 Good morning. How is everybody? So excited for today. Good. I'm Angela Buckman. I'm a local meteorologist in town. I work at the NBC affiliate channel 13. I'm a proud 96 Purdue grad. What a day to be a Boilermaker. I'm also count down is on till 9 20 as well. We've got a lot to get through between now and then and we're really happy that you're joining us today. This is the total solar eclipse viewing event at the Indianapolis Motor Speed proudly presented by Purdue University. This event will allow three amazing organizations to come together. Of course Purdue University. Of course the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and NASA. We are celebrating this once in a lifetime event. By the way this is only one of three NASA locations in the country. So you are in for a treat all day long. You are in the sun track by the way. And this is going to be a little more technical in nature. We've got scientists, engineers, astronauts that will all be presenting here today. Our live astronaut panel hosted by this is Purdue podcast host Kate Young will come a little later. Then we'll feature five of Purdue University's cradle of astronaut members. We've got information that you're going to learn about the Parker Solar probe and how it's enabling us to learn more about the sun than ever before. How the James Webb telescope is changing our perceptions of the galaxy. Neil Young's world changing Apollo mission and NASA's aspirations for the Artemis campaign. Purdue University's cradle of astronauts and how each member later today has taken their own giant leaps to explore space. And of course the interconnectivity between space and motorsports. Our first panel closer than ever before technologies to touch the sun starts now. We're live. Thank you all so much for coming. We are so excited to chat with you this morning. I'm the associate director for flight at NASA headquarters in the heliophysics division. And I would like to take a moment to have my panelists introduce themselves. And we'll go from there. And I'd like to start with with Brian. Yeah. Hi. I'm Professor Brian E. Horgan from Purdue. I'm a professor of planetary science in the Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences Department up at Purdue. I'm a planetary geologist. So I study the surfaces of other planets in our solar system, particularly moon and the moon and Mars. I use the Mars rovers like the Perseverance rover to look for ancient habitable environments on on Mars and also study ancient volcanoes and impact craters on the moon as well. So hi, I'm Heather Futrell. I'm a program executive at the NASA Heliophysics Division. And I work on two current projects, Muse and Sunrise, both things to go explore our sun. And I've also worked on some of the operating missions as well. Professor at Purdue at the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. And I work with satellites and space debris. And if you have questions, what's up there? What's coming down? What are we sending upwards going? That will be me. So one of my favorite things about the sun is it's a system level science. I'm actually a marine ecologist by training. So I kind of grew up doing research in the ocean. And it's very strange that I'm now working with spacecraft in the sun. But I would like to chat a little bit today about like this, how the system level of science works. Also, just kind of how of all our different pieces fit together and how we kind of, in our different niches, do some research that impacts sun. As you know today, this is a big day for us with the eclipse coming up, opportunity to visualize the corona. Weather's looking pretty cooperative. So I'm very excited about that. But I was going to start with you, Heather. And could you share a little bit about what NASA's doing and like what we do, some of our missions studying the sun, some of the things to do in space, whether what's going on with you right now? Yeah, so let's see. So talking about the corona today. So we have missions placed all over in space. And so one of those is actually going to be flying through the corona. It has been since 2021. So if anybody knows that project, it's called Parker Solar Probe. So it's the mission to touch the sun. And so that mission is pretty exciting because it's going faster than any man who man made objects ever been. And it's just so close to the sun, so close. In December it'll be 3.8 million miles away from the sun. And that does sound like a lot, but our earth is actually 93 million miles away from the surface of the sun. So it's getting really close. And then also we have projects like Voyager. So Voyager is actually outside of our solar system. And so it's still sending back data. Granted, one of them takes like 23 hours one way and the other one takes about 19 hours one way. But we have many missions scattered about. So it is amazing. So the Parker mission is incredible. You know, the heat shield at the front, 3,000 degrees behind that room temperature, a few inches behind. It's incredible that the engineers have been able to accomplish with that mission. So I'm curious for my Purdue colleagues. Can you tell a little bit about the research you're doing and how that's kind of connecting into some of the studies we have with the sun? Okay. Yeah, my research is not directly kind of looking at what the sun is doing but more dealing, okay, what is the sun doing to us and to our satellites. For one, in my research I'm using the sun to be just a cheap illumination source. So it actually shines on the satellites, not only gives the satellites power, but actually I can look with my telescope and then see the satellites know where they are and if we look at them long enough, we can even see like are they tumbling, are the solar panels deployed correctly, although the satellites are so far away that we only see like a bright dot like a star. Besides that, the sun is also influencing us in kind of how the earth atmosphere works and how drag on the satellites work. If we are thinking about space debris during the solar cycle of high activity, the atmosphere actually expands and makes more of the debris burn up and clean up a bit more that space around the earth. And then if we're kind of in a solar minimum, it's good for our missions, we're staying up longer, we need fewer maneuvers, but therefore also the debris is not coming down as fast. The other aspect of course is if we have kind of solar storms corner mass ejections and that can actually disrupt things on earth, but we are protected by the earth magnetosphere from that, but also our satellites as they are in a much weaker magnetosphere as they're further out, they are much more affected. So we see kind of interference with the electronics during solar storms of our satellites, and if we would have a very large solar storm, then that could actually take out some of our satellites because of kind of arcing and they go through differently charged plasma currents in that atmosphere. So we're looking at that and try to be prepared and try to be proactive, so our satellites are surviving that. Thank you. I'd love to hear people in some of the broadcasts talking about Team Sun and Terry Boddy, Satango. I'd love to hear a little bit more about your background and how it's going to go. Yeah, I mostly work with you all. So on Mars rover, for example, I work on the Mascan Z camera, that's kind of the eyes of the Perseverance rover, and we actually do a lot of solar science with those cameras. We monitor the sun, we look at the sun almost every day to measure how dusty the atmosphere is, but that also gets us a chance to monitor the sun from a totally different place in the solar system over on Mars, and we get to track things like sunspots, we actually get to watch the Martian moons, Phobos and Demos, these little potato moons that orbit Mars, do actually transit the sun and have eclipses, they're a lot smaller though, so they don't block out the sun, but we can actually monitor that with our camera, and we've actually used those observations to help nail down the orbit of those moons, which is really important as we start planning for new robotic and human missions to visit them. So that's really exciting, but at a bigger scale, I like the idea of the sun as kind of system science, because a lot of the work we do is trying to understand things like the history of the solar system, trying to understand, for example, you know, the sun hasn't always been as bright as it is today, we think it actually used to be a lot dimmer billions of years ago, and that may have actually been at a time when life was first starting on both Earth and Mars, and so understanding what the climate of Earth and Mars might have been because of the effects of the sun changing over time is one of the things we worry about a lot, you know, it's hard to start life when you have a cold icy world because the sun was a lot dimmer, so we think a lot about the sun and how it interacts with the planets a lot at kind of the system level for the work we do. Thank you. Thank you very much. So Heather, you know, not only are we here for this incredible eclipse today, I keep hearing about solar mobs, you know, tell me a little bit more about what is solar, hang on, tell me, try and not drive everything to be as busy. Solar max, what's going on with the sun right now and what is this maximum? Yeah, so we have a 11-year solar cycle and so we're approaching our solar max right now, so we're expecting the sun to be more active right now, so that's why a lot of us are super excited for this eclipse because we had an eclipse that came in 2017, that was in their total eclipse, however the sun was not nearly as active, so we're expecting this time that when the moon blocks the sun, we're really hoping that we can see a lot more things around popping around the moon, some more wispy and complex structures, hoping that the magnetic field, it should all be a lot more active, so we're really excited to see what we see during this eclipse today, during totality, which for the cloud cover, it looks like we should be good to go. Absolutely, yeah, fingers crossed. So we've, I want to share a little bit, you know, when the heliophysics division, we have a fleet of spacecraft that are orbiting around Earth and Sun all the way out to Mars and as Heather mentioned before in the far resheds of interstellar space with Voyager 24-7, I'm just kind of curious if we could chat a little bit from your perspective, so like why do we study the sun? Why is it important? I mean obviously it governs our life cycle on Earth in many ways, it's when we wake up, it's when we go to sleep, it helps us with our immune system, our agriculture, energy, all these things, but there's a lot of other science. Sometimes I personally kind of take the sun for granted, it's always there in the morning when I get up and you know, it's pretty darn reliable, but I'd love to hear Caroline a little bit, if you could start, share a little bit more about, you know, why do you think we study the sun in general? Yeah, I mean I get it, we say the sun is far away and as long as we get light, we should be good, but there's a lot more going on and you see in the projection also kind of the Earth magnetic field lines that you see, so the sun is not only just giving us photons as light, but there's also a lot of charged particles going on and mass ejections that go up and then these charges interact with whatever other objects we have out there, they interact with the satellites, they interact with our atmosphere and they interact with the Earth magnetic field, so depending on how active the sun is, it influences things on Earth, but most noticeable the satellites just because they're further out and they are not as protected by the Earth magnetosphere, so a significant part of the research is that for example my colleague at Purdue, F.R.M. Fishbach is doing is on how can we predict when there are big solar storms or big coronal mass ejections because we want to be ready for that, we want to have our electronics protected for those cases and right now it's just like the smallest random times when those occur, they are more active during the solar high, but the exact times when a wave of charged particles comes to us, it's kind of hard to predict and then for our satellites, we also want to design them that they are more robust as they are traveling through different parts of the plasma, they're getting charged up differently and then we can have so-called arching, like little thunderstorms, so to speak, on the surface of the satellite and if you're ever shorted your cell phone or something, you know that's usually not going well and so we have to have ways of protecting our electronics and keeping things that we like, like GPS and our weather forecast going even when we have a very active sun. So you're touching on some really cool things around space weather, you know I found it fascinating that yes indeed there is weather in space and that weather in space can impact us on Earth when it comes to things like communications, navigation, our power infrastructure, I don't know if anybody's like me, I'm visiting Indiana, this is my first time here, I'm using my GPS to literally go everywhere and there are wonderful straight lines and no traffic but I rely on that thing on a day-to-day basis and so it's interesting when we think of as a society, you know the technology rely on that we rely on, how dependent we are with our star, our sun and our satellites to cooperate. Heather, you want to share anything else even that we've got going on in the space weather, Irina, or even as we look forward to putting humans further out in space, you know the activities on Gateway. So yeah so one thing that Helio Physics participates in it's a project called Moon to Mars and so we have some instruments that are going up on a project called Hermes to help us study more about the star in an effort to make astronauts safer when we start traveling and going back to the moon and then eventually to Mars. So we are trying to better understand and as Carolyn was saying, we need to be able to predict what space weather is happening and we do have some solar predictions already, they come from one of our partner agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, but it's something that because we still don't really understand all the effects that happen on the sun, we still need to be better about studying more about the sun, having more information with in situ where it's measuring directly in the environment and so we still have more to do so we can keep improving and making sure everyone stays safe who's traveling in space. So Brian, I'm curious, you know there's a lot of other planetary bodies out there that are impacted by space weather that are impacted by the sun and there's things that we can learn about our sun that also help us better understand other planets and I'd love to hear any comments you have about what we can learn here in our own kind of solar neighborhood and what we can learn as we look out where. Well I mean one of these uh I want to thank you for being learning. The human exploration side of NASA actually put an instrument on board the curiosity rover and that was to measure radiation doses as the rover launched from earth traveled through space and landed on Mars and operated on Mars and that was really fascinating because it was yeah and that was really fascinating because as I was saying if you have an instrument on board the curiosity rover that