single post that I had put online there. So you have to be careful today, because you never know, maybe five years, 10 years, 15 years from now, you're applying for some incredible job, maybe to go to Mars or do something else really incredible. And they may do a security background check on you, and just know they're going to be looking at everything they can find, and all your posts are there forever. So you got to be really careful. Be smart about what you post today, because you never know in the future if somebody's going to be looking into that.Andrew:So I've heard that you've had an engineering career. So my question is, how did your engineering career compare to your astronaut career?Dr. Don Thomas:Good question, Andrew. I start it off as an engineer, I became an astronaut, and for the last 15 years, I've been working in education. I had a great job in engineering. I really loved the work that I was doing, but almost nothing compares to going in space. I worked as an engineer for six years at a company called Bell Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, and then three years I was working at the Johnson Space Center as an engineer before I became an astronaut. And I loved those careers. And I was just so thankful to be working at NASA as an engineer. I really loved it, but I'll tell you nothing can compare to being an astronaut and going in space.Dr. Don Thomas:And I did that for 17 years, and then I told you I've been in education for 15 years, and this is pretty close. There hasn't been a day since I left NASA that I've been sitting around saying, "Why did I leave? Why oh why did I ever leave?" I found a good career to do after the astronaut job, working with young students like yourself, working with great educators, like Miss Janet here. And it's really rewarding work for me. So, I think my favorite career would be the astronaut, the second favorite on the list would be working in education, and maybe the engineering was a close third there.Dharma:You mentioned that you got your private pilots license. So what was the best memory you've ever had about learning how to fly? And what's some advice you would give to a student pilot learning to fly like myself. I really look up to in your whole flight career.Dr. Don Thomas:Wow. That's fantastic. That's great. You're doing that Dharma. I'll tell you my memory of my very first flight. We took off, the instructor gave me the controls, and we started bouncing around. It seemed like a really rough day. And I asked the instructor, I said, "Is that me? Or is this turbulence?" He said, "Let go of the column." So I let go of the stick and the plane smoothed out. And then I took control again and I was bouncing around the sky.Dr. Don Thomas:So that's one of those funny moments that I remember. I also remember when I soloed the first time, I don't know if I had 20 or 30 hours, I don't know how many hours of flying time I had, but we were practicing touch and goes, coming down, landing, taking off, going around and doing more landings. And after one of those, the instructor just said, "Hey, go over to the control tower, let me out, you're going to go solo." And my jaw dropped, it's like, "Wow." And it was an amazing feeling knowing that, once I took off, there was only one person that could land that plane. That was me. I always had the instructor sitting next to me, and that made it a lot easier, if anything goes wrong, there's an instructor there to take over. But when you solo, you're there on your own. It's a little scary, but in incredibly exciting.Captain Janet:Dharma, do you have a favorite moment from your flight training so far?Dharma:I'm often very stressed, but when I get in the plane, just this calmness washes over me. So anytime I get to be in the plane is my favorite moment ever, just that I could be away from everything. So that's my favorite thing ever, I couldn't pick a single memory.Isaiah:Did you serve in the military, and is it a requirement for the astronauts?Dr. Don Thomas:Yeah Isaiah, good question. We have two types of astronauts that we select, pilot astronauts and then mission specialists. And almost all the pilot astronauts come out of the military, and even some of the mission specialists do as well, but I never served in the military. I just went the science route. When I was in high school, the United States launched a space station called Skylab, it was our first space station, and they were selecting science astronauts to fly on those missions to do science. And I loved science when I was your age, and I knew that that was my path.Dr. Don Thomas:Probably about two thirds of the astronauts they select, come out of the military, maybe a third or just strictly civilians. Typically, they select a lot of people out of the military.Eyezak:What makes a good crew mate?Dr. Don Thomas:Eyezak, good question. We are in space, like on the space shuttle on my missions, we're in a very small area for two weeks or more in space. So, the number one requirement is to really work as a team, to get along with other people. That's why NASA was carefully looking at, interviewing my neighbors to see how I treated people in the neighborhood and talking to my former bosses to see how did I get along with my coworkers. Because it's so important in space, almost everything we do in space, it's a team effort, and it takes everybody working together, and you have to learn to work with different personalities.Dr. Don Thomas:So I think that would be the number one thing to be a good crew member. You need to be a really good team player, and work together with the team.Isaiah:What was your favorite food in space?Dr. Don Thomas:You are talking with the very first human being to take pizza to space.Captain Janet:Famous even, right? You're famous for this, right?Dr. Don Thomas:I'm, famous for that. Yeah. I'm not famous for much else, but I'm famous for flying the first pizza in space. And I'll just tell you the story quickly, we're allowed to carry a sandwich with us out to the launchpad, on launch morning, because we may be laying on our backs out there for a few hours if there's weather to even longer than that. So they would let us take a sandwich, and most of the time you may take a Turkey sandwich or something like that. But on my third mission I asked instead of a Turkey sandwich, could I get a slice of pizza? Because I love pizza. And they said, "Yeah, we can do that." So they made me a little personal pizza. It was pepperoni, and we flew that in space. I did that both on my third and fourth missions.Dr. Don Thomas:So, we don't normally fly pizza, most of our food, as you probably know is freeze-dried food or military rations, MREs Meals Ready to Eat, that come out of the military. And most of that food is okay. When I get asked the question, what's my favorite space food? I say none of them. Because it isn't that good, and I would never go to a restaurant that was serving space food. I wouldn't do that. But it's okay, it's a lot like camping food.Dr. Don Thomas:My favorite overall of the food that I had in space, they had beef and barbecue sauce. That was one of the MREs, the military rations that were pretty good. And we had sweet and sour chicken, which was good up there too. I did make, before I flew the pizza in space, we made what we call space pizza and that would be taking a tortilla, and then I would spread some spaghetti and meat sauce on top of that, and then roll it up. And that was as close as I could get to a pizza.Andrew:What was the funniest thing you saw in space?Dr. Don Thomas:We don't do a lot of practical jokes. People always ask that, so tell me about the practical jokes you do in space. And it's like, "Boy, I don't have any stories like that." Because you don't want to go up to somebody and try to scare them going, "Boo." And have them jump and maybe hurt themselves. So, we don't do a lot of practical jokes up there, but one of the funnier things that I saw in space, is sometimes when the astronauts have free time, we goof around. I don't know if any of you guys goof around all, but sometimes the astronauts goof around and what we like to do, we play catch, up in space. And when you play catch here on earth, you're probably using a football or a baseball. In space we don't have anything like that, so what we'll do, we have one of the astronauts, we'll tuck themselves into a little ball and then two of us can play catch with that individual. And it's really funny to watch two people playing catch, with a third person going back and forth, just tucked into a little ball like that.Dharma:Was there any feeling that compared to looking back on earth while in space?Dr. Don Thomas:There is nothing like that. Before I first flew in space on my first mission, I trained to be an astronaut for four years for that flight, and in that four-year period, I probably had 40 or 50 hours of training on earth observation training. So, specialists would come in, show us pictures of the earth taken from space and tell us what we're looking at. So once we got to space, we would be very familiar with what we're looking at back on planet earth. So I thought, okay, I've seen it, I know exactly what it's going to look like when I get to space, but that wasn't the case. Once I got to space and I looked out the window the first time I just gasped, I went, "Oh wow." It's just so incredible when you see it with your own eyes.Dr. Don Thomas:The pictures that we take, the IMAX movies that you'll see of the earth, they don't do it justice. You see much more detail and subtle color variations with your eyes, than any of the pictures can take. So, it just doesn't do it justice, and every astronaut, the very first time they look out the window with their own eyes, you'll hear that gasp. And I'm gasping at how thin the atmosphere is from space. Our atmosphere is just a paper-thin layer around the earth and it's glowing blue, like a blue fluorescent light glowing. And then I'm all also gasping at the black sky. The sky in space is a darker black color than I've ever seen anywhere else. I've been caving, where we all turned off our lights, it's pitch black, but I think the sky in space is even darker, darker than that.Isaiah:How old were you when you went to space?Dr. Don Thomas:Okay. When I got selected to be an astronaut Isaiah, I was 35 years old and the first time I made it to space, I was 39 years old. And 39 years old, that's pretty much an old man, right Isaiah? You could be honest. That's okay. Is that an old man or not?Isaiah:Kind of.Dr. Don Thomas:Kind of. Yeah. And my point is, some of the careers you're going to pick, it's going to take time to get there. If you want to be a teacher, doctor, lawyer, scientist, professional athlete, it takes a lot of time after high school to get there. So don't be turned off by that, just keep working hard, keep following your dream, follow your path. You can accomplish anything you want to, don't worry about how much time it takes.Captain Janet:JP Space Crew I really want you to hear this. I think sometimes we think that things are going to happen instantly, the moment that we apply, and if we just put our best out there, there's going to be an instant yes. But as we listen to Dr. Don's story, he applied, and applied, and then applied for a third time and got another no. And Don, I just have to say, please tell them more about this experience of getting that third no, going to bed that night and then waking up the next with what decision.Dr. Don Thomas:I thought I got to do something else. NASA doesn't want me, and I thought I'll go to bed, get a good night's sleep and then in the morning when I wake up, I would put together a new plan for my career that did not involve being an astronaut. Because I had worked hard, I did my best, and just three times in a row NASA said no to me. I went to bed that night, the next morning when I woke up, the very first thought that popped into my head was, I still want to be an astronaut. And that dream never died as I slept that night.Dr. Don Thomas:So I just kind of dusted myself off and said, "Okay, what else can I do? I've learned to fly. I've learned to skydive. I've taught a university course." And just looking at who NASA was selecting and who they weren't selecting, it was pretty clear that I could increase my chances quite a bit by working down at the Johnson Space Center. So I moved, I quit my job. I moved down to Houston, got a job there with NASA, as an engineer and did that for three years and then became an astronaut.Dharma:What is your life advice for students?Dr. Don Thomas:My life advice for students, whatever your dream is in life, you don't have to be dreaming of being an astronaut, whatever your dream is, if you want to be a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, whatever, just work hard and always do your best. You want to do your best every single day, in all your subjects, because you never know when something you're learning today is going to help you out in the future. And the other thing is to never give up on that dream, keep working hard towards that goal. You'll get discouraged. You'll fail along the way, I failed three times, but you just got to pick yourself up and try to figure out, okay, what am I missing here? How can I make myself a better candidate?Dr. Don Thomas:But the key is to never give up. It takes hard work. It takes time, and never give up on your dream and you can accomplish anything you want to in your lifetime. Because I was just an average student in school, but I had a big, big dream and I was going to go for it and nothing was going to hold me back.Captain Janet:We are so glad that you stuck with it, that you didn't give up and that you persevered, otherwise we wouldn't be having this incredible conversation with you. To learn more about astronaut Don Thomas, you can visit his website, Ohioastronaut.com. And if you're really wanting to know more, read his book Orbit of Discovery available on Amazon.Dr. Don Thomas:Thanks. It's been great being with you, Isaiah, Andrew and Dharma, thanks for the great questions and Eyezak always great getting your questions as well. Thank you so much.Captain Janet:ByeKids:Bye.Eyezak:Wow. Astronauts are the best!Captain Janet:Indeed they are, and just like astronaut, Don said, NASA is looking for all kinds of people to be astronauts and especially those who are kind and know how to get along well with others. And Isaac, you definitely are one of the best crew members I've ever had.Eyezak:Wow, thanks Captain Janet. Hey, would you be willing to write me a recommendation letter?Captain Janet:You bet I would. Thanks everyone for listening to the JP AstroCast. Let your mind revolve around this thought, the universe is always expanding, let your dreams do the saying. And that's the view from the JP AstroCast. (Singing).

