EVSN: Escape Velocity Space News

In this special episode, funded by the National Science Foundation, we're taking a break from the headlines to share the background story of comets. Today, we'll focus on the origin of comets and their basic anatomy, and in future episodes, we'll dive deep into how comets are discovered, what we can learn from them, and how they can literally and figuratively impact our world.

This episode went through a lot of rewrites as breaking news kept breaking our hearts. Artemis is still on, but there are delays and cancellations. Before we face that, let's look at some pretty pictures and remember the universe is pretty even when our Earthly-timeline is not.

The glaciers are melting, the volcanoes are erupting, and earthquakes are shaking things up. Let's discuss.

In this episode, we take a closer look at how the increasing number of rockets and satellites going up mean there is also an unfortunate increase in the space junk coming down. We also cover dramatic weather, stars dying and disappearing, and update you on Maven and Paranal Observatory.

In this episode we look at highlights from the latest American Astronomical Society Meeting. An accidental theme came out: with each new telescope and each improved instrument we can look more closely at our universe - we can and do learn more and understand more even about the things we thought we knew best. In this episode, Rubin Observatory brings rapidly rotating asteroids, and JWST peers at objects thriving in the first 2 billion years of our universe. Observatory after observatory brings us new science.