actually measures the radiation dosage coming from launching from earth traveling to Mars and then landing on Mars and operating on Mars and that was our first chance to really understand uh how much radiation an astronaut would experience on that trip to Mars. And so we found that it's actually even worse than we thought unless we were trying to figure out how to deal with so for reference you know the if you go to the International Space Station you end up with uh getting a lot of radiation from the sun and galactic sources uh it's a several times higher than like the DOE annual limit for radiation workers right and that's already bad if you go to Mars it's about 10 times worse and if you operate on Mars it's that same dosage again so it's a whole lot of radiation that's one of the things you want to understand more about for example how space weather and how it varies over time and through the year through the solar cycle how that might affect our ability to get astronauts in space safely and keep them there safely too into this this connectivity. I love your touching on solar cycle you know future exploration goals um a lot's going on right now with this eclipse so we're getting into solar max like should we be expecting to see anything different out of this eclipse because we are in solar max Heather? Yeah so because we're in solar max we're hoping that we'll see some more kind of magnetic structures and some more solar flares maybe even with our naked eye during totality um so typically the sun can be a little bit calmer but because of solar max there could be more things that are kind of getting shot off and coming into space so yeah and I'm also curious we've got a lot of I'm familiar with the research we're doing at NASA I'd like to chat a little bit about that that we're doing today um and some of the activities but was there anything else you'd like to share from a perspective on anything you know going on or things are happening or should we kind of jump into some of our NASA activities we have going on I mean we collaborate with NASA um a lot and um I think um one of the things we have to keep in mind with those missions is kind of the the different levels of complexity that go into it I mean one is kind of okay how do we plan how do we find a good trajectory in the multi-body system like from the astronomics where we want to go where how do we actually can be close to the sun and actually not run into the sun but make a nice turn and come back and then um kind of a lot of research goes into the um actually then flying the mission the navigation how do we know where we are how do we know we are operational how do we know that everything has deployed the way it it should have deployed how do we know we are healthy and then um a lot of my research is also how to make sure not to run into the stuff we brought up like we are very kind of often have several um thrusters and upper stages that are decoupling and then we are throwing away stuff and um unfortunately most of that debris we are leaving behind so um it's also part how do we not ram into the stuff we leave in orbit because it's orbiting with us and um how do we coordinate between the different missions um that we can all be in that space do the exciting research and um not get in each other's way I think that's what's so incredible for science and engineering in general we do better science when we learn from each other when we bring these disparate data sets with different ideas and different concepts together to really better understand our system and learn more about our sorry so Heather I'm going to look at you again we've got we've got sounding rockets going up today uh before during and after the eclipse we also have some student balloon experiments going up you share a little bit about some of the things we're actually going to be doing in observations today what it looks like it feels like yeah so for the sounding rockets yeah there are and they're going off about one 35 minutes before eclipse peak one at eclipse peak and then one right after and they're going to be just studying what changes in the atmosphere because there will be changes when the the moon's blocking the sun because we're going to have less heat I don't know if you guys will look at your weather apps but if you can tell there's actually a lower temperature during the time of totality because of that temperature change rockets that fast it is super difficult to get I mean we're here we're looking at race cars today but to get rockets going three sets of rockets going within an hour and a half time period it is an amazing feat and that crew is incredible it's just boom boom boom boom and if anybody I know if anybody's have the pleasure of watching a rocket launch but a lot has to go right in a very short amount of time for that to work and I'm super excited that we're getting three not only one bird up but three three rockets up in rapid succession and they did the same thing for the annular club second October out of white sand so they're a busy crew and then another another science activity we have going on too so NASA has some WB 57 jets and so there's going to be three jets that are going to be flying north as they go in order to expand their totality time frame so that way they can continue to take more measurements with that totality time it's just it's such a unique time for a scientist so we're really excited to get more information from those those two different ethnic experiments that is so cool I can't wait until the results and how that compares with our spacecraft I'd like to talk a little bit about y'all personally Brian we're starting with you like what are you excited to see today like what is what is your kind of like why for the eclipse and and what does that mean for you I've actually never seen a total eclipse before so I'm really excited to see it for the first time I'm so excited to be able to see the structures on the sun be able to see the corona I think that's just gonna be so so cool or true like once in a lifetime event seeing it during solar max even more exciting so I'm so excited to be able to do some you know solar system science with my eyes today it's going to be very cool I think that's a good point because I'm used to seeing all this amazing imagery I've never seen a total solar eclipse ever before totality we see these amazing images from spacecraft today we get to we get to be the telescopes we get to be the observers Heather how about you what are you most looking forward to today yeah so from the science side up to the plate take on what Brian he was saying seeing the corona and you don't see those structures with my naked eye I'm really excited for that also from like a personal side I did witness the 2017 launch but I was out camping so it was very different because you got to see a little bit more in terms of wildlife but here there's so many people here that are joining us like I'm so excited to have this much energy about an eclipse about science it's this is awesome thank you how about you yeah so besides personally seeing the eclipse of course actually my students are out in the field and we are testing a new camera and seeing if it's a it's a camera that is inspired by how our human eyes work and it's not measuring the total light but light differences so we should be able to look directly at the sun even before the eclipse and we are we are hoping to see okay can we can we see some of the sun activity with this different type of camera and that will be one of our biggest field tests at the moment very cool well I just you all today are scientists you are curious you are here to see this incredible phenomena you know it's going to be interesting to see in this kind of very unique setting if we do see any the wildlife effects or different sounds but notice what's happening with your bodies like I can't wait to see just like you know the the response like you know I've heard people's the hair stands on end on your arms or you know just it feels very kind of almost eerie or some people just feels very cool so I just I hope you all can take a moment today to kind of just be really you know check in with what it feels like for you and and those around you and as we as we experience this together Heather so I would like to chat a little bit more Parker you know you talked about it's doing its closest path to the sun yet you've been involved with Parker I'd love to hear a little bit about just mission experience in general like what does it mean to work a mission you know at NASA what does it mean to study work as you know kind of mission studying the planet now so for a mission studying NASA it's about partnerships and collaboration so there are so many people involved in the path of a project so you've got principal investigators who will build together this proposal from a design concept and then they propose to NASA they go through a lot of rigor in that process before you're selected and then once you start that then you start building hardware then you start integrating hardware then you hopefully you test it everything comes out well and then you do a launch and then once you launch you go up into space and then you start bringing data down and so there's this whole process kind of from cradle to grave for a mission and then at the end of the mission you have to dispose of it because we have to keep our space degrees limited as we can so that's one of those other pieces that we're trying to do and be good stewards of the environment that we're all investigating and researching still thanks Heather. So today is a big day right we've got the eclipse going this is incredible science like what's coming up next for you like what do you what are the things in the coming days and how does this kind of mesh or not mesh with your with your research in the coming days. I'll answer Purdue going to the championships tonight. Go Boilermakers! Yeah our fun fact for today is that this is the first time Purdue is in the championship since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon who's also a Purdue alum so great day. Anyway but beyond that I'm really excited this is such a wonderful outreach opportunity you know there's space is such a great way to get you know kids and everybody in the public excited about science and I'm so excited to hear all the wonderful questions from everybody. We have a booth at EAPS booth for our department over in Gasoline Alley come check it out if you want to ask more questions about space exploration space missions planetary science please come talk to us we're always glad to hear about that. If you want to talk to anybody about how to get how to actually have a career in space exploration we're all happy to talk to you about that but I'm really excited for you know the impact that still have on STEM education research in the years to come because it's such an inspiring moment for sure. I have one more question for you Carolyn you know you talked earlier about orbital debris and things that are going on so we've got a lot of stuff in space right now like a lot and there's only going to be more more and more satellites and that just I'm curious any perspectives on why it's so important to be under characterizing this done and looking at some of this stuff as space is becoming really there's like some serious traffic jams up there like it's becoming very very crowded yeah especially the the nearest space is very crowded and like altitudes like 800 850 kilometers are already space debris dominated and not like satellite and cool signs and communication dominated so that is of course a big problem and my aim is we want to do spacefaring we want to have GPS we want to have our weather forecast which is satellite based we want to be able to launch some of the the cool missions to do further science and then we have to just be careful on how we treat that environment because for a long time we thought oh it's big and there's space for everything but things are moving fast like the the objects can move faster than kind of a bullet leaving your handgun and then you can imagine there's a lot of damage when things run into each other so um so we have to be careful and then what's next for me is as we are pushing out further like away from the near-earth space more like closer to the moon again which is super exciting we also want to have good strategies on how we sustainably can use um that space so that we have many more decades to come to launch our missions and be able to operate the way we like it thank you so much and i was wondering if anybody has any questions for us i think we have a minute or two if anybody would like to ask a question we'd love to hopefully be able to answer it the question isn't over here yeah i can get i can give her a mic okay all right sorry just very quick question are we able to see the camera that you're working on with your students um unfortunately not because um yeah we need a bit more quiet space for that not too many people and stuff so i think um the many of the actual experiments are off off-site sorry sorry for that but we're excited to share the results any other questions anything else i can come to you if you've got one even in the back just raise your hand you're left i see you there are lots of you now i will try to do that i was just wondering what technologies are being looked at for cleaning up space debris it seems like such a massive job and probably different ways to go about it but um it always just kind of interests me how we're ever going to take care of that mess thank you yeah that's a very good question so um before getting into that our biggest lever as with the trace trash on earth is mitigation the less we are producing the fewer pieces we actually have to scoop up so we have been slacking on that one so we want to want to do better then several um entities are looking into active debris removal that means going up having a dedicated mission trying to grab a piece and bring it down that's costly so we cannot do that with most of the pieces but we are like okay even if you can't get like five or ten or fifteen key pieces that are in in danger to be rushing into other things and creating many more pieces we are we are making headway um the uh entity i'm working with that's further this is kind of astroscale out of out of japan they had the lzd mission they are now where they had a test object that they released and grabbed and could bring that down and um they're gonna um have a follow-up mission but also um our own nation uh the space force and nasa are looking looking into that the european isa is looking into that the difficulty is and that was one thing i've been working on figuring out is that the debris is starting to rotate as soon as it's not actively stabilized because we have the sun creating a torque on our object we have the atmosphere so it starts to rotate so a lot of the technical difficulties is how do you grab something or hold on to something that rotates how do you get rid of that momentum because if you just grab it then it just spins up the two of you and you have not um not gained anything so that's where the research is at the moment but um i think we will see that in the near future we're spending a lot of time trying to characterize the environment as well like especially the smaller scale debris understanding what's there and how that might impact our assets it's easier to track the bigger stuff but some of the little things are a significant risk as well i don't