Joe Palka
speaker
237 appearances
31 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 29 Aug
Joe Palka’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 31 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 7.
Appearances
The MAVEN mission is about understanding the history of the climate on Mars.
Bruce Joukowsky was MAVEN's principal investigator when it went into orbit in 2014.
Mars is now a cold, arid planet, hostile to life.
But scientists believe it was once wet and warm and potentially habitable.
The Martian atmosphere most likely holds the explanation for why the climate changed so dramatically, and that's what the probe's instruments were designed to study.
NASA says it's still investigating why communications were lost.
For NPR News, I'm Joe Palka.
At its closest approach, Mercury is a mere 50 million miles from Earth.
Jupiter is more than seven times that far.
Yet a mission to Jupiter took five years to arrive.
The Mercury probe called BepiColombo is taking eight.
Why?
The answer is the sun's gravity.
When you head to a planet closer to the sun, the trick is slowing down enough so you go into orbit around the sun instead of plunging into it.
BepiColombo flew by the Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury itself six times to use those planets' gravity as a way of putting on the brakes.
Once the European and Japanese Space Agency's spacecraft arrives, it will study how Mercury formed and why there is ice at the poles.
For NPR News, I'm Joe Palka.
At its closest approach, Mercury is a mere 50 million miles from Earth.
Jupiter is more than seven times that far.
Yet a mission to Jupiter took five years to arrive.
Showing 181–200 of 237 · page 10 of 12
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