Transcript:Captain Janet:Welcome to the JP AstroCast, where we are traveling at the speed of thought. Today's episode is brought to you by Hunt Brothers Pizza. Ah, Eyezak, what are you doing?Eyezak:Hey, Captain Janet. I'm just hanging up some pictures on these walls. New crew, new beginnings, new surroundings.Captain Janet:But Eyezak, you're using nails?Isaac:How else would I hang a picture?Captain Janet:Well, I don't know, but you don't put nails in a spaceship. That might puncture our hull, and then we would lose oxygen, and we need that to breathe.Eyezak:Oh, didn't think of that. Hmm.Captain Janet:Did you just hang that picture up with your chewing gum?Isaac:Yep. Problem fixed. Right.Captain Janet:You know, this post-it was supposed to be something entirely different, so okay.Eyezak:That ought to do it. Do you think our new crew will like my decorations?Captain Janet:I'm sure they'll love it, Eyezak.EyezakOkay. Do you think they'll like me?Captain Janet:Of course, they will. Everybody loves you.Eyezak:Usually, but these kids are super genius smart. They read lots of books and do experiments and want to do awesome things in space. What if they don't think I'm smart enough to hang out with them?Captain Janet:Eyezak,I am sure they will love you. And here they come now.Kid 1:Hello.Kid 2:Hey everybody.Captain Jane:Glad you guys are here.Captain Janet:All right, crew. Welcome to Janet's planet and happy to have you aboard. First, unpack your gear in your cabins and then meet Eyezak and me in the galley for some lunch. And then we'll beam up Dr. John Grunsfeld to speak about his work on the Hubble telescope and the newest thing in space, the James Webb Space Telescope.Maggie:That's amazing.Captain Janet:See Eyezak, was that so bad? They're really cool and super accepting kids. I know new beginnings are tough, but you're going to be just fine. And one of the esteemed JP space crew.Isaac:Oh, I sure hope so. I hope I don't ask Dr. Grunsfeld any not-smart questions.Captain Janet:Oh, Isaac. Here's the thing. There are never any not-smart questions. Now let's just go get ready for lunch. Remember it's Hunt Brothers Pizza today.Isaac:Oh, my favorite! Hunt Brothers Pizza is proud to support the JP AstroCast with over 8,000 locations in convenience stores near you, finding a Hunt Brothers Pizza is easy as pie. Choose between Hunt Brothers Pizza's original crust or thin crust. And top your pizza with any of our 10 toppings at no extra charge. With that many options, there's sure to be a topping combo for everyone to enjoy a Hunt Brothers Pizza.Captain Janet:All right, everyone. Quiet, please. I would like to introduce our guest today. He is fittingly an astronaut and astronomer. Dr. John Grunsfeld hails from Highland Park, Illinois, received a Bachelor of Science Degree in physics from MIT, a Master of Science Degree, and a Doctor of Philosophy Degree in physics from the University of Chicago. Dr. Grunsfeld has four NASA space flight medals, three NASA exceptional service medals, a NASA distinguished service medal, and many other special honors.Captain Janet:Dr. Grunsfeld was selected by NASA in March 1992 and reported to the Johnson Space Center in August 1992. A veteran of four space flights, Dr. Grunsfeld has logged over 45 days in space, including five spacewalks, totaling 37 hours and 32 minutes. During STS 1 0 3, Dr. Grunsfeld and his crew installed new gyroscopes and scientific instruments and upgraded systems on the Hubble space telescope, which required three spacewalks. STS 1 0 9 successfully upgraded the Hubble space telescope, installing a new digital camera, a cooling system for the infrared camera, new solar arrays, and a new power system.Captain Janet:Those upgrades required a total of five spacewalks in five consecutive days. He's watched Hubble drift against the background of earth and stars. And he's guided new parts and instruments into the telescope and left it whole and healthy. He has helped the science missions of Hubble and envisioned science goals for the James Webb space telescope. And is now an Emeritus scientist at Godard Space Flight Center, working on Hubble observations of Jupiter's moon, Europa, and collaborating on the design of the next generation of space. serviceable telescopes. Dr. John Grunsfeld, what an honor to have you beam up today?Dr. John Grunsfeld:Well, it's absolutely a pleasure to be on. I'm excited because we are on the cusp of an astronomical revolution. And for me, my telescope is the Hubble space telescope. And what's interesting is about a third to a half of everybody who lives on planet earth has always lived in a world with the Hubble space telescope. And that's because it's been in orbit for 31 years coming up on 32. Your telescope though will be the James Webb space telescope. And you'll be learning about the new universe that the James Webb Space Telescope sees over the coming years. So thanks for having me on board.Evy:How or when did you know you wanted to be an astronomer and an astronaut?Dr. John Grunsfeld:When I was born, 1958, I know that's a long time ago, but there were no astronauts. In fact, the very world's first satellite had just been launched a year before, but as I was going to elementary school, we started sending astronauts off into space. First, there was the Mercury program where one astronaut would go into space at a time in a Mercury capsule. Then Gemini. And that's what I remember are the Gemini missions where two people at a time would go and then the Apollo missions to the moon. And I thought that was all exciting.Dr. John Grunsfeld:So about age six or seven, I was already a young scientist. I was interested in fossils and dinosaurs and insects. But once we moved out of the city lights, I started seeing the night sky and that's when I decided I wanted to be an astronomer. And my grandmother at that time gave me a small telescope. And I started looking at the planets and the stars. That's when I decided I wanted to be an astronomer. And it came from looking up at the stars and wondering if there were other planets out there that had people. Well, whatever people would be, aliens.Eyezak:Aliens! Well, I would think that my presence would more than confirm that question.Captain Janet:Yes. Maggie?Maggie:I just wanted to say what I thought was kind of interesting is my grandma gave me a telescope too, a few years ago for Christmas. So, that was cool.Captain Janet:Really? How old were you?Maggie:I think over three years ago.Captain Janet:That is pretty cool.Lucas:What is it like working on Hubble?Dr. John Grunsfeld:Oh, I love working on the Hubble space telescope. As you know, the Hubble space telescope was designed to be serviced. And that means to be fixed by people in space suits with the big gloves. First of all, doing a spacewalk is just the coolest thing anyway. You get to put on a spacesuit, you get to go outside of the space shuttle or space station and float around in your own spaceship, the suit that wraps around you. You get to see the earth just through your thin visor. So, that's really fun. Plus I'm an astronomer. And so we love telescopes. So I got to be the one to fix the Hubble space telescope. And some of the things we did were really hard. And so we had to figure out new tools and new ways of fixing things in orbit.Dr. John Grunsfeld:Here on planet Earth, I get to use the Hubble space telescope to observe, and that's not as much fun as working on the Hubble up in space because you put in a proposal and NASA approves it, and then you get your observations. It's basically downloading the data from a server. So you don't really get to play with the Hubble at all, but then you get the cool science and you get to see pictures of your Europa. And Jupiter. And that's pretty cool.Eyezak:Look, look, do you have a favorite image from Hubble?Dr. John Grunsfeld:I have a bunch of favorite images from Hubble because I went up three times to fix the Hubble space telescope. And my favorite image each time is the first image that Hubble takes. In the case of my first mission in 1999, it was the Eskimo Nebula. In 2002, it was an image called the Tadpole.Dr. John Grunsfeld:The Eskimo Nebula is a star that's dying. And as it dies, it kind of has these temper tantrums and flows off its outer envelope. And then that glows. And so this particular image looks kind of like an Eskimo in his big parka. The Tadpole is a picture of two galaxies that have collided and they're circling around each other and have thrown out a long tail of material. And in that long tail of gas and dust, new stars are for me.Dr. John Grunsfeld:And on this most recent mission, it was a picture taken a little later, but my favorite image is an image that widefield camera three, the new super-duper digital camera on Hubble, took of the Orion Nebula, the great Nebula, and Orion. And the reason I like these images so much is that it proves that we fixed the telescope and didn't break it. If we got home and they turned the telescope on and it couldn't take images anymore, I'd feel terrible.Kevin:I heard if the James Webb telescope doesn't deploy everything as it should. There's something you can make it do. I think it was called the shimmy?Dr. John Grunsfeld:The James Webb space telescope isn't really assembled completely when we launch it. And that's because it has to be folded up so that it fits in the rocket faring inside the rocket. And once the rocket's launched, it's like a transformer or undoing an origami or both, that it has to slowly unfold and pieces have to come out before it can be a real telescope. There are I think, 40 different mechanisms and 600 pulleys and 150 motors, and 178 individual actuators.Maggie:That's amazing.Dr. John Grunsfeld:And it's incredibly complex for all these things to work. And so if something like the secondary mirror, there's the big mirror, and then there's a little mirror above it. If that doesn't unfold all the way, they can't send me out to give it a shake or to pull it. Astronauts can't go near the telescope. We don't have the capability, but also it's too delicate.Dr. John Grunsfeld:And so what you can do is kind of drive the motors or use the spacecraft to shake it while you're trying to drive the motor and see if you can redeploy it. And so, we'll try everything and anything to make sure everything deploys.Evy:How long will take to unfold?Dr. John Grunsfeld:It's going to unfold in pieces. The very first thing that will unfold, which is actually just a few hours after launch are the solar panels. So you can see on Hubble, there are those big solar panels. Well, we actually put those on ourselves and then unfolded them. So just after launch a few hours after it separates from the launch vehicle, the solar panels will unfold. That'll give it the power it needs to drive all those other motors. Then a few days later, they'll start to unfold the sunshade, and this will be about the size of a tennis court. And so over the course of about two weeks, most of the deployments will be done, but it'll take about a full month before everything is fully deployed because they want to go slow and carefully.Captain Janet:How soon will we be able to get an image from the J W S T?Dr. John Grunsfeld:I don't know exactly what it is, but it's going to be a few months. And that's because not only does James Webb have to deploy, but it has 18 mirrors and those mirrors are aligned to make one big