think our crowd was this big when you first started but where does solar max correct or something bigger going on in the sun can you explain that real quick before we wrap you up absolutely so the sun has a cycle and it wakes up and calms down at different times and we're getting into the solar maximum worth getting more busy so we're going to be seeing more coronal mass ejections more flares more activity so it's an incredible opportunity to visualize the corona today during this solar max in this 11 year cycle as we ramp up and we're in the midst of a heliophysics big year that that's a part of as we're doing all of our missions and parker's closest approach to the sun the annular eclipse last october and the total eclipse today so we're really hoping to see some beautiful beautiful sights beautiful flares out of the corona as a result of that solar activity question here in the middle that is an excellent question yeah um i need to go look at a map i honestly i will get back to you on that i'm not sure i i think when i checked the map it was tracking fairly close to where we were going to be able to visualize the eclipse today but i don't know given the conditions that we have that it's going to be visible thank you for all of that information um so you were talking about something called solar or space weather and right now we all know weather here on the ground and on earth and how it affects us and all the weather prediction that goes on right now we're waiting to see the eclipse uh so how do you go about predicting weather in space do you want me to take that you want to take it so for us to be able to predict we have to understand a little bit more about what happens around the corona so when the sun kind of ejects particles out they speed up in the corona and then they can come towards the earth and so there's different properties that they those the kind of balls of gas contain and so we need to figure out how quickly they're coming what the direction is that they're coming because sometimes they do come towards earth but sometimes they don't and some of the flares can reach us in a few minutes some cms take less time than that so it just kind of depends on a lot of the properties of what that material is and how it gets to us the NOAA group they actually already do solar predictions so you can see some information that they offer because people go look at that too for even folks that are traveling like on larger flights because if you're even like going closer to the poles and you may have like a higher dose of radiation and so that's something that you can track through NOAA's website and you can also check about kind of their different energetic particles and how much is happening I know earlier Carolyn was talking about kind of surface charging and so we have different things like that that NOAA helps us with that's exactly why we have our fleet of spacecraft that's why we're observing every day to understand what's going on and we don't know why solar wind speeds up we don't know why the corona gets hotter and we are trying to figure that out there are mysteries about our own star that we still have to solve and all of that plays into how that energy flows from the sun into our earth system and drives you know energy changes and can impact weather space weather that flows down through the earth and it's an incredible incredible situation as we especially look at sending humans back beyond going back to the moon and beyond and how they'll be impacted by the weather and space and if they need to shield themselves if there's a particular event going on with the sun or if they are you know in a place where the sun has had an impact on the atmosphere or magnetosphere of the planetary surface and i'm going to look make sure we're we've got i've got one future scientist question and then we need to wrap it up because we're a little over on time go ahead uh so i was wondering i've heard during solar eclipses the wind just kind of stops is there a reason for that so go for it so that the solar eclipse the visible light from the sun is the big thing that's impacted the energy is going to keep flowing out from the sun the way that we can look at and visualize some of those solar wind is changing we shouldn't see solar winds stopping we shouldn't see that energy flow stopping but the way that we can visualize the context of visual of visible light and the corona are gonna change and so today i'm really curious to see what we're gonna see if we have any if we have any activities we've had a lot of flares going on and a lot of cme's going on lately so this is an excellent opportunity for us this afternoon um to take some data and use those sounding rockets and the observations to to understand more it's a great question well let's give it up for our scientists this is just the beginning of a very exciting day we're gonna let them head back i'm meteorologist angela buckman by the way from local channel 13 here in indianapolis i'm gonna help facilitate panels coming in and out i'm gonna give you a couple of minutes to stretch your legs but don't go anywhere panel two will start in just a couple minutes okay are we ready for panel two we are so excited that you are here today my name is angela buckman i'm a meteorologist here in indianapolis at wthr channel 13 i'll thank you and i'm just here to facilitate but if you were here for the first panel and even if you weren't there what i got from it is we get to all be scientists today so we are we are excited that you are here uh panel two is called eyes on the skies and beyond it's an infrared eye on planets in earth solar system with the james web telescope our experts are next good morning everyone we're so excited to be here i am peg loose i'm the deputy director of the helio physics division at nasa headquarters and i have a wonderful panel here who are going to talk to you about how we study stars we're all here today because of our own personal star the sun and it's the moon is going to give us a rare opportunity to look at it in a way that we usually don't see um but we at nasa and at perdu use investigate use observations instrumentation to study the stars and we're going to talk about how we do that james web space telescope is certainly something you've probably heard about but may not know much about you're going to hear all about it and many people haven't heard what helio physics is so you're going to hear about that too so first i'd like our panel to introduce themselves starting with jane rigby hey there how y'all doing good awesome y'all i am so excited to be here my name is dr jane rigby and i am the senior project scientist for the web telescope i work at nasa goddard um and i am just so excited to be in the path of totality with y'all good morning everyone whoa good morning everyone i'm uh dan oh they're adjusting the valuing because i can't again i'm there's a filter on me i'm danily salvo beach i'm an associate professor of physics and astronomy at perdu university we have some perdu fans in the audience here today yeah so i've been fortunate to lead one one of the programs using the james web space telescope and i'll be describing some of that today good morning i'm asa al-nasari i'm a program executive in the helio physics division of nasa science mission directorate and i'm happy to be here with all of you for my first total solar eclipse really it's your first oh my god i am really excited that i get to be with you for your first eclipse how many other people is in their first first total solar eclipse wow mine too okay it is super like like it is ah you're in for such a treat oh my god it's so amazing i've only seen one and i really want to see another one so before we get to the solar eclipse jane tell us about james web space telescope and how it helps us study distant stars awesome so in a sentence the web telescope is the most powerful telescope that humans have ever built it is about a hundred times more powerful than anything that came before it is a telescope that is a million miles away from the earth in a quiet dark part of our solar system and it hides in its own shadow it's always in eclipse protected from the sun and the web telescope is studying uh planets in our own solar system planets in other solar systems called exoplanets stars galaxies and web has been able to see further than any other telescope to study galaxies we are finding galaxies as they looked when the universe was only 300 million years old right so we're seeing back in time more than 13 and a half billion years so we can talk about we can geek out about this it's a really fun thank you jane and so dan will you tell us why is it important to observe stars across the galaxies right well um we have our own sun that's nearby but it's actually you know a star of many different types of stars and as we ask questions like is there life out there are there planets that have some kind of life we have to understand the stars that they'll be orbiting around right and it just so happens thankfully for us our sun our sun is fairly stable but there are stars that are not so stable so for instance stars that are cooler and smaller than the sun may have planets that are closer nearby and there may be activity that makes life they are not so hospitable so by studying stars not just the sun but beyond and across our galaxy it helps us understand what kind of planets may be forming there thank you dan a cell will you please tell everyone what is heliophysics what do we study and does heliophysics use any infrared instruments like the James Webb does so heliophysics is the study of the sun and how it behaves why it behaves uh the way it does and how it affects everything in the solar system especially our earth and earth's atmosphere of for our first launch uh in the heliophysics big year we had we sent all which is atmospheric wave experiment to the international space station that it's going to help us study our climate atmosphere and the effects of space weather for life for us it has an infrared wild wield of few infrared images that will look at the atmosphere in colorful bands of light called air glow where in in fact they are there because of what we call atmospheric gravity waves where you have buoyancy that will push the air up but the gravity of the earth will push it back down and you get these waves in the atmosphere that will have an effect on radio frequency signals navigation and communication thank you esau Jane what are some new discoveries that Webb has made about planets in our own solar system so one of the when we built well we built it to look at very very faint things right galaxies very very far away and one of the challenges was to get it to work on because it wasn't designed to do that really bright things nearby that move in our own solar system and so that's been a priority for some of us that that we're really proud that we got it working it's working spectacularly so we're able to study planets in our outer solar system asteroids comets and to date the thing that's really been exciting for me honestly there's the the dart impact you all remember the dart impact when nasa sent a little spacecraft to go hit an asteroid on purpose we captured that so we got to see the impact so we got to see the the debris coming out of that asteroid as our little poor little dart that was its job right collided with the asteroid right so that was really proud because our folks had to work really hard that thing was zooming across the sky and it was really hard to chase one of the things that but the thing that's been most scientifically impactful is that we've been able to look at the chemistry of worlds in the outer solar system and in particular to look at the moon's enceladus which is a moon of Saturn and to look at Europa which is a moon of Jupiter and to get little rainbows to see what's going on you know we look at the light coming from those those worlds and we can see the fingerprints of the chemistry of what's going on in those systems and so we've seen these like plumes of water shooting out of enceladus and we've been we've done the same for Europa it's a way to see what's in the oceans of those planets when normally that ocean is locked away under ice but there are cracks water comes up and then we've been able to capture that and we've been able to show that there's lots of carbon dioxide which means there's a carbon-rich chemistry in in these worlds that we didn't know about before that's exciting if you think about a wet warm carbon-rich world that sounds a little like our oceans that's a that's exciting that maybe that is a place possibly where a life could could exist in our solar system other than our own planet so we are really seeing water on other planets water yeah isn't that amazing we are definitely seeing water on on worlds in our own solar system moons of planets in our own solar system and we're studying other molecules like carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, methane we're seeing what we're basically like it's like having a chemistry lab but on other worlds where we're getting to see what the atmospheres are like what are those planets really like that's amazing dan why has web been able to show us unique images that that we haven't ever been able to see before uh well this goes back to what jane said originally web is basically the most complex largest telescope we've ever launched into space so let's unpack that a little bit more uh one is the was that a pun let's unpack that a little bit oh our unfolded yeah okay I'll work with that sure great put that in my back pocket for next time so um one uh the large size six and a half meter compare that for instance to wet uh sorry to the Hubble space telescope 2.4 now on earth we have larger telescopes that are 10 meters in size but they're on earth and they must look through the atmosphere and that uh moving air distorts our ability to study the stars web is above that web is also as jane said very far away a million miles away where it's very cold that helps it to operate in the wavelength that's designed to look best at which is in the infrared its mirror is also coated in gold which helps reflect that infrared light so why infrared light well it just so happens that the further you want to look into the universe the longer that the photons of light have to travel and because the universe is actually expanding the wavelength gets stretched longer from what may originally as ultraviolet and um optical light into the infrared light that web can see and it just so happens that anything that has a temperature has an associated emission of light that can be in the infrared uh the instrument itself can so that's why operate so far away with the sun shield to keep it's cool i mean it's something of an inch uh engineering marvel that it operates some instruments at seven degrees kelvin that's not a unit we use often but basically it's only seven degrees above the coldest temperature possible in the universe that that blows my mind right so it's these kinds of uh engineering marvels that allow us to get data um unlike any observatory we've had before and and how does that data challenge our current understanding of stellar life cycles dan well uh one is some of the data are so surprising uh it's taking us a while to digest and really understand uh where we're going from i can speak personally from my own research on supernova explosions and let me give you um first a warning what i'm going to say right now will not happen to