Richard Fidler

And I just remember thinking how much it discombobulated me and excited me and enthralled me that we could see the surface of Mars, that red, brown, pebbly surface, the craggy mountains, the dirty atmosphere with the pale sun in the sky.

That blew my mind.

Was your imagination similarly stimulated by some of these photos that have come from the space probe missions?

You did end up working on some of the Mars missions, overflight of Mars, if that's what you'd call it.

Tell me what they revealed about the surface of Mars.

Are there moments when you think, oh, for God's sakes, build me a space suit and a craft so I can just go and poke it with a stick myself so I can see myself?

Yeah, zero gravity in the Vertigo is a bit of an off-putting thing for me to the thought of that.

Now, tell me about the Kepler Space Telescope, the mission you worked on there.

What that was looking for?

Oh, something's passing in front of it?

I read a while back an article about the idea that there might exist dark planets, planets that have somehow come loose from a star that are just floating cold and dark alone in space.

Is Kepler able to even detect those if they're not reflecting any light?

From my learned point of view, I'm pretty much sure that's where Thanos is hiding out on one of those planets.

That's just my inexpert opinion, though.

Once you designed the spacecraft, you and your colleagues designed the Europa Clipper, this huge thing that's as big as a basketball court, as you said, you've then got to figure out a way to fold it up, like make it collapsible and stick it in the nose cone of that Falcon rocket you were talking about.

you compacted it somehow, like a bit of camping equipment in the nose cone of this rocket.

You shoot it up with the rocket out through the gravity world of the Earth into space.

What happens when it comes out?

Does it sort of come out like a butterfly from a chrysalis?

Yeah, I was going to ask you about that.