mirror. So they have to go through individually and adjust each mirror so that it works as one mirror and not 18 individual mirrors. And so it's going to take a few days for each mirror while they turn it, adjust it and maybe bend it until the whole telescope works as one.Dr. John Grunsfeld:So probably there'll be some really bad images that'll come out in about three months. I'm not even sure if NASA will show those, but probably they will. And over the next couple of months, those images will sharpen up until they're as good as Hubble. And, and that'll be at about six months. So commissioning of the telescope, which means making sure everything works takes about six months.Eyezak:How does the sun shield work?Dr. John Grunsfeld:The sun shield works like an umbrella. If it's a really bright sunny day and you forgot a hat, because you thought it was going to rain, you can always open your umbrella and use it as a sun shield. And so it works just like that. The problem is with a spacecraft is, there is some space junk out there. And if the space junk goes through your umbrella, there'd be a hole in it. And the sun would go through that hole. So in order to prevent that the James Webb space telescope actually has five layers in its umbrella in its sun shield so that if one layer gets punctured, it won't let the light through all the way to the telescope. The other effect of having those five layers is for thermal reasons, not just blocking the sunlight, but on the sunny side of the James Webb Space Telescope, it's about 200 degrees, really hot.Dr. John Grunsfeld:And with each subsequent layer, it acts like a Thermos bottle. So that on the cold side, the part that faces where the James Webb space telescope will be looking, the temperature will be about minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit, just 40 degrees above absolute zero. And so the sun shield does two things. One, it just blocks the light. You can't see the stars in the daytime and that's because the earth is so bright, the Hubble is so bright, that the camera had to be set to an exposure. And the same is true of our eyeballs that you can't see stars. You need to be at night to see stars so that you can have that sensitivity. The same is true for James Webb. So it has to block the sunlight. That's the main purpose. And the secondary purpose is to allow the telescope to get super cold so that it can see the very faint light from the early universe.Dr. John Grunsfeld:The James Webb space telescope will do so much more than looking back at the very early universe. It will also study the formation of stars, the formation of galaxies, and the time history of galaxies all the way up to the present. It'll look at planets in our own solar system. I'm really excited because one of its first targets will be Europa, around Jupiter, to look to see if it can see those plumes. And then the other big thing that James Webb is going to do is just going to look at the atmospheres of planets around nearby stars so that we can see if there's another planet out there that kind of looks like Earth. So I'm pretty excited about that too.Eyezak:I'm a little embarrassed to ask, but why is it called the James Webb Space Telescope?Captain Janet:Oh, you don't have to be embarrassed. Eyezak. Dr. Grunsfeld, could you please tell our young crew a bit more about James Webb?Dr. Grunsfeld:James Webb was the first, well, one of the first directors, we call them administrators, of NASA. And so he was in charge of trying to get people to the moon and back. But another thing that he did that people don't know a lot about is that he made sure that science was part of NASA and that it was a big part of NASA. And that astronauts would go to the moon and do science. And so in recognition of his contributions to scientific investigations of space, the NASA administrator in 2004, named the telescope after James Webb. So that's why it's called the James Webb space telescope.Captain Janet:I am excited about this new beginning. In reality, when you look through a telescope as an astronomer, a telescope is almost like a cosmic time machine. It's allowing you to see the past in part because of the way that light travels. Can you speak to how, whenever you look up at the stars on a starlet night that we're seeing into the past?Dr. John Grunsfeld:So how many of you have seen a bolt of lightning? And then five seconds later, you hear the thunder, right? Pretty much all of us, right? Why does the thunder take so long to get to us when we see the light almost right away?Ander:It's because light goes faster than sound.Dr. John Grunsfeld:Right. The speed of sound through the air is really pretty slow. It travels about a thousand feet every second. Whereas the speed of light goes 186,000 miles per second. And so the light comes to us really quick, whereas the sound takes longer, but light still has a speed. And that means when we look at the sun, for instance, or you don't look at the sun. When sunlight reaches us, it took about eight minutes to travel from the sun to the earth because it's 93 million miles away. Well, the sun is really close compared to the nearest star. It takes four years for the light to get to us from the nearest star, off of Centauri.Dr. John Grunsfeld:It takes millions of years for light to get from a galaxy to us. And the light that James Webb is going to look at will have taken at the very most distant, will have taken about 13 and a half billion years to get to us. And so when we look at some fuzzy galaxy, that was one of the first galaxies that ever assembled in the universe, the light that left that galaxy will have traveled for 13 and a half billion years to get to us. And that means when we see that light, we're looking at that galaxy as it was when it was just a baby galaxy. And so that allows us to look back in time, really because we have no other choice, it just took that long for the light to get to us.Evy:How long will the James Web telescope work?Dr. John Grunsfeld:Good question. It was designed to last at least five years. And we think if we operate it really carefully, it will last for about 10 or 11 years. And that's just because that's how much fuel it has onboard.Captain Janet:I will point out that NASA is notorious for underestimating the longevity of its hardware, like spirit or opportunity, both outlasted, original projections by a long shot.Speaker 8:You said that, in five to 10 years that the James Webb telescope will run out of fuel. Is there any chance that NASA will send any refueling missions to keep the satellite operating for longer?Dr. John Grunsfeld:It's possible. Right now, there are no plans, but when was in charge of the James Webb space telescope project, I insisted that they put some little details on the telescope. There are like targets so that a robot spacecraft would know where to grab if we did send a refueling spacecraft out there, but right now there are no plans to do that. I hope in the next five years or so, that refueling technology and capability and space will advance to the point where that seems like a very reasonable thing to do.Maggie:Do you think it'll answer the cosmic question of, "Are we alone?"Eyezak:Huh? Yeah. I'm getting really tired of people thinking I live on some made-up street in New York City. No one believes I'm a real alien.Dr. John Grunsfeld:Okay. We're here on earth and we are building these telescopes and we now know that virtually every star you look at in the night sky has planets around it. When I was growing up, we didn't know that I suspected there might be, but we didn't have any scientific proof. Now we have proof that other solar systems are out there. It just seems so likely that if there's life on earth, life should have started somewhere else. If life is a one in a million chance on a planet, there are 200 billion stars in our own galaxy, which means there are at least that many planets. Then there should be lots and lots of life. But if life is a one in a trillion chance, we might be the only life in the whole galaxy. And we just don't know. So that's one of the things that the James Webb space telescope is going to try to look at planets around nearby stars to see if we see atmospheres that could be habitable.Dr. John Grunsfeld:So if there's another planet, even if it's close and they put as much pollution in their atmospheres as we put in ours, there's a tiny chance we might detect that, but probably not. That's going to take a telescope that's a little bit bigger than the James Webb. I think that that question will be answered when we send a probe to Europa or Enceladus, or maybe on Mars, you'll find a microbial fossil, or maybe even a live Martian microbe when you're on Mars. Or with a next-generation telescope beyond James Webb, something that instead of being 20 feet across is 30 or 35 feet across, a 16-meter telescope might be able to answer that question.Captain Janet:Wow. Thank you so much, Dr. Grunsfeld, for beaming up to the JP spaceship to speak with our crew.Speaker 3:Thank you.Speaker 4:Thank you, Mr. Grunsfeld.Eyezak:Thank you.Dr. John Grunsfeld:My pleasure.Captain Janet:We had a great time speaking with you. Would you consider coming back again?Dr. John Grunsfeld:Sure. My pleasure.Eyezak:Wow! Smart and brave and nice?Captain Janet:He truly is a gem. And speaking of gems, let's talk about the newest gem that NASA has launched, the James Webb telescope. December 25th, 2021 may become known as the day. The universe changed from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself. Congratulations to the many amazing humans at NASA, the European space agency, the Canadian space agency, and Arian space. Listen to the launch countdown from Kuru, Guyana, and an excited Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for NASA science mission directorate, talk about the joy of watching 20 plus years of work finally take flight.ESA Mission Control Manager:[foreign language 00:23:53].NASA:We have lift off.Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen:Whenever we look at launches, they're both an ending in the beginning. They're an ending of an engineering project on the ground and with many amazing hours and challenges that are there. But they're a beginning. JWST is the beginning of one of the most amazing missions that humanity has conceived. And I'm so excited to look forward to the next setup of this telescope and all the signs to come. Thanks to everybody. This is what we can do when we come together as one, humans. It's just absolutely incredible.Captain Janet:I love Dr. Zurbuchen's sentiment, that the engineering marble that is the James Webb telescope, is what can happen when we all come together for space exploration. 100 times more powerful than the 31-year-old Hubble telescope, Webb can see back in time, all the way to the let there be light moment. That instant when a cold dark universe ignited into stars and Webb, made perchance, put an end to some of our biggest cosmic questions. We just can't wait to see the James Webb space telescope unfold the universe for all of us.Captain Janet:So you see Eyezak, just like with the JWST, new beginnings can be scary, but they are also exciting.Eyezak:You're right. I'm excited to explore the universe with this awesome new crew.Captain Janet:Thank you, everyone. For listening to the JP AstroCast, let your mind revolve around this thought.Eyezak:The universe is always expanding.Captain Janet:Let your mind do the same.Captain Janet and EyezaK:And that's the view from the JP AstroCast.The JP ASTROCAST, a galaxy of fun.

