Small Steps, Giant Leaps

• Simulating Moon and Mars Dust

  Dr. Jennifer Edmunson explains what it takes to simulate Moon and Mars dust on Earth, and lessons learned from preparing to build habitats on other worlds.

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• NASA's Centennial Challenges Prize Program

  There’s a program at NASA that taps into the power of the public to solve some of the toughest problems in space exploration. It’s called Centennial Challenges, a prize competition that has awarded more than $24 million to hundreds of people ranging from academics, startup founders, small business owners, and independent inventors from across the U.S. and 86 countries.

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• 6,000 Exoplanets and Counting

  On September 17, 2025, NASA announced that the number of exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, tracked by NASA has reached 6,000. In the three decades since the groundbreaking detection of exoplanet 51 Pegasi b, the first confirmed planet orbiting a Sun-like star, astronomers have concluded that exotic worlds are everywhere.

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• NASA's Zero Gravity Research Facility

  A steel vacuum chamber 50 stories deep at NASA’s Glenn Research Center lets researchers simulate near-weightlessness by letting test hardware freefall for 5.18 seconds.

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• Turning Space Data Into Sound

  From black holes to star clusters, scientists are turning space data into sound with a process called sonification. Dr. Kimberly Arcand, visual scientist with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, joins us to explore how data sonification lets more people experience the cosmos and give researchers a new way to interpret science one note at a time.

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Small Steps, Giant Leaps: Podcasts in Family