Tagged: space

On today's Your Call, in light of NASA’s historic landing of the $2.5 billion “Curiosity” rover on Mars, we’ll talk about space.  A planning group is taking a look at how the agency will continue exploring Mars beyond the missions operating today. Who decides where we explore?  What space missions are we NOT hearing about?  Join us at 10am PST or post a comment here. What role do you think NASA should play in the future?  It’s Your Call with Holly Kernan, and you.

Guests:

What’s the size of a car, but travels 13,000 miles an hour? That would be the Curiosity Mars Rover, which touched down on the Red Planet last night after eight months of travel and what NASA engineers called “seven minutes of terror.”

If you think back to the 1997 film Contact, you’ll recall a scene where Jodie Foster, playing alien-hunting astronomer Ellie Arroway, lies on her car hood with huge headphones on her ears, in a field of towering white satellite dishes. She’s waiting for something. A signal. She lies still, her eyes closed. And suddenly, she hears something, the sounds of something – someone  – beyond the earth, communicating with her.