The James Webb Space telescope—decades in the making—finally launched from Earth recently and promises to unlock some of the deepest mysteries of the universe. Who better about this milestone in astronomy than astronaut veteran of 5 space flights and former NASA science administrator, John Grunsfeld. Grunsfeld became known as the Hubble Telescope's repair man, logging more than 58 hours in 5 space walks and three repair trips to the Hubble before being the last person to touch it in 2009. We talk about the risks of space flight, and I ask John how he felt flying in the space shuttle after the 2nd total crew loss in the 2003 Columbia accident. "The weakness of the shuttle which we always known is the heat protection. You're enveloped in a 2000 degree plasma. If that thermal protection is compromised then it's a very bad day." Would we solve the environmental crisis that we face if world leaders had the chance to see the earth's fragile bubble from space, the way John has?   We talk about how human emotions play a role in scientific research bias and the astonishing speed of technological development of the last 200 years. And finally I ask this NASA insider for the honest truth about UAPs. Note: If you love astronomy you'll also want to listen to my interview of Nobel Laureate and Science Director for the James Webb telescope, John Mather, in Season One.

Dr. John Grunsfeld is a former NASA astronaut who flew 5 missions on the Space Shuttle, including 3 to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. He also has a PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Chicago, and also served as NASA's Associate Administrator for Science. https://terryvirts.com/ Twitter: @AstroTerry Instagram: astro_terry

Veteran of 3 Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions, NASA Space Shuttle Astronaut Dr John Grunsfeld discuses HST's discoveries, its contributions to science & education,...and his HST servicing mission experiences that have enable Hubble to perform longer, look deeper into Universe...& with more clarity than it's original design.

Former astronaut and NASA Associate Administrator John Grunsfeld is often called the Hubble Repairman. He made three space shuttle trips to the space telescope to repair and upgrade it. Now he looks back over three decades of science, beautiful images, and inspiration delivered by the HST. Rubber asteroids are back, and you might win one in the new What’s Up space trivia contest. Great links, including to Mat Kaplan’s live interview with John Grunsfeld, are at https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2020/0527-2020-john-grunsfeld-hubble-30th.html

John Grunsfeld closes our coverage of the Space Foundation’s 32nd annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. We also meet the leaders of the New Generation Space Leaders Program.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Grunsfeld, the former astronaut who now heads NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, thinks that traveling light could get people to Mars by the 2040s  

Janet Jansson is the Senior Staff Scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her expertise is in molecular microbial ecology and “omics” approaches with a focus on soil, marine sediment and human gut environments.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, [00:00:30] a biweekly 30 minute program, bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. I'm your host, Brad Swift. Today's interview is with Janet Jansen, UC Berkeley, adjunct professor of molecular microbial ecology. She is a senior staff scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and president elect of the International Society of microbial [00:01:00] ecology. Her expertise is in the area of molecular microbial ecology and Omix approaches with a focus on soil, marine sediment and human gut environments. Today she talks about the human microbiome project, the Earth microbiome project and American Gut, a crowdsourced research project. Onto that interview. Janet Jansen, welcome to spectrum. Hi, what'd you give us a short description [00:01:30] of microbial ecology and give some examples of complex microbial communities. Speaker 4: Sure. So microbial ecology is the study of micro organisms in the environment and their interactions with other microorganisms, plants, animals, that particular habitat that they happen to be living in. So it's really not just studying a single microorganism, but a community of microorganisms. Uh, so some examples [00:02:00] of complex communities. Well, the most complex ecosystem is soil and that's because it has such a diversity of microorganisms and it's really packed full of microbes. So there's so many microorganisms living in soil. So that combined with the diversity makes it a very complex system. The human ecosystem is very complex. Our own intestines have a very complex microbial community. [00:02:30] The oceans or other examples, sediments. So I think this is my community college that you had to think differently than one would when you study organisms in pure culture and their physiology is much more complex Speaker 3: and microbial research seems to have jumped in stature in the past few years. You have a broader view of it than I do. What's your take on the trajectory of microbial research? I think Speaker 4: [00:03:00] particularly the microbial ecology part has increased in stature recently. Microbiology as a field has been around for a long time. But the thing that I think has really boosted the field of microbial ecology is the advent of these new technologies, the new tools to be able to really look at these complex communities and understand them. Until I guess it was about the 1980s there wasn't [00:03:30] any way to really look at these micro organisms in soil. Again, I'll use that as an example, unless you cultivated them onto augur media or looked at them in a microscope. So when the field was limited to looking at what was possible to cultivate, that was only a fraction of the microorganisms that live in soil habitat. So probably fewer than 10% could be cultivated. So the majority of the organisms that were there, [00:04:00] nobody knew anything about them. Their identities or their functions were really unknown. Speaker 4: So it was considered like a black box eco system. But after the late, I guess the 80s and into the 90s there were the developments in DNA extraction techniques. So it was possible to extract DNA from soil and then came PCR amplification methods and methods to be able to amplify specific [00:04:30] pieces of DNA that you had extracted that made it possible to actually study soil microorganisms without cultivating them. And now we have these deep sequencing technologies, so it's really made it much easier to do very deep analysis of these communities and not have to rely on cultivation. Speaker 3: The human microbiome project is in its last year. What were the goals of it and can you speak to that about what the goals were and what you think [00:05:00] you've found out? Speaker 4: The first stage of the h and p was to sequence different bodies sites and understand which micro organisms are residing in different sites in the human body. And so this was looking at a large cohort of humans, healthy humans, and just basically understanding who are the microbial inhabitants of the human body. So that part is winding down. We have that knowledge now. We know that there are different micro organisms that live on your skin, [00:05:30] then in in your gut for examples and also in the oral cavity. So these organisms are specialized to live in different parts of the human body and there are differences between different individuals though. So that means that each human has their own individual microbiome and it can almost be used as a fingerprint. So that was a successfully completed project. The next stage there has been a recent call too, I think it's even called h and p two [00:06:00] to go the next step. So to use other kinds of methods to look at not only which microorganisms are there, but what are they doing. So this would be looking at the functional capabilities of the human microbiome. Another thing that is still ongoing with the h and p is looking at how does disease influence the human microbiome and vice versa. What is the correlation with the microorganisms living with us and disease? And it seems like there are many different links between many [00:06:30] human disease that send the human microbiome Speaker 3: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 5: Our guest today is microbiologists, Janet Jansen. In the next segment she talks about the microbiome and disease correlation. This is k a l x, Berkeley. Speaker 3: Well, and often in science there's a lot of correlation [00:07:00] that goes on and sometimes you get fooled by the correlation. Sometimes you don't. Are there strategies you use in terms of validating what you think correlates? Speaker 4: Oh, correlations are can be quite challenging. Definitely. So, um, that's an interesting question because then one of the things that is very tricky is if you find a difference in an environmental sample, for example, with the civic treatment or in a human with disease often all we have, [00:07:30] we can then say, well it's correlated to this organism that is higher in abundance or it's correlated to this protein that is higher or lower in abundance. That's a little frustrating. So that the next step, and we're not quite there yet in this field, would be then to say, okay, go beyond correlations and then actually do the proof, you know, to take that organism like Cox postulates, you then prove that this correlation that you see is actually [00:08:00] occurring. But it's difficult with these complex samples, like I was saying before, because you have to move away from the complex environment where you have all these different factors. Speaker 3: So the complexity defeats you in a way because you can't isolate the specific from the general. Exactly. Exactly. And so within this correlation of disease, are there particular diseases that seem to be top priorities in a sense or are most likely to be effected by [00:08:30] the microbiome? An example of Crohn's diseases, Speaker 4: Crohn's disease is the example. I would give us a very clear example and also other inflammatory bowel diseases where there has already been established a link between the gut microbiome and the disease. The details are still under investigation, but there is a difference in the micro organisms that inhabit the intestine in individuals that have Crohn's disease compared to healthy. [00:09:00] So that's known. Speaker 3: And is that the case with ulcers as well? Or they were sort of one of the first, it seems that had this association with the microbiome in the gut, Speaker 4: right. So systemic ulcers, there was a Nobel prize awarded for the discovery of [inaudible] go back to Pylori as the cause of ulcers in the stomach. And so that's a good example, this specific microorganism that can contribute to a disease. And then of course a lot of medications were subsequently [00:09:30] developed to dampen hillcoat back to pylori through new research. We know that