us with the sun okay it just so happens that stars that are much more massive than the sun about 10 solar masses they undergo a tremendous energetic uh demise okay if you took all the all the light that uh energy that the sun emits over its entire 10 billion years i mean that's a lot you go outside today you might get sunburn standing out there for too long right imagine all that energy over 10 billion years combined multiply that by 100 and that's how much an exploding star a supernova will make in one second right this is an incredible energy source that drives a lot of the evolution of the universe and this is what i research and web because it's sensitive to infrared light can actually access um light from the gas that has not been perturbed by shocks of the supernova and allow us to do a kind of uh i know an autopsy of the debris field left behind by an exploded star we can map out how fast it's moving what it's composed of and really give us a treasure map of understanding how that explosion proceeded and again it's such an important uh part of the the universe's evolution because of its energy and what it produces for us these supernova explosions provide the raw materials for life so the iron in our blood the nitrogen in our dna the carbon in our apple pies these are all being manufactured in stars and supernova explosions so we're really learning about life on earth from what we see with web as it's looking at those explosions and many people are familiar with the expression from Carl Sagan we are stars that is exactly correct and so by understanding the massive star explosions we're learning about our origin story here on earth that's amazing a cell why is it important to study our sun and and why is it important to use observation data collection to study the sun well the sun is our star yes it's one of the ordinary stars out there but it's the one that we can actually get closest to and study and buy it learn more about the other stars but also it's the main source of energy for us on earth the solar wind also the radiation solar winds coming from the sun changes space weather and our atmosphere it can disrupt satellites communication radio signals and navigation so we need to observe the effects of the solar winds coming from the sun so that we are ready or and we know more about the solar system and how the sun affects everything it touches everything on the solar system so we by observing it and studying it we learn more about not only earth but the solar system thank you so can i interject a point yes please sorry i volume is a real issue for me but pro tip i always encourage people to get telescopes to observe at night but you should also strongly consider getting a solar telescope so one's that designed to look at the sun in fact at the boots Purdue University and others will have solar telescopes set up for you to look it is amazing how you can see you know activity on the sun you'll see the the sunspots you'll see solar activity around the edges that'll be in a dramatic portion for fashion today but a solar telescope it is an amazing thing it's our star and it is there visible so Jane can you how can you compare what's happening today with our our total solar eclipse with the science that web is focusing on when it's looking at stars sure absolutely so first i want to can i give can i do a pro tip you did a pro tip i do one pro tip like i really hope that for folks especially seeing their first eclipse like just soak it in like take your time it is a chance to remember that we're all part of the universe that we're on a planet we're going around a star that star is going around a galaxy we're all made of star stuff except for the hydrogen which is big bang stuff but either way it's pretty cool and and like an eclipse is a chance to like we all know that but we have to go do the laundry and we're out of toothpaste and like you know life happens right and an eclipse is a chance to be like oh my gosh that's right i'm a little sentient being on a planet going around a star wow that's like something out of a science fiction movie so i really hope you get that today something that is also out of a science fiction movie is that we now know of thousands of planets orbiting other stars we call those exoplanets and web can study those exoplanets the the small subset of them that go in front of their parent star we call that in a transit or an eclipse and so when that planet goes in front of that star it makes the star just a little bit dimmer and then it gets out of the way and the star gets a little bit brighter again okay that tiny little dip which is a couple parts per million right so you go from like the sun is you know if that star is a million bright it goes down to 999 thousand right you know 999 right it's just a tiny bit painter that we can study that transit that eclipse of that exoplanet eclipsing its star and we use that we you end up taking take a little rainbow when the the planet is in front you take another rainbow when the planet is not in front of its star you take the difference and that difference gives you the light of that star that went through the atmosphere of that planet so you're getting to see light that went through the atmosphere of another of another planet and you can measure carbon dioxide you can measure methane we've done sulfur dioxide we've done like quartz rain so like sand raining on these some of these planets interesting to hear and so what we're going to do with that we've got a live mic we we're studying what other planets are are made of what their atmospheres are like some of these planets there's nothing like it in our own solar system and we do that using little tiny eclipses on of those stars by those planets thank you now we just have a couple minutes left and asal i was hoping that you could tell people a little bit about the science that we're doing today that nas experiments that are taking advantage of this this eclipse that we're going to yes so we are taking advantage of the eclipse to study not only the ionosphere which is the charged particle area around the earth and part of our upper atmosphere but also looking at the atmosphere of the sun because now the sun is not as bright we can actually see the atmosphere around it whereas if you look at it right now you won't be able to see it so we are going to use aircraft balloons sounding rockets and radars and handheld radios amateur radios to study the sun the ionosphere during the eclipse we are going to use nasa's wb-57 research aircraft that they will fly through the path of totality to extend the amount of time they can get measurements for our scientists we're going to send sounding rockets up before during and after the eclipse so that they can study the temperature density composition of our atmosphere and ionosphere and the changes during the eclipse and then we have all these other as i said the handheld radios we have balloons student projects public scientists and public science projects that are just going to add huge amounts of data to what will help our scientists later on to study the sun its atmosphere and its effect on our ionosphere and our atmosphere thank you acel so we are calling this the heliophysics big year so welcome to the heliobig year it kicked off in october with the annular eclipse of the sun we launched the awe mission right after that that acel was talking about and it's one of the high points of course is today but it actually goes on it's a big year it goes on until christmas eve when our parker solar probe spacecraft is flying closest as close as it's ever been through the atmosphere of the sun so when you see the atmosphere today parker solar probe is going to be actually flying through that atmosphere so welcome to the heliobig year thank you so much to our guests this was they're amazing and i wish we could have spent more time with you enjoy okay we're going to give you another uh five minutes or so to stretch your legs but don't go anywhere we have neil armstrong's sons on the panel next so don't lose your feet you've got a good one okay it's time to find your seats if you'd like we still need to stretch your legs we understand that as well but our next session is getting underway this one is beyond apollo neil armstrong's legacy and artemis ascent well good morning we got we have march badness and eclipse badness going on here in the end of the day so we'll try and finish this this panel before the game starts tonight uh just very quickly because we haven't got a lot of time i'd like to introduce the people in the panel my name is john norberg i'm going to serve as the moderator uh i i was retired from prudu university i knew neil armstrong there as a my writing about him and uh when he visits to campus i'm a prudu historian with us today are rick and mark armstrong the sons of neil armstrong and sharon armstrong janet sharon also joining us is dr jake blicher from nasa over at the end just very quickly so you know a little bit about them rick sitting next to me here works as a software developer and a consultant it is also a musician with three solo albums released and is a member of the progressive rock band edison's children uh next to him mark has worked in software consultant and administrative and executive positions with several companies uh dr blicher is a planetary geologist he is a science advocate for nasa technology and architecture development to enable human exploration of the moon and mars so as angeles you know today we're talking about uh two different moon programs the apollo program pow 11 which the alarm strong was on and the artemist program which is the next project to go to the moon and it won't be too long before they do that so just to start off uh dr blicher could jake can you tell us where the name artemist comes from what what that means louder can you hear me now um yeah artemist is the twin sister of apollo in greek mythology uh so the siblings uh together exploring the moon we have a male and a female presence again from our greek mythology and uh artemists one of one of our goals with artemist is to increase the diversity of uh of the people who have explored the moon and so as we go to the moon and onto mars that's that's uh where we're heading great thank you so uh uh rick and mark let's talk about uh the apollo program and apollo 11 and this is probably a good point to stop and point out that today is uh mark's birthday and i think it's pretty thank you all for coming i think it's pretty neat that the moon has decided to have a total birthday and that he's sharing that with us so that's that's pretty cool and it's not your first eclipse rick and mark is it no and my birthday was on the first eclipse that i saw so what are those odds there are no coincidences it's all planned so rick and mark what do you want us to know about your dad neil what is the public getting right and wrong about what kind of person neil was well i don't know exactly how to answer what is right uh because i'm not sure what that is but but it's a common misperception that he's a was a recluse he was definitely not a recluse he went all kinds of places all kinds of people um he just didn't maybe notify the media what he was doing so they they i think they may have called him a recluse but other than that now he was nothing but that or nothing like that just to elaborate a little bit um uh he um for example he and and my mother played in a friday night mixed scramble golf outing every week with uh you know 30 other people from the local town and after they'd play nine holes of golf they would go and to someone's house and they have a potluck dinner they um they had a ball they would laugh and tell stories this is not the behavior of a recluse i'm sorry to say um but um the truth is that no one that actually knew him would call him such such a word um and uh he was uh we're very lucky he was a wonderful person and uh and as my aunt june his sister often would say he was the man you saw so if you saw him and you interacted with him then you knew him and um unfortunately the press didn't always get that opportunity and so they they were bitter about it and i think that's the that's the truth of it um and it's a it's a shame that that that they put that kind of thing out there and it just wasn't true i i agree with that i didn't know neil and every every corner in the country interviewed neil and there wasn't time to do an interview with everyone in the country but he talked about every minute of that Apollo 11 flight online uh rick and mark most people think it's an incredible experience to meet just one astronaut but you grew up with astronauts all around you including the dinner table what was that like you know we didn't really think of them as astronauts they were just the neighbors right or they were just dads going to work they didn't really they didn't really see it the same way that everybody else would so it's a it's a different perspective that's a little hard to explain john we we grew up in a neighborhood that that um was newly developed and it was created um at the time when nasa was bringing in astronauts and scientists and mission control specialists and engineers because in the early 60s they knew that they had to make this mandate that was um that was presented by president kennedy so our whole neighborhood was full of people that worked at nasa and i am professor ali rampson and i'm a professor at the department of earth and uh okay so everyone was in the everyone was in it together i guess is what i wanted to say and so it didn't feel like a community of that was extraordinary it just felt like normal life and uh that's how we saw it how old were you during jemini eight napal 11 what do you remember about them did you understand the dangers what was it frightening exciting i was three so i'm gonna punt to my brother yeah for jemini eight i think it was uh almost nine maybe eight something like that uh no didn't did not really understand how much trouble they were in until really years later i think um my mom knew but uh she kind of kept kept us from worrying about it so didn't really think i never thought they'd get in any trouble that they couldn't get out of so that was maybe a little naive but it worked for me apollo 11 was uh 12 for for that so yeah i remember that pretty well anything stand out you remember you bought it uh the the launch of course i think was was was pretty amazing and uh yeah i mean the we watched the the moon landing and the moonwalk you know in our living room i think just everybody else did and i think i just expected it to happen it wasn't surprised when it was successful um i just figured that was how it was going to work out an entire week of the of the mission our house was full of people um it was customary for astronaut families to host an open house throughout the entire flight so the door was open and neighbors and friends and relatives and nasa officials and other astronauts were constantly coming over bringing over food and and and just talking about the mission and at our house we had something called a squawk box which was uh was a way for us to listen to the air to ground transmissions and um which we're filled up full of jargon but there was always an uh a knowledgeable nasa person there they could say oh well this is what's happening now and this is what that means so um it was just really a big open house the entire time and i think that that really helped it was it was a big it was kind of a community feel and and we were all in it