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Launching Soon: Artemis II
New Jan 08, 2026 3 min

Launching Soon: Artemis II

This year, four NASA astronauts are flying around the Moon and back—and Curious Universe is bringing you along for the ride. The mission is called Artemis II. It’s a key test flight that will set t...

Cosmic Dawn with Nobel Laureate John Mather
Dec 19, 2025 18 min

Cosmic Dawn with Nobel Laureate John Mather

The James Webb Space Telescope is doing something astronomers dreamed about for decades: peering into our universe’s early past, a period known as cosmic dawn. A new NASA documentary—also called Co...

Encore: A Day In Space
Dec 02, 2025 22 min

Encore: A Day In Space

Have you ever dreamed of spending a day in space? Humans have lived aboard the International Space Station for 25 years—or more than 9,000 consecutive days. In this episode originally published in ...

How Webb Illuminates Stars’ Cloudy Origins
Sep 30, 2025 22 min

How Webb Illuminates Stars’ Cloudy Origins

In the space between stars, dark clouds of gas, dust, and ice mingle in a chemical laboratory unlike any on Earth. Ewine van Dishoeck, an astronomer who studies molecules in space and who helped de...

What Webb Is Teaching Us About Our Solar System
Sep 23, 2025 27 min

What Webb Is Teaching Us About Our Solar System

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is hard at work answering our biggest questions about the birth of our universe and faraway galaxies. But some astronomers are pointing its powerful eyes much clos...

Webb's Exoplanet Research Sounds Like Sci-Fi—But It's Real
Sep 03, 2025 23 min

Webb's Exoplanet Research Sounds Like Sci-Fi—But It's Real

Some exoplanets—like a gas giant with rain made of glass and 5,000-mile-per-hour winds—sound like worlds dreamed up by a science fiction writer. But they’re real. From light-years away, scientists ...

Why Webb's Earliest Galaxies Are Blowing Scientists' Minds
Aug 04, 2025 27 min

Why Webb's Earliest Galaxies Are Blowing Scientists' Minds

With the James Webb Space Telescope, we are seeing the early universe like never before. Webb produces beautiful images and detailed scientific data that leave astronomers in awe. In this episode, ...

How Lying In Bed For 60 Days Helps Astronauts
Jun 24, 2025 27 min

How Lying In Bed For 60 Days Helps Astronauts

In space, microgravity changes the body. Body fluids shift from the legs toward the head, the back of our eyes flatten, we lose muscle strength, our bones lose some of their density, and even the a...

Earth Series: What's Next for NASA Earth Science
May 20, 2025 28 min

Earth Series: What's Next for NASA Earth Science

NASA has a record of Earth observations going back more than 50 years. What might be in store for the next 50 years? In this finale of our Earth series, we hear from two sc...

Earth Series: Monitoring the Air We Breathe
May 06, 2025 39 min

Earth Series: Monitoring the Air We Breathe

Take a deep breath, and you’re inhaling oxygen from Earth’s atmosphere. Take a walk outside, and the atmosphere is shielding you from harmful radiation. NASA research provides crucial data to under...

Earth Series: From Space to Your Plate
Apr 29, 2025 31 min

Earth Series: From Space to Your Plate

Earth has an incredibly varied and ever-changing landscape—jagged mountains, arid deserts, lush rainforests, rolling wheat fields. Before NASA came on the scene, no one was keeping a systematic eye...

Earth Series: The Ocean, Now in Full Color
Apr 22, 2025 35 min

Earth Series: The Ocean, Now in Full Color

Life all over the planet—even far from the coasts—depends on the oceans. A pair of NASA satellites, PACE and SWOT, is giving us a fresh look at Earth’s water. PACE tracks color changes driven by ti...

Earth Series: How NASA Sees Our Blue Marble
Apr 15, 2025 29 min

Earth Series: How NASA Sees Our Blue Marble

NASA is an exploration agency, and one of our missions is to know our home. In the 1960s, NASA astronauts orbiting the Moon captured a revelatory view of Earth. Today, NASA explores our home p...

Welcome to Earth
Apr 08, 2025 3 min

Welcome to Earth

There’s one planet NASA studies more than any other: Earth. With our unique vantage point from space, NASA collects information about our home in ways nobody else can. In this podcast miniseries, c...

Inside the Team That Keeps Hubble Flying
Mar 14, 2025 39 min

Inside the Team That Keeps Hubble Flying

When it launched in 1990, NASA expected the Hubble Space Telescope to last for about 15 years. Thirty-five years later, Hubble is still showing us the universe as no other telescope can. Go behind ...

How NASA Found the Ingredients For Life on an Asteroid
Jan 29, 2025 28 min

How NASA Found the Ingredients For Life on an Asteroid

How did life begin? It’s one of science’s biggest questions, but it’s impossible to answer on Earth, where ancient clues have been buried by the planet’s shifting surface. Instead, scientists are l...

Why the Moon’s Icy South Pole is a Hot Target for NASA
Jan 21, 2025 37 min

Why the Moon’s Icy South Pole is a Hot Target for NASA

The Moon’s South Pole is a bizarre landscape. Mountain ridges glow in perpetual sunlight while deep craters freeze in billion-year-old shade. Yet hidden in the depths of those shadowed craters, und...

The Mind-Bending Math Inside Black Holes
Dec 17, 2024 26 min

The Mind-Bending Math Inside Black Holes

Black holes are mysterious, far away, and can bend the fabric of reality itself—but we're learning more about them all the time. Ronald Gamble, a NASA theoretical astrophysicist, uses math, compute...

How Open Science and AI Are Advancing Hurricane Research
Nov 12, 2024 32 min

How Open Science and AI Are Advancing Hurricane Research

As climate change drives more frequent and intense tropical cyclones and hurricanes, coastal communities desperately need better tools to predict how bad storms will be and when and where they’ll s...