there is a considerable diversity of microorganisms in the stomach that people weren't aware of before using these techniques and also in your teeth and then in the oral cavity. There's a very large diversity. I should mention that one of the things that is a really hot topic right now is the link between the brain and the human microbiome, including [00:10:00] the gut microbiome because it's known that some of the metabolites that are produced by these intestinal microbes can pass the blood barrier and then migrated essentially in impact the brain, so some current research is looking at the link between autism and schizophrenia, these kinds of things. Then I think that's really interesting. That's one future direction of the field. Speaker 3: The new initiative in brain mapping exactly [00:10:30] now ties that together. That would be great. At least the findings here was just a new funding. Speaker 4: Yeah, I know. I don't know if they've really decided to make that link for funding, but it probably will come. Speaker 3: Can you talk a bit about American gut and how it's set up to help people figure out their own microbiome? Speaker 4: Sure. So the American get is, it's a relatively new way of doing research [00:11:00] is crowdsourcing. And the idea is that if a person such as myself is interested in knowing quip, my gut microbiome is I can pay a small amount, it's like $100 to get my sample sequence. So that is the way that the project is funded. And so this project, it had a funding goal, I think it was $300,000 to be able to launch the sequencing. And so there was the campaign [00:11:30] and it was sent out to the community and through connections such as Facebook and another with this nice little carrot that if you pay $100 you can get your microbiome. And in addition to gut, it could be your skin sample, oral cavity, your pet. And so this idea really caught on and is a good example of crowdsourcing for funding. Speaker 3: And how are people able to leverage that information? [00:12:00] Is there some characterization that you do as well? Speaker 4: The data that they get back is, it's different kinds of information. So first which micro organisms do I have? That's kind of fun to know. It's sort of like 23 and me where you get information back about which genes you have in, which kind of markers for different things. So depending on your microbial community composition, you may have markers that are more indicative of health, certain kinds of diets like [00:12:30] vegetarian or a protein rich diet, even obesity, there's certain microbial indicators of obesity. So that's just interesting. Another thing that is valuable for the consumer, the person who does this is that you can compare your microbiome to everybody else's. It's all anonymous of course. And nobody knows who's this, who's, but you have your own data and can see how your microbiome fits into a pattern. So do you cluster [00:13:00] with obese people or with a disease type microbiome or a certain kind of eating pattern Speaker 3: and are these online tools that you have available through American gut for people to do this kind of characterization? Speaker 4: So the analysis has to be done by the actual scientists that are doing the samples because it's still quite elaborate and involves a lot of bioinformatics. So currently it's not possible [00:13:30] to do a lot of that on your own, but still to get an output, the actual data, the results of the analysis is what the individual can get through this project. Speaker 2: [inaudible] you were listening to spectrum on a k a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Janet Jensen. In the next segment she talks about the earth microbiome project. Speaker 3: [00:14:00] Can you talk a bit about the earth microbiome project and maybe differentiate it from the human project? Speaker 4: Yeah, sure. So the Earth microbiome project, which I'll call the emp, is, um, instead of just looking at humans, it's including basically all of earth. So it has a very lofty goal of understanding earth microbial diversity. That project also relies [00:14:30] on collaborators, so it's sort of a crowdsourcing project as well, but limited to the scientific community. So the way that Earth microbiome project works is if a collaborator has an interesting set of samples, for example, from the deep sea or from Yellowstone hot springs that have the required kinds of environmental data, so Ph, nutrients, things like that. Then they can [00:15:00] send an email to the steering committee and say, well, would this study be of interest to the earth microbiome project to the ENP? And then the steering committee looks through the data and decides whether the environmental data is sufficient and if the samples are filling a hole and providing novel information and if so the samples are accepted and the sequencing is done without any costs to the investigator. That's the win win scenario for the emp [00:15:30] because the investigator does of course provide the funding for the study and collection of the samples and the emp provides the funding for the sequencing. Now the funding for emp is also kind of fuzzy because it's through different kinds of companies that have supported by providing regions or equipment and then in turn they get advertisement through the emp that they're sponsors of the project. And so that [00:16:00] also seems to be quite successful. Speaker 3: And the intent again to build a catalog Speaker 4: basically, yes, to build a catalog to find out who's there and are there patterns. The nice thing about heading samples from so many different disparate environments is that you can see, well does this particular microorganism occur across different kinds of environments or is it really endemic only to one kind of habitat? And if you tweak the environment, [00:16:30] for example, with climate change to have increases or losses of certain members of the community that are predictive, one of the aims is to have something like a Google map and then you can highlight all of this sort of organism type in pink. If you click on a button and see where they are localized around the globe. But then if the climate increases by five degrees, then you can click another button and see what happens. Does that organism increase or decrease there? Does another microbial typing [00:17:00] green become more abundant? Speaker 3: The methods you use that you apply to your research. So often we're results oriented with science or at least to the public, you know, what did you find out? It becomes more important than how did you find it out? Can you give us some sense of your methods to doing the research that you do? Speaker 4: I think that the methods, as I mentioned earlier, that's been a limitation to my particular field, but that [00:17:30] also makes it kind of fun because we're always trying to develop better methods and new methods to be able to investigate these systems. And so it's quite challenging, which is something I like. So the method in my own lab that we're developing are different kinds of what I call omix quoting. Oh, mixed methods. So that's everything from sequencing everything, which would be metogenomic x to extracting RNA and [00:18:00] sequencing that. That would be looking at express genes. That's Meta transcriptomics or extracting all the proteins and looking at that. That would be metaproteomics. You can even do the metabolites metabolomics. So these are the current methods that are stated. The art right now for looking at these kinds of complex communities. Speaker 6: [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 5: this is k [00:18:30] a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. I'm Brad swift. Our guest is professor Janet Jansen, microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley lab and UC Berkeley. Speaker 3: In your experience working on these large projects and also then working in small projects, I'm curious about the, the idea of big science versus small science. You know, the individual scientists toiling [00:19:00] away versus the big group that gets together and decides what they'll do and [inaudible]. Speaker 4: So personally I, I'm a big science kind of person. I definitely appreciate the value of a small science than I do have some smaller targeted projects. I moved to Berkeley lab about five years ago. I was a professor in Sweden before that and my funding was more individual, smaller projects in Sweden. But uh, one of the reasons I came to Berkeley lab was because of the big team science. I really [00:19:30] like that I'm a super collaborator and I can see the value of having people with different skills working together to tackle some really big problems. [inaudible] Speaker 3: and I suppose the culture then becomes really important to the group, the dynamics, the sharing, the openness. And how does that happen, do you think? Have you seen it work well and work badly? Speaker 4: Oh, it's very important. So you had to choose your collaborations as well and sometimes if they, the dynamics [00:20:00] aren't working, then it might be time to rethink the collaborations and revise it in a certain way. But ideally you have people that are so motivated that they are, I know that start delisting, but in the best case situation you have people that are so motivated towards a specific goal that it works quite well. There is an example of one project that is ongoing right now at the lab. It's called the next generation ecosystem [00:20:30] experiment in the Arctic, which is looking at the impact of climate change on permafrost communities. And that's the big doe funded project that involves probably hundreds of researchers at different laboratories, different doe laboratories and universities that are all focusing on one location in Barrow, Alaska, using all of the different tools available at the national labs and expertise at universities as well. Speaker 3: [00:21:00] And how long has that been going on? Speaker 4: It's been about a year and a half. It's a new project, but I'd like it because it has the necessary funding. Of course, when you spread it out, you know, everybody gets a little chunk of it, but it enables incredible things to be done at that site. It's just so much fun to go to these meetings and hear about the lidar sensing team and the modeling team and the hydrology team with their sleds and the geochemists go [00:21:30] in and my part is the microbial ecology. We get deep cores and we extract DNA and sequence them. It's just really a lot of fun Speaker 3: and there's a lot of emphasis on trying to encourage young people to get into science, technology, math. Is there really an opportunity in this field for, for people? Speaker 4: I have to say that right now it's a huge opportunity and there aren't enough persons educated in this field [00:22:00] to be able to fill these growing companies that are starting up. I'm getting several calls from companies that are asking for postdocs from my lab if they're interested in joining and if I were starting right now as a biologist, I would definitely look into bioinformatics and also the metagenome mix fields because these are the sorts of persons that there aren't that many yet. It's not that widespread yet [00:22:30] and there are companies that really need that expertise. Speaker 3: Would you characterize both of those briefly? Speaker 4: The bioinformatics would be more of generation of software algorithms, ways to look at these big data that are generated from different kinds of biological samplesSpeaker 3: and that might include visualization as well as other normal text output kind of a thing. Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely. Everything from the database [00:23:00] management to the visualization of the data and things in between. The statistical analysis, that's a huge growth area and I predict this is going to continue because the data is just getting bigger. It's not going away from that a genomics and these other kinds of omix areas. I think that that would also involve some computing skills, but in addition to differentiate it from bioinformatics, more of the combination with lab skill. Speaker 3: [00:23:30] Janet Johnson. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Speaker 4: Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Speaker 3: Well, we'd like to mention a few of the science and technology events locally over the Speaker 7: next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky joins me for the calendar. The Saturday the science of cow lecture will be given by Dr Nadir Mirabal Fathi. The lecture is entitled, connecting infant decimal to infinity, the search for dark matter. [00:24:00] He will speak about a new class of elementary particles known as weakly interacting massive particles or Wimps to resolve inconsistencies in our understanding of the nature at both extreme, large and small scales and how they are connected together. He will also explore the experimental efforts to detect these particles. Interest real laboratories. Nadir r Mirabal Fathi earned Phd in elementary particle physics and cosmology at the University of Paris. He did his postdoctoral [00:24:30] studies at UC Berkeley and has been an associate research physicist at UC Berkeley since 2008 the lecture is Saturday, May 18th at 11:00 AM in room 100 of the genetics and plant biology building. Makerfair. The self-proclaimed greatest show and tell on earth is this weekend, May 18th and 19th at San Mateo fairgrounds. Speaker 7: We talked last year with Tony to rose and Michelle, who? Bianca. Two of the founders of young makers about [00:25:00] the maker fair. Find our interview with them@itunesuortinyurl.com slash calix spectrum one day prices range from $15 to $30. Highlights of this year's maker fair include KQ [inaudible] kitchen sisters with their new radio series, the making of what people make in the bay area and why NASA makers with astronauts, John Grunsfeld, Dennis Bartell's discussing building the new exploratorium, [00:25:30] how to tie a perfect neck tie with Nobel prize physicist Arno Penzias, DIY research with Tekla labs and amazing science. Tornadoes, smoke rings and more. For more information, visit makerfair.com that's maker F A I r e.com the long nose Stuart brand. It's presenting on reviving extinct species on Tuesday, May 21st [00:26:00] at the San Francisco Jazz Center, two Oh one Franklin Street at 7:30 PM tickets are $15 he'll summarize the progress of current de extinction projects including the Europe's Oryx Australia is gastric brooding frog and America's passenger pigeon. Speaker 7: He'll also discuss some of the ancient ecosystem revival projects such as Pleistocene Park in Siberia. New Genomic technology can reassemble the genomes of extinct species [00:26:30] whose DNA is still recoverable from museum specimens and some fossils. Sorry. Jurassic Park fans. No dinosaurs. It is hoped that the jeans unique to the extinct animals can brought back to life in the framework of the genome of the closest living relative. For more information, visit long now.org now Rick Karnofsky and I present to news stories. Alberto Saul from Brown University and colleagues [00:27:00] published an article in science on May 9th that suggests the water that is on the moon came from Earth. The team measured the relative abundance of deuterium that is heavy hydrogen that contains an extra neutron to hydrogen in the water, found in small bubbles of volcanic glass and Melt inclusions in moon rocks. They found the ratio was very similar to the ratio found on earth and from carbonaceous chondrites meteorites that are thought to have supplied [00:27:30] the earth with water. Speaker 7: Higher. Deuterium levels were expected by some who had hypothesized the comments from the Kuyper belt in Oort cloud could have been the source of the Moon's water. If the moon's water did come from Earth, it is likely the earth already had this water when the moon was formed. Some four and a half billion years ago when the earth and another Mars sized planet collided. However, such a collusion may have been hot enough to vaporize the lunar water. There is sir now [00:28:00] debating whether it may have been retained because of the earth's gravity or because the moon shared some of the earth's high temperature atmosphere when it formed pregnant mothers exposure to the flu was associated with a nearly four fold increased risk that their child would develop bipolar disorder in adulthood. In a study funded by the National Institutes of health. The findings add to mounting evidence of possible shared underlying causes and illness processes [00:28:30] with schizophrenia, which some studies have also linked to prenatal exposure to influenza, principal investigator Allen Brown and MD mph of Columbia University says prospective mothers should take common sense preventative measures such as getting flu shots prior to and in early stages of pregnancy and avoiding contact with people who are symptomatic in spite of public health recommendations, only a relatively small fraction of such women [00:29:00] get immunized. Speaker 7: The weight of evidence now suggests that benefits of the vaccine likely outweigh any possible risk to the mother or the newborn. Brown and colleagues reported their findings online. May 8th, 2013 in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry Speaker 2: [inaudible]. The music heard during the show is written and produced by Alex Simon. [00:29:30] Thank you for listening to spectrum. Had comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address is spectrum dot k a l s@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Janet Jansson is the Senior Staff Scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Her expertise is in molecular microbial ecology and “omics” approaches with a focus on soil, marine sediment and human gut environments.TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, [00:00:30] a biweekly 30 minute program, bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Good afternoon. I'm your host, Brad Swift. Today's interview is with Janet Jansen, UC Berkeley, adjunct professor of molecular microbial ecology. She is a senior staff scientist in the Earth Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and president elect of the International Society of microbial [00:01:00] ecology. Her expertise is in the area of molecular microbial ecology and Omix approaches with a focus on soil, marine sediment and human gut environments. Today she talks about the human microbiome project, the Earth microbiome project and American Gut, a crowdsourced research project. Onto that interview. Janet Jansen, welcome to spectrum. Hi, what'd you give us a short description [00:01:30] of microbial ecology and give some examples of complex microbial communities. Speaker 4: Sure. So microbial ecology is the study of micro organisms in the environment and their interactions with other microorganisms, plants, animals, that particular habitat that they happen to be living in. So it's really not just studying a single microorganism, but a community of microorganisms. Uh, so some examples [00:02:00] of complex communities. Well, the most complex ecosystem is soil and that's because it has such a diversity of microorganisms and it's really packed full of microbes. So there's so many microorganisms living in soil. So that combined with the diversity makes it a very complex system. The human ecosystem is very complex. Our own intestines have a very complex microbial community. [00:02:30] The oceans or other examples, sediments. So I think this is my community college that you had to think differently than one would when you study organisms in pure culture and their physiology is much more complex Speaker 3: and microbial research seems to have jumped in stature in the past few years. You have a broader view of it than I do. What's your take on the trajectory of microbial research? I think Speaker 4: [00:03:00] particularly the microbial ecology part has increased in stature recently. Microbiology as a field has been around for a long time. But the thing that I think has really boosted the field of microbial ecology is the advent of these new technologies, the new tools to be able to really look at these complex communities and understand them. Until I guess it was about the 1980s there wasn't [00:03:30] any way to really look at these micro organisms in soil. Again, I'll use that as an example, unless you cultivated them onto augur media or looked at them in a microscope. So when the field was limited to looking at what was possible to cultivate, that was only a fraction of the microorganisms that live in soil habitat. So probably fewer than 10% could be cultivated. So the majority of the organisms that were there, [00:04:00] nobody knew anything about them. Their identities or their functions were really unknown. Speaker 4: So it was considered like a black box eco system. But after the late, I guess the 80s and into the 90s there were the developments in DNA extraction techniques. So it was possible to extract DNA from soil and then came PCR amplification methods and methods to be able to amplify specific [00:04:30] pieces of DNA that you had extracted that made it possible to actually study soil microorganisms without cultivating them. And now we have these deep sequencing technologies, so it's really made it much easier to do very deep analysis of these communities and not have to rely on cultivation. Speaker 3: The human microbiome project is in its last year. What were the goals of it and can you speak to that about what the goals were and what you think [00:05:00] you've found out? Speaker 4: The first stage of the h and p was to sequence different bodies sites and understand which micro organisms are residing in different sites in the human body. And so this was looking at a large cohort of humans, healthy humans, and just basically understanding who are the microbial inhabitants of the human body. So that part is winding down. We have that knowledge now. We know that there are different micro organisms that live on your skin, [00:05:30] then in in your gut for examples and also in the oral cavity. So these organisms are specialized to live in different parts of the human body and there are differences between different individuals though. So that means that each human has their own individual microbiome and it can almost be used as a fingerprint. So that was a successfully completed project. The next stage there has been a recent call too, I think it's even called h and p two [00:06:00] to go the next step. So to use other kinds of methods to look at not only which microorganisms are there, but what are they doing. So this would be looking at the functional