together Jake did the Apollo 11 mission and the other Apollo missions and Neil Armstrong inspire you to go into a career with nasa closer to my mouth that work all right there we go we'll figure it out um yeah you know i think it's almost impossible to talk about where we are with nasa now without talking about the Apollo legacy uh for me i wasn't born during Apollo so we're now in a generation in nasa where many of us who are leading the way weren't around to experience Apollo but i can tell you for a fact uh i i work with Artemis and my favorite thing about Artemis is coming out to panels and talks like this with the public because every single time i talk about Artemis and what we're doing i learn about Apollo folks come up to me and they say hey my parent or grandparent worked for this company that made this bolt that held these two panels together and they know it they know it and and to me that means the Apollo program is alive and an active part of the Artemis effort and so it's almost impossible to describe the impact that Apollo had um on generating this this generation of scientists engineers artists you know everybody that's involved in this effort well i think we can see that it's easier to fly to the moon and back than it is to get microphones to work i hear this morning uh rick and mark your father once told me that that when he said uh that's one giant leap for for mankind that wasn't the most important thing he said on the moon that day he said the most important thing he said on the moon was the eagle has landed which was very hard walking to the moon was for show uh what did they ever tell you about uh being on the moon walking on the moon what the experience was like but i didn't really tend to ask him too much about it because i knew how much he got asked by others and didn't want to contribute to the noise i do remember uh asking me about the low fuel situation in the landing and and how close was it and and his answer was if people don't know yeah they were they were very low on fuel and his answer was well the gauge wasn't really that accurate and and and the reason was it's because of this the sloshing of the fuel uh in the tank made the made that that gauge or whatever it was only accurate at a particular moment in time but uh you know he he got it down so like i think that was going to happen regardless at that point he was going to make it down dad well they spent about two and a half hours uh on on on the lunar surface and they had a lot to do uh buzz and dad were were setting up experiments they had to do an external visual inspection of the limb to make sure that uh everything looked good there uh they had to plant the flag which wasn't as easy as you might think it's not uh it's it's not a damp soil up there um and uh and of course they had to they had a lot of pictures to take they had a lot of geological samples to collect and so they were quite busy during that that short visit but there wasn't they didn't see much risk in any of that it was uh getting it down getting getting the limb down on a stable surface um and uh not only allowed them to walk on the moon but gave them a platform to then launch back into orbit after their EVA so that was definitely the most the most risky and uh and i think for for dad the the most stressful portion of the uh of the mission jake landing astronauts on the lunar south pole is a crucial objective of nasa's aramis campaign please explain why this reason is specifically targeted for human exploration and does this environment pose any issues or challenges that we didn't encounter with apollo yeah that's a really important point uh to to elaborate upon um i will show a quick video here um during apollo we understood the lighting at the moon and we took full advantage of that if you look at the moon just from your backyard you can actually see what we would refer to as a lunar day it's actually about the same length of time as an earth month and so in the equatorial regions they experience 14 earth days of light followed by 14 earth days of darkness and each apollo mission landed in what we would call the lunar morning and we knew that they would experience eight nine 10 days of continuous sunlight for their activities that they were conducting but we're going to the south pole with artemis so this is a very different region we are absolutely standing on the shoulders of giants with the knowledge that we gained from apollo and over the many years since then but the south pole and the poles in general are a very unique and different terrain it's different places it's a more rugged terrain impact craters have made these circular depressions that you see here and there are high mountains that will be exploring the thing that's really interesting though is the sunlight and it's very fitting to talk about this today as an eclipse is truly a celestial dance between the sun the earth and the moon and actually on the moon we will experience eclipses where the earth blocks out the sunlight but in the lower right hand corner you can see the south polar region compared to other equatorial more equatorial sites and so when we talk about daytime at the poles it's not actually the same way you think about a day from the places that the apollo astronauts explored the sun never goes up over your head because the moon doesn't have an axial tilt like the earth does it's almost straight up and down and so the moon is turning and the sun is just i like to say dancing right along the horizon so here's a view that we've rendered that shows what it would be like to look at the earth from the south pole one thing i like to point out is when the earth comes back above the horizon notice that it looks like it's upside down or you could say that the view is upside down if you're standing at the south pole so the sun i said is dancing just along the horizon while the earth is bobbing up and down and you can see what the light looks like on the surface it's not sunlight everywhere around you it's shadows it's shadows that are sweeping across the area and so there's a lot to take into account now what's nice about this is that the high topography ends up being places that are in sunlight and in sunlight more than average it's one of the reasons we want to go there we can find places there in sunlight almost 80 to 90 percent of the year so that's very different than equatorial regions the other part that's interesting is there are places in permanent shadow off to the right of this image is the shackleton crater the south pole is along that crescent of light you can see there inside that crater the floor of the crater never sees sunlight and so we believe that any water that's been placed on the south polar region that goes into these craters is trapped that water is basically a record book of the early evolution of the solar system so from a science perspective it's extremely valuable it could also be a resource it's one of the most heavy things that we carry when we fly into space is the water and so carrying enough water to support a mission really increases the the thrust that you need to be able to get it off the surface of the earth so we really are going to a new place learning how to explore we like to say that we're building the blueprint for space exploration we're building a blueprint for how to leave the earth and those first footsteps that we placed on the moon were the first footsteps along that path of building that blueprint right jake we're running out of time but can you tell us how living and working on the moon is preparing NASA for human missions to mars absolutely i mentioned this already we like to speak about the blueprint we're building a blueprint for learning how to live away from the earth in the time between the Apollo missions and now we've learned how to live off of the earth so at the international space station in low earth orbit we've now occupied that space station for over 22 years one thing we like to say is someone who's younger than 23 years old i bet there's a few of you in the crowd here don't actually know what it's like to live on an earth that hasn't had someone living in space think about that it was very i'm sure exciting to have someone be off the earth for a short period of time now children born today don't know what it's like to have uh have not have people there and i i like to think about the fact that sometime in the near future we may be in a situation where young people don't know what it's like that people don't live on the moon or maybe even mars all these lessons about living landing operating they're all part of that pathway that puts a destination like mars on the radar for us so learning how to live at the moon learning how to live in low earth orbit is all a piece of the story that helps us learn how to go to a place like mars rick and mark last question how do you feel about the united states returning a human presence to the moon uh i think it's super important both for the the exploration value that that jake was talking about but also for the inspiration that it provides to people all over the world just like the powell program did the you know the the roi on the the money spent to to uh go to the moon is you can't even calculate how great that return is and so yeah super important there's something called the overview effect that has been expressed by astronauts that have been in space and uh they look back at the earth and they see it as a fragile beautiful thing that that needs to be cared for and i think that um that this is something that that is really important for our planet we need more people to go to space and to talk about it and to write about it and to sing about it and to paint about it so that so that more people understand just how special this planet is when you're out there and everything around you is gray and black and you look back at this planet and you realize that we have this wonderful atmosphere around us that protects us from galactic radiation and we have our own renewable food and water sources and water filtration and energy sources that are renewable this is a special place we live in and i think that the more people that go to space and live in space and experience that will look back on this planet and realize just how special it is and that we have to be better stewards of our home great well thank you uh rick and mark and jake for being with us today and thanks to the audience for joining us we could talk for hours uh with this with this panel but there's a group of Purdue astronauts waiting in the wings and you can't hold Purdue astronauts back so thank you very much and we'll move on to the next session okay we're going to give you another couple minute break but just a couple minutes because we're going to try to stay on track because we have an eclipse to view here in a few hours right um and then hopefully a Purdue win later this evening up next are some astronauts and i'll be back in just a couple of minutes to to get them on on the stage they don't need any introduction so i will not introduce them we'll get right to it this by the way presented by Purdue University today oh everyone thank you for coming my name is kate young i'm a proud boiler maker alumna and the host of the this is Purdue podcast and as everyone knows it's a super exciting day because of these five astronauts next to me but there's also a certain big game tonight all right okay so i'm going to get started with the intros and then we'll launch into our first question okay first up we have sarisha bandla sarisha is the vice president of government fairs and rich operations at virgin galactic next up is drew foistel drew is a former nasa astronaut and he's also a Purdue presidential ambassador next up is mark polanski he is well we'll go to beth moses next so she's the chief astronaut instructor at virgin galactic in 2019 she became the world's first female commercial astronaut as well as Purdue's first commercial astronaut and we have mark polanski he is the vice president for barrios technology in houston and a former nasa astronaut and finally down there we have audrey powers she is the vice president of mission and flight operation at blue origin audrey is also an attorney and before working for blue origin she worked as a nasa flight controller okay okay so we're all about to experience something really big in just about two hours i think the question on my mind most people's minds out there what is it like when you finally had your moment to go up in space and what might surprise people out here you know when you were up in space is there anything that surprised you all and could you share that with us yeah of course hi everyone so great to be here so for me i've wanted to be an astronaut since i was young so i grew up looking at pictures of earth from space so when i finally got to go up and look down at the planet i mean from the picture it would i saw the planet it was brilliant no borders you see the thin blue line of the atmosphere you see the matte black of space but what the picture doesn't capture is the the significance the gravity of it all no pun intended that was hilarious no pun intended yeah but really it that is what it doesn't capture in a picture and what was surprising to me looking down on the planet and just looking down at everything that i've ever known every experience every person it made me feel extremely small but it did not make me feel insignificant and i came back to earth feeling very empowered reminding myself that what we do in space really starts with what we're doing here on earth check check we're gonna keep going down the line so my answer about what was like what surprised me the most about space was how quickly the human body adapts to living and working in microgravity environment when we go to space we just sort of float everything floats around us and it was surprising to me how quickly that could be normalized and working and living in space was just like being here on earth and doing the things that we do every day so that was pretty impressive humans have the great ability to adapt to their surroundings check check uh so uh my first flight uh what was it like to have that big day sort of like today's big day actually for me everyone asks were you afraid especially because our system was new and in test flight and you know privately funded and didn't have all the gravitas of nasa um uh for me the biggest anxiety was uh not getting all the data if it was an engineer and somehow letting down my team uh so fortunately flight went well and i got all the data and then to sarisha's point i was amazed and had not really anticipated that uh for for our vehicle virgin galactic we're sub orbital so we just head up and come straight back down and for me the time dilation at apogee was pure magic i didn't expect to sort of feel as if time had stopped but because we sort of slow down to a stop and then pick it back up and come back down through the atmosphere the feeling of being unstrapped completely weightless not touching anything in the middle of the ship looking at all the windows and coming to a stop and then seeing the majesty that sarisha spoke about was unlike anything i had ever anticipated and we are all so infinitesimally small but so unbelievably important to this planet which needs us all especially Purdue engineering uh that it was an amazing day so for me the thing that uh that i first felt when i got up there and i got to go ahead and see the earth from orbit for the very first time you go ahead