Podcasts Culture Nerdette Podcats In Space

Podcats In Space

Published: Feb. 22, 2019, 6:01 a.m.

Yep. Podcats. Not a typo.

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This week we take a journey back to 1994, just after an astronomer named Heidi Hammel \u2014 as well as the entire scientific community at large \u2014 learned that a fragmented comet named Shoemaker-Levy 9 was going to crash into Jupiter at a speed of more than 130,000 miles per hour.

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"We have witnessed other impacts,\u201d Heidi tells us. \u201cWhat was really special about the Jupiter one was we had warning that it was going to happen.\u201d 

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This moment was huge for Heidi, who was just a young astronomer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the time. She was asked to lead the team that would analyze photos of the impacts taken by the still-relatively-new Hubble Space Telescope. 

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Oh yeah, in this podcast episode Heidi also compares planets to cats and herself to a veterinarian so PODCATS!