capabilities of the human microbiome. Another thing that is still ongoing with the h and p is looking at how does disease influence the human microbiome and vice versa. What is the correlation with the microorganisms living with us and disease? And it seems like there are many different links between many [00:06:30] human disease that send the human microbiome Speaker 3: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 5: Our guest today is microbiologists, Janet Jansen. In the next segment she talks about the microbiome and disease correlation. This is k a l x, Berkeley. Speaker 3: Well, and often in science there's a lot of correlation [00:07:00] that goes on and sometimes you get fooled by the correlation. Sometimes you don't. Are there strategies you use in terms of validating what you think correlates? Speaker 4: Oh, correlations are can be quite challenging. Definitely. So, um, that's an interesting question because then one of the things that is very tricky is if you find a difference in an environmental sample, for example, with the civic treatment or in a human with disease often all we have, [00:07:30] we can then say, well it's correlated to this organism that is higher in abundance or it's correlated to this protein that is higher or lower in abundance. That's a little frustrating. So that the next step, and we're not quite there yet in this field, would be then to say, okay, go beyond correlations and then actually do the proof, you know, to take that organism like Cox postulates, you then prove that this correlation that you see is actually [00:08:00] occurring. But it's difficult with these complex samples, like I was saying before, because you have to move away from the complex environment where you have all these different factors. Speaker 3: So the complexity defeats you in a way because you can't isolate the specific from the general. Exactly. Exactly. And so within this correlation of disease, are there particular diseases that seem to be top priorities in a sense or are most likely to be effected by [00:08:30] the microbiome? An example of Crohn's diseases, Speaker 4: Crohn's disease is the example. I would give us a very clear example and also other inflammatory bowel diseases where there has already been established a link between the gut microbiome and the disease. The details are still under investigation, but there is a difference in the micro organisms that inhabit the intestine in individuals that have Crohn's disease compared to healthy. [00:09:00] So that's known. Speaker 3: And is that the case with ulcers as well? Or they were sort of one of the first, it seems that had this association with the microbiome in the gut, Speaker 4: right. So systemic ulcers, there was a Nobel prize awarded for the discovery of [inaudible] go back to Pylori as the cause of ulcers in the stomach. And so that's a good example, this specific microorganism that can contribute to a disease. And then of course a lot of medications were subsequently [00:09:30] developed to dampen hillcoat back to pylori through new research. We know that there is a considerable diversity of microorganisms in the stomach that people weren't aware of before using these techniques and also in your teeth and then in the oral cavity. There's a very large diversity. I should mention that one of the things that is a really hot topic right now is the link between the brain and the human microbiome, including [00:10:00] the gut microbiome because it's known that some of the metabolites that are produced by these intestinal microbes can pass the blood barrier and then migrated essentially in impact the brain, so some current research is looking at the link between autism and schizophrenia, these kinds of things. Then I think that's really interesting. That's one future direction of the field. Speaker 3: The new initiative in brain mapping exactly [00:10:30] now ties that together. That would be great. At least the findings here was just a new funding. Speaker 4: Yeah, I know. I don't know if they've really decided to make that link for funding, but it probably will come. Speaker 3: Can you talk a bit about American gut and how it's set up to help people figure out their own microbiome? Speaker 4: Sure. So the American get is, it's a relatively new way of doing research [00:11:00] is crowdsourcing. And the idea is that if a person such as myself is interested in knowing quip, my gut microbiome is I can pay a small amount, it's like $100 to get my sample sequence. So that is the way that the project is funded. And so this project, it had a funding goal, I think it was $300,000 to be able to launch the sequencing. And so there was the campaign [00:11:30] and it was sent out to the community and through connections such as Facebook and another with this nice little carrot that if you pay $100 you can get your microbiome. And in addition to gut, it could be your skin sample, oral cavity, your pet. And so this idea really caught on and is a good example of crowdsourcing for funding. Speaker 3: And how are people able to leverage that information? [00:12:00] Is there some characterization that you do as well? Speaker 4: The data that they get back is, it's different kinds of information. So first which micro organisms do I have? That's kind of fun to know. It's sort of like 23 and me where you get information back about which genes you have in, which kind of markers for different things. So depending on your microbial community composition, you may have markers that are more indicative of health, certain kinds of diets like [00:12:30] vegetarian or a protein rich diet, even obesity, there's certain microbial indicators of obesity. So that's just interesting. Another thing that is valuable for the consumer, the person who does this is that you can compare your microbiome to everybody else's. It's all anonymous of course. And nobody knows who's this, who's, but you have your own data and can see how your microbiome fits into a pattern. So do you cluster [00:13:00] with obese people or with a disease type microbiome or a certain kind of eating pattern Speaker 3: and are these online tools that you have available through American gut for people to do this kind of characterization? Speaker 4: So the analysis has to be done by the actual scientists that are doing the samples because it's still quite elaborate and involves a lot of bioinformatics. So currently it's not possible [00:13:30] to do a lot of that on your own, but still to get an output, the actual data, the results of the analysis is what the individual can get through this project. Speaker 2: [inaudible] you were listening to spectrum on a k a l x Berkeley. Our guest today is Janet Jensen. In the next segment she talks about the earth microbiome project. Speaker 3: [00:14:00] Can you talk a bit about the earth microbiome project and maybe differentiate it from the human project? Speaker 4: Yeah, sure. So the Earth microbiome project, which I'll call the emp, is, um, instead of just looking at humans, it's including basically all of earth. So it has a very lofty goal of understanding earth microbial diversity. That project also relies [00:14:30] on collaborators, so it's sort of a crowdsourcing project as well, but limited to the scientific community. So the way that Earth microbiome project works is if a collaborator has an interesting set of samples, for example, from the deep sea or from Yellowstone hot springs that have the required kinds of environmental data, so Ph, nutrients, things like that. Then they can [00:15:00] send an email to the steering committee and say, well, would this study be of interest to the earth microbiome project to the ENP? And then the steering committee looks through the data and decides whether the environmental data is sufficient and if the samples are filling a hole and providing novel information and if so the samples are accepted and the sequencing is done without any costs to the investigator. That's the win win scenario for the emp [00:15:30] because the investigator does of course provide the funding for the study and collection of the samples and the emp provides the funding for the sequencing. Now the funding for emp is also kind of fuzzy because it's through different kinds of companies that have supported by providing regions or equipment and then in turn they get advertisement through the emp that they're sponsors of the project. And so that [00:16:00] also seems to be quite successful. Speaker 3: And the intent again to build a catalog Speaker 4: basically, yes, to build a catalog to find out who's there and are there patterns. The nice thing about heading samples from so many different disparate environments is that you can see, well does this particular microorganism occur across different kinds of environments or is it really endemic only to one kind of habitat? And if you tweak the environment, [00:16:30] for example, with climate change to have increases or losses of certain members of the community that are predictive, one of the aims is to have something like a Google map and then you can highlight all of this sort of organism type in pink. If you click on a button and see where they are localized around the globe. But then if the climate increases by five degrees, then you can click another button and see what happens. Does that organism increase or decrease there? Does another microbial typing [00:17:00] green become more abundant? Speaker 3: The methods you use that you apply to your research. So often we're results oriented with science or at least to the public, you know, what did you find out? It becomes more important than how did you find it out? Can you give us some sense of your methods to doing the research that you do? Speaker 4: I think that the methods, as I mentioned earlier, that's been a limitation to my particular field, but that [00:17:30] also makes it kind of fun because we're always trying to develop better methods and new methods to be able to investigate these systems. And so it's quite challenging, which is something I like. So the method in my own lab that we're developing are different kinds of what I call omix quoting. Oh, mixed methods. So that's everything from sequencing everything, which would be metogenomic x to extracting RNA and [00:18:00] sequencing that. That would be looking at express genes. That's Meta transcriptomics or extracting all the proteins and looking at that. That would be metaproteomics. You can even do the metabolites metabolomics. So these are the current methods that are stated. The art right now for looking at these kinds of complex communities. Speaker 6: [inaudible] [inaudible] Speaker 5: this is k [00:18:30] a l x Berkeley. The show is spectrum. I'm Brad swift. Our guest is professor Janet Jansen, microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley lab and UC Berkeley. Speaker 3: In your experience working on these large projects and also then working in small projects, I'm curious about the, the idea of big science versus small science. You know, the individual scientists toiling [00:19:00] away versus the big group that gets together and decides what they'll do and [inaudible]. Speaker 4: So personally I, I'm a big science kind of person. I definitely appreciate the value of a small science than I do have some smaller targeted projects. I moved to Berkeley lab about five years ago. I was a