and uh first reflect on the people that are most significant to you in your lives and so for me at the time it was my fiance now my wife and my family who had waited all this time to see me and it was such an emotional experience to go ahead and see that and to know that they were all there supporting me for all of these years it really meant a lot the other part of course is at this time there were eight of us on orbit so the entire human population except for eight people are on the planet and that was a pretty astounding thing to go ahead and comprehend and to answer the question what was the thing that kind of surprised me the most that i got there which uh you know i'd waited a long time to do that and and as i said and i don't know about anybody else it's like okay i got this you can't take it away from me no matter what happens after this so it was a really pretty cool thing the the thing that was most surprising to me was the overwhelming sensory experience that it was and from from even the moment of ingressing the capsule on on the launch tower and the ignition of the engine all of your senses just overwhelmed by and and is almost hard to hard to process and that goes all the way through zero g kind of experiencing this weightlessness for the first time and then through reentry i just remember thinking take this all in like really you know try as hard as you can to be present in this moment and take all of this in um so i think to to drew's point too um that that that was i i i wanted to i wanted to keep that with me i recognized how unique it was and that my my body was able to adapt to all of these things so quickly amazing so we have a mix of nasa and commercial astronauts with us today on this panel some of you have worked within both industries what are you most excited about when it comes to these emerging partnerships between nasa and commercial spaceflight i think especially now with commercial where it is and nasa doing those incredible missions it used to be back in the day commercial versus it almost seemed like it was commercial versus government but it's really commercial and government and the capabilities together allow us to do so much more so what i'm excited about is seeing that capability in space grow because of this energy between commercial and government nasa and other national agencies are doing that audacious work going out and exploring areas and destinations that don't yet have a business case and they can rely on commercial for suborbital and leo and use their resources to get us to that next destination so it's really cool to see them working lockstep because it wasn't like that in the past um yeah i important to remember of course that you know nasa has never existed without private corporations supporting right we've always had contractors doing work for nasa nasa has just been the one leading the way uh in many cases contracting out for companies to build spacecraft that we use directly the difference now is that we're looking for service providers so instead of doing all that work we direct the work and provide those capabilities and eventually we create an economy that is self-sustaining and not just relying on the government but relies on those private companies to feed off of each other and create those economies of scale and that's really what i'm excited about now that we're finally to the point where the technology is meeting our needs and our expectations our desires and the things we dream about for space exploration and we create those opportunities and remember the money doesn't go to space it it creates jobs here on earth and that's what's really important about is that we're creating economies that people can then create opportunities for our planet yeah i agree with both of those um i work for virgin galactic uh nasa is one of our customers they fly research on our ship uh which actually sirisha personally did on a flight with me and they were our first customer actually yeah nasa was our first customer and actually on my first flight nasa was flying along with me automated and my job was to not kick nasa so she did not kick nasa thank you um actually what i'm looking forward to i guess the most is uh the success of all these years of um private and public working together such that private companies can be a service provider selling flights to nasa and nasa can land people on the moon again that's what i'm looking forward to so i think you're hearing a common theme here there have been uh private companies contributing to space flight for decades since the very beginning the government doesn't do everything with only government employees it never has and uh but what's kind of different as of late is that we are now flying people in space who are not associated with a government and government astronauts so real quick who likes star wars and star trek and all those kind of movies there we go okay how many people out there actually want to travel in space if they could at some point in their life okay well the opportunity is so much closer than you think because of what's going on with these private enterprises and so what we're doing with blue origin with virgin galactic with others this is just the precursor to what's going to happen and so the days where science fiction becomes a little more science fact and the days where more of you will have opportunities especially for your kids and your grandkids that's coming because of what's happening now so i mean i think everybody's really in favor of that because it's good for all of us yeah i um this is this is just it's a force multiplier for our for our industry um getting all of this amazing knowledge and experience together that that nasa brings with some of the ingenuity and creativity that we see in the in the commercial industry um this is we we also have blue origin um have flown nasa payloads through our flight opportunities program and now we're working with nasa to build the lunar lander that will that will go to the moon with the Artemis program and this is just um it's an absolute force multiplier you you cannot possibly achieve in a in a silo all of the things that you can achieve when you partner with other uh like-minded and diverse um folks and and agencies and companies so um it to think that we've you know we're we're in a space where 600 ish people have have ever left this planet and that number is just going to absolutely multiply in a in a huge way much much more rapidly than we've seen in our in our lifetime amazing a lot of people believe the total solar eclipse is best enjoyed with the group we have a lot of people here today we're at the iconic indianapolis motor speedway what does this event mean to you all you've spent your whole careers you know studying space exploring space what are you looking forward to experiencing today with with all of us out here yeah i mean it's an incredible like events bring people together and it's really cool to be here for a celestial event because we're all space nerds to bring you know a very diverse group of people together i mean we've got engineers here of course but we've also got politicians and lawyers and artists all here for the common event of seeing the eclipse so that's really what excites me is coming together with that base foundation getting to know everyone that's here and what this event means to them and we're just we at least have that common thread to kick off relationships and that common thread today is space which we're all really excited about and the one other thing and i'll add is it's also it's kind of like what we the first question it's about the experience we can see pictures of the eclipse we can talk about the eclipse but when until you've seen it you've seen a total solar eclipse it's really hard to describe what that feeling is and it really puts into perspective like how much what goes on up there whether it's infrastructure we put up or the physics of everything that's out there in the universe affects our lives and this is three minutes where you'll get that and you'll see that impact and you'll feel that impact of space okay so for me i'm a huge motorsports fan anybody who knows me and has followed me i'm really into motorsports so to me this is like the perfect trifecta we've got Purdue University our alma mater all of us up here the ims which is the icon you know of racing and space the exposure to the eclipse and seeing what's happening with orbital bodies around us so to me this is perfect as a kid i either wanted to be an f1 driver or an astronaut i figured out one of those things hoping today to figure out the other half but it's just great to be here and a great place to do it it's not too late to be both well let's see for me i think it's somewhat ironic fate loves irony that you know all five of us went to space because mankind figured out how to you know engineer something spectacular and control mother nature well today i think mother nature is in control and we're gonna all be humbled so if i get philosophical for a second you know what i'm thinking about what's going to happen with this eclipse and i'm looking at you know the tens of thousands and more people that are going to be just here a lot more over throughout the city and throughout the path in this country i mean you know going to have millions and millions of people watching some of you are watching because uh you're into astronomy you're into science you like that stuff but a whole lot of people are going to be doing it because it's this seminal event that doesn't happen that often and you're going to go ahead and you're going to look at the sky and just think about science in a way that maybe you don't kind of think about it and so what i'm really hoping happens is that we're going to go ahead and have a lot of people especially a lot of kids out there who are going to see this and it's going to motivate them to realize that there are things that happen off of this planet and there's opportunities off of this planet and that uh they can go ahead and be a big part of this which is going to go ahead and make our country and our world a better place we've we've all had the opportunity this morning to meet um an amazing number of people from here in Indiana and at Purdue but people from other countries folks who have come from far and wide to experience this event and i think um the you know the the feeling of unification and the fact that through no fault of our own this perfection of the universe is going to be on display today and um that we're all just here able to witness it together there's this wonderful feeling of feeling of unity that i think we've all experienced um with the with the folks that we've met this morning and just a really wonderful um a wonderful event to be able to observe and and honor and enjoy and learn about this this perfection of the universe i mentioned earlier it's a very special day for Purdue University Jean Cernan Purdue alum and the most recent astronaut to walk on the moon said why are there so many astronauts from Purdue what are they doing over there in West Lafayette so we're going to talk about that um what would you say how would you say Purdue you know prepared you for your successful careers you know any favorite highlights or memories from your time at Purdue so i literally went to Purdue because they had the most astronauts and Neil Armstrong went there i didn't even apply to a backup school which was kind of dumb now that i think about it but everything worked out well for me um but it was inspiring to me i mean i not to embarrass but i like at the Armstrong Hall there's a wall of astronauts and i would go by Drew and Mark's face while i was studying there every day i didn't touch them or anything was weird but i did i did look at you guys i'm like one day one day um so really i mean that kind of inspiration to you know follow in the footsteps of just really incredible alumni it was something that kept me going because engineering was hard i found out really quickly that i didn't even know how to study when i first joined freshman engineering so just looking at some of the achievements really helped keep me going and seeing what is after graduation and how this this education i'm going to get at Purdue is really going to you know align me for success and i mean how awesome that we have such incredible graduates that are literally teaching people that the sky is not the limit it's just the inspiration we all need i also have to note Serisha's face is now up on campus she humbly left that out and your face will inspire others to do the same thing and that's the beauty of it i too went to Purdue uh because i believed in its ability to create astronauts and create opportunities and Purdue has so many graduates around the world not only in our country but around the world that are in aerospace and exploration that i think it just supports the development of people that then want to get into actual human spaceflight with you know you had the panel just now with the Armstrong kids Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin you know led the way to the surface of the moon with Mike Collins but having knowing that Neil was there and knowing that Jean was the most recent person on the moon i think that inspired all of us so just like you were inspired i was inspired by thinking about them and led me to Purdue and thought about the opportunities that we created and and i think that does the same for people wanting to get into industry and do other things it may not just be exploration but Purdue is such a great school it's such a great institution for this state in the country that it just breeds excellence and that shows yeah absolutely likewise i knew of Purdue's legacy both uh its relation to NASA and its relation to space explorers and was drawn to it and it was my first choice school as well um you asked or maybe Jean Sintern asked you know what's happening out there in West Lafayette honestly it really is and thank you to the current and former president of Purdue a magic place i had no idea until i was there we all worked like dogs slave did our homework overnight many many all nighters um but it's an environment where you learn humility teamwork and support as well as the craft that you're there to learn uh and i came out of there a much more well-rounded individual than the idiot kid who started there and so i think i think there is magic in West Lafayette thank you to Purdue okay so uh three really eloquent responses so true confessions i had no clue that Purdue was a place that astronauts went to i didn't know anything about Purdue i kind of came to Purdue by accident i grew up in new jersey and and i found a Purdue through a friend and i applied and i'll make the story short but i i came to Purdue i started out as a physics major and after a year i found that i liked physics but physics did not like me so then when i was finishing my freshman year and if anybody's here from Purdue you might have heard of a place called carry quad and that's where i lived as a freshman and a sophomore uh this astronaut came to give a talk at one of the common areas and the guy's name was just as Kate said Gene Cernan and so i got to meet a guy who had walked on the moon and wow did that go ahead and set me for a loop like i want to be like that guy and so that started me on a path and uh and every time that i would have a reunion i would remind gene in a form like this how i met him when i was a freshman and he inspired me you know as some older