We are kicking off a new series on space exploration, which is particularly relevant this month because a new Mars rover named Perseverance is hurtling towards The Red Planet for its landing on February 18. And joining me along for the ride as co-host for this series is my Science Center colleague and planetary geologist Devin Waller. There is a lot of science to unpack here, so we’ll be talking to people who explore all different corners of our solar system. 

While we have sent quite a few rovers and other robots to Mars, we haven’t sent any humans there yet—it’s just too far away and dangerous right now. In the 1960s and 70s, NASA’s Apollo missions famously landed astronauts on the Moon. And last December, NASA announced a new class of astronauts for the Artemis Team, which plans to send the first woman and the next man to explore the Moon a few years from now. But if we’ve already been there before… Do you ever wonder why we keep going back to the Moon?

Kelsey Young (@RockDocYoung) is a planetary space scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She explains that there is still quite a lot of science we can learn on the Moon to better understand our own planet. Kelsey also has the enviable job of training astronauts how to be geologists here on Earth, so they can do science when they get to the Moon.

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