professor in Sweden before that and my funding was more individual, smaller projects in Sweden. But uh, one of the reasons I came to Berkeley lab was because of the big team science. I really [00:19:30] like that I'm a super collaborator and I can see the value of having people with different skills working together to tackle some really big problems. [inaudible] Speaker 3: and I suppose the culture then becomes really important to the group, the dynamics, the sharing, the openness. And how does that happen, do you think? Have you seen it work well and work badly? Speaker 4: Oh, it's very important. So you had to choose your collaborations as well and sometimes if they, the dynamics [00:20:00] aren't working, then it might be time to rethink the collaborations and revise it in a certain way. But ideally you have people that are so motivated that they are, I know that start delisting, but in the best case situation you have people that are so motivated towards a specific goal that it works quite well. There is an example of one project that is ongoing right now at the lab. It's called the next generation ecosystem [00:20:30] experiment in the Arctic, which is looking at the impact of climate change on permafrost communities. And that's the big doe funded project that involves probably hundreds of researchers at different laboratories, different doe laboratories and universities that are all focusing on one location in Barrow, Alaska, using all of the different tools available at the national labs and expertise at universities as well. Speaker 3: [00:21:00] And how long has that been going on? Speaker 4: It's been about a year and a half. It's a new project, but I'd like it because it has the necessary funding. Of course, when you spread it out, you know, everybody gets a little chunk of it, but it enables incredible things to be done at that site. It's just so much fun to go to these meetings and hear about the lidar sensing team and the modeling team and the hydrology team with their sleds and the geochemists go [00:21:30] in and my part is the microbial ecology. We get deep cores and we extract DNA and sequence them. It's just really a lot of fun Speaker 3: and there's a lot of emphasis on trying to encourage young people to get into science, technology, math. Is there really an opportunity in this field for, for people? Speaker 4: I have to say that right now it's a huge opportunity and there aren't enough persons educated in this field [00:22:00] to be able to fill these growing companies that are starting up. I'm getting several calls from companies that are asking for postdocs from my lab if they're interested in joining and if I were starting right now as a biologist, I would definitely look into bioinformatics and also the metagenome mix fields because these are the sorts of persons that there aren't that many yet. It's not that widespread yet [00:22:30] and there are companies that really need that expertise. Speaker 3: Would you characterize both of those briefly? Speaker 4: The bioinformatics would be more of generation of software algorithms, ways to look at these big data that are generated from different kinds of biological samplesSpeaker 3: and that might include visualization as well as other normal text output kind of a thing. Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely. Everything from the database [00:23:00] management to the visualization of the data and things in between. The statistical analysis, that's a huge growth area and I predict this is going to continue because the data is just getting bigger. It's not going away from that a genomics and these other kinds of omix areas. I think that that would also involve some computing skills, but in addition to differentiate it from bioinformatics, more of the combination with lab skill. Speaker 3: [00:23:30] Janet Johnson. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. Speaker 4: Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Speaker 3: Well, we'd like to mention a few of the science and technology events locally over the Speaker 7: next two weeks. Rick Karnofsky joins me for the calendar. The Saturday the science of cow lecture will be given by Dr Nadir Mirabal Fathi. The lecture is entitled, connecting infant decimal to infinity, the search for dark matter. [00:24:00] He will speak about a new class of elementary particles known as weakly interacting massive particles or Wimps to resolve inconsistencies in our understanding of the nature at both extreme, large and small scales and how they are connected together. He will also explore the experimental efforts to detect these particles. Interest real laboratories. Nadir r Mirabal Fathi earned Phd in elementary particle physics and cosmology at the University of Paris. He did his postdoctoral [00:24:30] studies at UC Berkeley and has been an associate research physicist at UC Berkeley since 2008 the lecture is Saturday, May 18th at 11:00 AM in room 100 of the genetics and plant biology building. Makerfair. The self-proclaimed greatest show and tell on earth is this weekend, May 18th and 19th at San Mateo fairgrounds. Speaker 7: We talked last year with Tony to rose and Michelle, who? Bianca. Two of the founders of young makers about [00:25:00] the maker fair. Find our interview with them@itunesuortinyurl.com slash calix spectrum one day prices range from $15 to $30. Highlights of this year's maker fair include KQ [inaudible] kitchen sisters with their new radio series, the making of what people make in the bay area and why NASA makers with astronauts, John Grunsfeld, Dennis Bartell's discussing building the new exploratorium, [00:25:30] how to tie a perfect neck tie with Nobel prize physicist Arno Penzias, DIY research with Tekla labs and amazing science. Tornadoes, smoke rings and more. For more information, visit makerfair.com that's maker F A I r e.com the long nose Stuart brand. It's presenting on reviving extinct species on Tuesday, May 21st [00:26:00] at the San Francisco Jazz Center, two Oh one Franklin Street at 7:30 PM tickets are $15 he'll summarize the progress of current de extinction projects including the Europe's Oryx Australia is gastric brooding frog and America's passenger pigeon. Speaker 7: He'll also discuss some of the ancient ecosystem revival projects such as Pleistocene Park in Siberia. New Genomic technology can reassemble the genomes of extinct species [00:26:30] whose DNA is still recoverable from museum specimens and some fossils. Sorry. Jurassic Park fans. No dinosaurs. It is hoped that the jeans unique to the extinct animals can brought back to life in the framework of the genome of the closest living relative. For more information, visit long now.org now Rick Karnofsky and I present to news stories. Alberto Saul from Brown University and colleagues [00:27:00] published an article in science on May 9th that suggests the water that is on the moon came from Earth. The team measured the relative abundance of deuterium that is heavy hydrogen that contains an extra neutron to hydrogen in the water, found in small bubbles of volcanic glass and Melt inclusions in moon rocks. They found the ratio was very similar to the ratio found on earth and from carbonaceous chondrites meteorites that are thought to have supplied [00:27:30] the earth with water. Speaker 7: Higher. Deuterium levels were expected by some who had hypothesized the comments from the Kuyper belt in Oort cloud could have been the source of the Moon's water. If the moon's water did come from Earth, it is likely the earth already had this water when the moon was formed. Some four and a half billion years ago when the earth and another Mars sized planet collided. However, such a collusion may have been hot enough to vaporize the lunar water. There is sir now [00:28:00] debating whether it may have been retained because of the earth's gravity or because the moon shared some of the earth's high temperature atmosphere when it formed pregnant mothers exposure to the flu was associated with a nearly four fold increased risk that their child would develop bipolar disorder in adulthood. In a study funded by the National Institutes of health. The findings add to mounting evidence of possible shared underlying causes and illness processes [00:28:30] with schizophrenia, which some studies have also linked to prenatal exposure to influenza, principal investigator Allen Brown and MD mph of Columbia University says prospective mothers should take common sense preventative measures such as getting flu shots prior to and in early stages of pregnancy and avoiding contact with people who are symptomatic in spite of public health recommendations, only a relatively small fraction of such women [00:29:00] get immunized. Speaker 7: The weight of evidence now suggests that benefits of the vaccine likely outweigh any possible risk to the mother or the newborn. Brown and colleagues reported their findings online. May 8th, 2013 in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry Speaker 2: [inaudible]. The music heard during the show is written and produced by Alex Simon. [00:29:30] Thank you for listening to spectrum. Had comments about the show, please send them to us via email or email address is spectrum dot k a l s@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

NASA today announced the selection of a Discovery Class mission to Mars called the InSight mission. This telecon has remarks about the mission and questions from the press. The panelists for the briefing are: -- John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator, NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington -- James Green, director, NASA's Planetary Science Division, Washington NASA has selected a new mission, set to launch in 2016, that will take the first look into the deep interior of Mars to see why the Red Planet evolved so differently from Earth as one of our solar system's rocky planets. The new mission, named InSight, will place instruments on the Martian surface to investigate whether the core of Mars is solid or liquid like Earth's and why Mars' crust is not divided into tectonic plates that drift like Earth's. Detailed knowledge of the interior of Mars in comparison to Earth will help scientists understand better how terrestrial planets form and evolve.

This summer, the world was watching as seven astronauts visited the Hubble Space Telescope and did the first ever on-orbit repairs in space. This fifth and final Shuttle mission to service Hubble has equipped the telescope with cutting-edge technology and extended its mission lifespan for several additional years. Here at the Astrophysics Science Division, we are excited about the data being captured by Hubble's enhanced instruments, and the discoveries that are sure to come. One of the astronauts on this mission, Dr. John Grunsfeld, is also an astrophysicist. We interviewed him about his experiences with Hubble as both a researcher and a repairman. He shared his thoughts about Hubble's new capabilities, the value of astrophysics, and more. He also told us about a gorgeous image he snapped on a previous servicing mission and is now using as a screensaver - and you can download this image for your own computer!

Interview with John Grunsfeld, NASA astronaut, about his recent mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Learn more about Dr. Grunsfeld at www.msichicago.org/podcast.