guy so sureisha thanks so much for doing that to me in return okay but um but it's funny like drew said it's good it's gonna it's gonna pass on right because somebody's gonna see one of you folks and be inspired by that but like beth said i started out like i did like i said i didn't know anything about this university well i learned a heck of a lot in a very short period of time and there's a big difference between what you start out as a freshman and what you wind up as a senior you grow so much and yes beth this university gave me everything that i needed to become successful uh and get out there and set the foundation which allowed me to go ahead and get there and so i have undying gratitude to purdue and let's go kick some butt tonight too okay um well purdue gave me a career in human spaceflight i mean it's it is that simple it's it's what i wanted from a very young age and i i knew a lot of astronauts went to purdue and i said even if i don't get to fly in space one day myself i want to enable human exploration of space and this is the school that i need to go to um to be able to do that and purdue taught me to to surisha's point it was real real hard to get through purdue engineering and you know you get to graduation you think man i survived that i got through it i did it that is how hard some of this stuff is that we are doing so that those those challenges um and all of that you know really really hard work that has has followed me my entire career and that is what it takes um to expand these these barriers that we're all talking about um and to explore space in this way so it it taught me determination it taught me stick to itiveness it taught me that there is absolutely no way i can do this on my own that i am still close friends with the people that i went through purdue engineering with um i relied on them and they relied on me to succeed when when we were engineering students and they are still my colleagues and my mentors and my commiserators now that now that we're all out in the in the industry and we continue to succeed together even though we're all at different companies and sometimes we're at the same company um so it all of those things that i learned um at at purdue as far as how to survive and succeed um i i have absolutely relied on it my my entire career spoiler up okay this is going to be our last question i want to know what's in the future for you all what's your next giant leap i'm gonna i just love where i am right now because you know i worked my entire life to get to space um especially in i think at the time was nontraditional i think it's now becoming i think that notion is going away but i'm now in a position to help enable more and more people to go to space especially scientists and researchers so i'm really excited about that what my next giant leap is i'll be totally honest i don't know i've been working to go to space my entire life and then i did it and i was like okay what's next and i did the same thing so it's actually kind of liberating to have a blank piece of paper to kind of determine what i want to do you know what would i want the next giant leap to be but so but i'm not rushing to it thanks true my biggest my biggest supporter uh i'm like you i don't know what's next after a 23 year career uh with nasa i'm now working in the private sector and supporting purdue university as well as a presidential ambassador along with my wife indy who's also a purdue grad and so our next giant leap is just to continue to share this story give back to uh not only the university but also continue work in human space flight and try and help to enable and take advantage of that uh low earth orbit economy and that lunar economy that we're all working towards now and have been for you know the last five to ten years so i've i've kind of got two short answers uh so i've flown six times four of those times were within five months last year and once was on two hours notice so the next thing i'm gonna do is take a vacation and then after that uh i think you know like everyone here uh i want to continue to contribute and spend the rest of my life helping human space flight you know as hard as i can and so i'll continue doing that so for me i've i've had the longest time since my last space flight from everybody up here so it's been almost 15 years since my last space flight and um and so i've already made that transition from flying in space to knowing that i'm gonna go ahead and have a career where i'm more you know feet on the ground and so for me i'm gonna continue doing what i have been doing which is to go ahead and support uh industries to be successful so that we can continue exploration of space uh you know i support uh nasa's goals to go ahead and uh have a public and private enterprises for exploration on the moon to get on to mars with a human being and to go ahead and continue and do that and then on a personal level i think from our wife and i our big adventure is figuring out whether our son's going to go to prudu or texas a and m right so so we're working on that prudu uh well i'm i'm still working on the new shepherd program at blue origin and we we really really want to make this routine so figuring out how to reuse every single piece of our booster in our spacecraft and fly it routinely like every week um that's what we're trying to do and and we're we're using the technology something that really excites me about continuing to support this program is we are using technologies on new shepherd to inform the future program so our lunar program um that will help nasa land people on the mar people in cargo on the mar on on the moon um we are using those technologies on new shepherd during our flights to test them and and to to vet them before they they um fly on other missions so i i like that kind of feedback loop that we're able to that we're able to enable on on my new shepherd program so that's what i'm most excited about thank you all for sharing how cool was this we got to spend some time with five astronauts can you give them a round of applause please thank you so much a quick reminder this is prudu is available on apple podcast spotify youtube wherever you get your podcast this is going to be a podcast episode so you can listen to it again and again um and a quick reminder too that they are going to be signing autographs at 3 30 right back in here at gallagher pavilion along with some indy car drivers so don't miss that and finally boiler up and let's uh cheer for our men's basketball program tonight thank you all okay looks like we lost a few so those of you in the back if you want a better seat come on up we're not quite done we've got one more panel left that includes a combination of race car drivers and astronauts so you're not going to want to miss it okay we have made it to our final panel of the day and you are in for a real treat astronauts and race car drivers here at the indianapolis motor speedway all right well good afternoon everyone while we are getting seated on the stage first of all we appreciate all of you being here my name is holly writings i'm excited to host the panels astronauts race car drivers um i came from houston texas we're really excited about the weather here for the eclipse because if you've looked at the weather like texas is really terrible so we're excited to be here um in houston i'm responsible for building a space station around the moon that's part of nasa's artemous campaign uh the name of the space station's gateway before that i had the opportunity to work in mission control in houston as the first female chief flight director for many many years and so uh thank you and so one of the really exciting things about doing those jobs is you get to meet a lot of really amazing people talk across industries and so today we're going to talk some about uh flying in space and also driving race cars and the similarities and differences and then some of the innovation that's going on all right so i'm going to introduce our panelists kind of at the very end down there we have uh megan macarthur astronaut uh she was flew in space sts 125 and so that was the mission one of the missions to service the Hubble space telescope pretty awesome she caught the Hubble with the robotic arm which is really cool and then had the opportunity to fly again just recently going up to the space station on a space x dragon and living and working on the space station for a long duration mission so she is our astronaut next to her we have uh lizzie and lizzie we're very excited is on our panel she was a student at Purdue um so very local and now works as a systems engineer for the aero mcclaren team and she'll get to talk to you a little bit about uh how she got where she is today all right then we have kurt oh go ahead all right then we have kurt bush uh who uh drove uh nascar for many many years just recently retired although i was listening to him talk and he doesn't sound like he's very retired he was talking about going to team meetings and coaching um so had the opportunity uh to race in all the nascar series uh told me he raced once here and actually might have beat one of the other guys on the stage so as you can tell um the race car drivers had an awesome time just like we do at nasa given each other a really hard time so um kurt's gonna be with us then we have uh will power go ahead we'll have the distinction of winning here uh in 2018 um at the indy 500 currently obviously racing right the season just started only one points race apparently two events but only one points race so you get to see a lot of him this year uh following along in the indy series next up we have uh alex alex drossi who is also currently driving for aero mclaren oh i see some cheers i you guys probably know this but he had the distinction also of winning here um on the hundredth uh running of this race in 2016 um as a rookie right and so it's pretty awesome then down at the end we have uh lin st james and she is a legend in racing um nope go ahead they know you they know you this is awesome um she of course uh was one of i think just nine females to race um in indy 1992 the second female to do it um rookie of the year and now has a group that's doing women in motor sports and trying to really help uh improve the the diversity and the opportunities for women across all of the motor sports both working with the teams and then all of the the individuals coming through the system so we're really excited to hear from her all right so we've only got 25 minutes i probably took up three and a half or four of it and we've got a lot for the to say so we are going to jump right into questions i realize that folks are still coming in in the back um and so you guys just come on and sit down it's not going to bother us at all i know we were a little behind turn in the room over so you guys come on up to the front we're happy to just keep talking while you walk on in so with that we're going to start uh with the first question down at the end to megan you know just if you look at race cars and racing and drivers and then you also look at spaceships and human spaceflight and astronauts there's a lot of a lot of similarities a lot of things that jump out at you between the two different groups of people we were actually talking about some of it backstage so megan maybe for you you know what jumps out at you in terms of similarities between our worlds that we have represented up here thanks holly and let me say just hello and um we're really excited to be here i'm here with my 10 year old son and so i asked him this question last night what do what does he think that race car drivers and astronauts have in common and he said well you know you go really fat you both go really fast um you both need a lot of training and sometimes you fly so um william told me that's actually usually unintentional when that happens for them but uh yeah so i think there's several things that jump out to me as as being probable similarities and one of course is the way we rely on technology we use cutting-edge technology to do things that humans otherwise aren't suited to do right so exploring space doing research in space we have you know huge teams of engineers that um that work really hard to make our missions possible and that i think is that is the second thing that really jumps out at me as being a similarity is that we are just a member of a team as astronauts and we're maybe the most visible member similar probably to race car drivers you're a very visible member of of an extensive team right that every single person working really hard working hard to do their job right to keep us safe to make us successful so those are some of the sort of obvious similarities that i see and then i think we'll also hear i'm interested to hear lizzie from you one of the things you know when you're living in space you're in space for 200 days or the space station of course has been in space for over 20 years when we're building hardware we have to have hardware that's really durable that's going to last that's going to be resilient and that's going to be resilient to me fixing it so because we can't call in the specialists you know we have to be able to do a lot of that work ourselves and so really making sure that your hardware is resilient to the environment that you're expecting it to work in to make sure that you're successful and safe is kind of another similarity that i see all right well thanks again let's see so maybe kurt i'll go to you next from the driver's side do you see same things different things like what is looking at the space world from your perspective as a driver what does it what does it look like to you it's uh it's very similar and it's uh it's such a powerful combination when you have all of the departments and everyone that's working together and they find that synergy and you find that zone so to speak and you know a lot of it is done back at the race shop but the biggest thing for me like when i hit the race track for that first lap every weekend and i'm driving down into turn one at 200 miles an hour that's that trust that is what you find in the people's effort and the quality that they're building into the race cars and with the teamwork it it's all the way back to the wind tunnel you know you have the engineering staff you have the pit crew guys you know they have to do their job jumping over the wall and getting the pit stops done in a in a quick amount of time uh there's there's again just the safety protocols that we go through it's i'm sure it's it's way more stringent uh as an astronaut but you know it's it's so it's so very similar uh you you have to be on call ready to go at any time you have to adjust to all the changing circumstances uh you know i i loved weather as a kid i loved meteorology and and when i got into racing you learned so much more about the different elements that come into play for finding um you know speed out on the racetrack and then when i would jump to indy car or in a drag racing you find even more things that continue to to teach you how to be better in all areas and so like anything else in life you know once you stop learning your stagnant and you always have to find ways to continue to learn continue to adapt to evolve and you know as a as a kid watching the nasa program back in the 80s that's why i'm a big fan and that's why i'm here today and also at the times that i've spent in datona around our races there was launches down at cape canaveral and so we'd always go down there to try to check out a launch and most of the time it was a big party but we had a lot of fun trying to you know learn more about space and it gives you more motivation to go to the different places to absorb nasa and the smithsonians of course that are in washington dc so i'm a i'm a i'm a fan today but it's really neat uh that that indianapolis motor speedway put this on let's see lizzie since you're sitting in the middle i'm actually gonna go to you next um because you know megan talked about the teamwork and you know so did kerr and then actually weather we could spend probably three hours just talking about weather between spaceflight and and racing but what is the what does it look like from your side you know because the the team like when what's the preparation when does it start you know we just see the race at the end where you go around the track a bunch like what explain that to us yeah so most of the time you guys on the track see the car in its final product um but the months and months that go into prepping not only our indy 500 cars but our cars for all of the road course and street course and short oval racing we do we've been prepping for the indy 500 for for months now and we're finally getting the cars in the final stages for the test this week um but from my side from the system side i'm really concerned about the electronics making sure that the car is as healthy and as safe as possible and making sure all the sensors are reading accurately um before we go to the track well we were talking about uh you know the preparation so i think one race in two events it's a very long race season you start you know months and months before but then you race almost every week this is an off week so you guys got to to join us but like for you as an individual what what is it like trying to get ready for the race season and then stay at at kind of that level of performance throughout you know many many many weeks yeah i mean i think people don't realize how physical our cars are to drive um we pull a lot of g's i think under braking we pull five g's i know when we had really high downforce at phoenix we were pulling six g in turn one there um so you have to train very hard you have to train a lot you have to train hard and you know literally when the season ends you know in in uh september you you're immediately starting your your off season training you know getting that base good doing some long long uh cardio work start doing weights put on a bit of weight um to build some muscle uh you know i'd say during the season you get car fitness that's what that's what i call it car fitness and i don't think there's any training you can do do that that helps that i mean you've got to be in top shape but the car fitness is a big deal because you'll be super fit whether it's swimming running rowing whatever you do everyone has a different program but you know you have to be top top level uh cardiovascular strength all that but when you get in the car for the first test you go down the sea bring your tests i mean your glutes are burning your heart rates way up there your arms are aching um on your first run so that kind of shows that it's just the forces the g forces those lateral g forces are so hard to train for um and and so you get car fitness as the season goes we've still got to maintain the fitness in the gym you still got to be in the gym um training in between races uh every week just to maintain that level of cardio cardio strength um but we have we also have simulated you have simulated time which is pretty good it doesn't simulate g force but i mean it's the same weight as a wheel you're training in the uh you know at the circuits that you go to uh you do a lot of that in the off season you and you do that before every race you go to the actual track you're gonna race at in the simulator and it's i mean it is exactly the same like seriously when you sit in the simulator you're sitting at long beach and you're actually looking at the buildings and it feels like you're there um and the car feels very very very close so um massively important i mean if you're not fit you'll make mistakes you won't think as well your decision making goes down it matters it really does it matters to be fit because you'll simply be slower if you're not yeah so kurt do you guys do the same kind of simulations on the NASCAR side as well yes absolutely and like Will says the track mapping the bumps in the track the the ambient or the you know the architecture of the buildings and things that's it's so realistic but yeah we don't quite simulate g forces that's the toughest thing to prepare for yeah so Megan do we have spaceship fit this is what i want to know we have car fit i've never had a spaceship fit a term for sure it's very important for us to work out we're in space when we're in space because if we our bodies aren't loaded when we're when we're in free fall around the planet our bodies aren't loaded like they are here walking around on the surface of the earth and so our our muscles will start to atrophy and our bones will start to dissolve and so if you did nothing and you spend 200 days in space your bodies are going to be pretty unhappy when you get home and so we have time on the on the schedule every day for working out but i think we should rename that spaceship fit i think that's a i think that's a fantastic idea we're totally we're totally adopting that all right let's see so alex for you a little bit different question so rookie of the year 2016 you won here we talked about that so that's eight years in curious about you know innovation and technology how things are changing and then i heard you had a really good podcast they talk about all kinds of stuff so like what's what's coming down the pipe what does the future look like to you well i think what's very cool for for the indy car side of things this year is is we're introducing hybrid technology so obviously you know we've got two two different manufacturers in the championship in chevrolet and honda a lot of where consumer cars are going are towards you know hybrid and electrification so there's an importance to our partners to have a product that represents their brand and and their trajectory so hybrid systems are coming into the car at some point in in in this season actually which is going to be exciting for everyone to watch it'll add a whole new dynamic and element to the racing the strategy and obviously the performance of the car indy car is also you know we're the only race series in the world to be on a hundred percent renewable fuel which i think is is very cool and and certainly very innovative in terms of you know we have engines that you know creates 800 horsepower at their peak and it's on a fuel that's renewable so that's that's awesome and then also two years ago firestone actually introduced a tire for our street courses so the the races that we do through city streets one of the compounds we have two compounds the softer compounds of the higher performance tire is actually the sidewall is made from a yule plant which is again a renewable source of of rubber and it's the first tire manufacturer in the world to do something like that so indy car in a lot of ways is looking to the future it's important for our brands and our partners to definitely have a a mindset to to be environmentally conscious and and we're doing it in a lot of different ways so that's cool obviously we're all about going fast and making a lot of noise and that's something very similar to rockets i think but yeah for for those that haven't been to speedway before you know it's um this is our home this is what we love to we love coming here for any sort of event and it's certainly amazing to see so many faces here for what is going to be a very special moment in time here in a couple hours all right well thank you appreciate you doing the science part right so solar eclipse renewable energy it's all about the sun one of the things we're very focused with spaceships as well is you know we like the smoke and fire part uh in ours it's maybe more controlled in you guys case maybe smoke and fire is not super great for us we have to do it uh to get the spaceship off the ground but certainly lots of different types of fuels on the spaceship as well right we've got a lot of commercial partners out with NASA that are experimenting with different ways to do that um let's see so we'll switch gears a little bit one more time so Lynn here as i said in the intro one of the like the pioneers of women in motorsports had an opportunity to drive the nd cars and so for you you know maybe just give us a sort of a sketch of you know what it looked like when it started what it looks like now maybe what you then want it to look like in the future and and what you're working on thank you um i guess i'm old and so the way it was but i'm not a historian i'm not donald davison so i don't really know all the history um but i can say that you know i was fortunate um to find my passion and the one thing that i do say is that the car doesn't know the difference it doesn't really know the gender the ethnicity um and so and we're not robots yet i worry a little bit because i think a lot of the advancement of technology with the autonomous vehicles that are out there and i know there's some autonomous racing going on with nd cars but you know we the human factor is still with all the technology focused on the vehicles and and the dynamics and and all of that is fantastic and i think it truly does create a lot more overlap with with the aviation and with aeronautics but at the same time i think there's still so much to be learned about the human factor um i mean the not just the physical fitness but how the minds work and how they fit with the team and the human dynamics of how teams work i don't know these guys very well but i can tell you that there are times that i'm sure alex will be with a team um and be able to get the most out of the car and the most out of himself um and those are sometimes very hard to define i don't know how the technology or or um engineering can do that but if you look at each individual driver um and i know even my own career where everything just gels and you really are able to bring the best out of yourself and out of your team and i i still think that human factor i love technology i love the fact that the cars are going faster not all that much faster than we did back in the in the 90s but um but the fact is that it's it's it's advancing technology but i think there's still opportunities for the human factor and if i were young out there um thinking about what i would want to do is a career in my life um i would really want to do not just about you know about health and fitness but just about how human beings work and how to bring the most out of human beings in a particularly in a team environment and when you then also are dealing with technology which of course is advancing the blend of of advancing technology um of the human dynamics and then how to bring the most out of out of human beings that i i still think that's an open door to be able to to explore more um and maybe not enough emphasis on that and i think more women and more people of color more people are from different diverse populations um would have opportunities then to it wouldn't be such a maybe an expectation of a cookie cutter of what a scientist should look like what a near an engineer should look like what a race car driver should look like it would be a much more open field and i guess that would be my wish for the future is that it would just be much more wide open for people that have the passion and have the skill and can develop the skill and bring the best out in every human being on earth absolutely thank you so maybe lizzie i'll ask you to follow right you're kind of at the very beginning of your career this was like a dream and a goal for your degree is motorsports like it's just like who that's a cool degree like i'm gonna go to school for motorsports and so like you know what does it what does it look like to you you know being female and then also just you know people has said to me well holly what's it like to be the female chief flight director and i always wanted to say i just am the chief flight director i worked hard and we want to get to that point but at where we are now we're still talking about it a little bit so what do you think yeah it's definitely an interesting question because i don't know what it's like to not be a woman in motorsports because i always have been so it's definitely a question i always find very hard to answer but like lin was saying i didn't come into motorsports to be a female in motorsports i came into motorsports to be an engineer and i wasn't hired because i'm a woman i'm hired because i'm a good engineer so um i think it's important as i see more females coming into the paddock which is always extremely exciting for me um that they know that your voice matters and that you belong here and you should be up here um and don't let anyone tell you that you shouldn't be up here because we're here for you um we've got a great support group and i hope that they i see you guys up here in the future all right we have like just a minute or two left so we're going to be lightning around which means you start at the end and everybody goes down and then you get to say like you know a couple of sentences something you want to leave the audience with so lin will end with you so you be you yep you got time to think so all right megan ready go sure i just want to echo what uh what both lizzie and lin said that um the more people we have thinking about solving these difficult problems the more uh more people we have working together bringing their innovative ideas and their unique backgrounds the better solutions we're going to get so i'm looking forward to seeing what the future brings for both industries all right lizzie go um be curious ask questions figure out how the world works excellent kurt go it's about work ethic commitment and being in that top one percent and pushing yourself to become better and better i would say find your passion and uh work hard follow it uh anything can happen anything believe in it and it will come true i promise you honestly i'm just pumped to watch the moon go in front of the sun for the first time since 1869 in indiana so let's go i thought it was easy to get harder now but um i you don't really believe in yourself um find a way to believe in yourself and then find other people um but find your passion and then just believe in yourself don't let anybody stop you all right thank you all right my two sentences to leave you with is just great people right i just met some of these people we all met each other like an hour ago they are amazing and you can form a team from anywhere if you all are just excited about what you're doing so thank you guys for being a wonderful panel for taking your time and we appreciate you guys listening thank you very much all right that concludes the fun of the morning things are just getting started be sure to come back here after the eclipse uh we will have race car drivers and astronauts signing autographs that will happen at 330 in this building so come back after the eclipse um thank you to our moderators our panelists i don't know about you but i was here the whole time and i learned a lot so we were um obviously very grateful for their time and thank you for being such a great audience opening ceremonies by the way get underway at one o'clock enjoy your day