From Another Star

NASA’S office of planetary defense isn’t worried about Klingons or Amoeboid Zingatularians. They worry about asteroids and comets. Like the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013. It was about 20 yards across. An asteroid 150 yards in diameter could take out a city. An even bigger one — as the dinosaurs reading this will attest — could change earth’s ecology, and lead to mass extinctions. Kelly Fast, program manager for NASA’s office of planetary defense , tells Dr. Michelle Thaller about an asteroid that watchers in Hawaii recently sighted: a mysterious, massive, cigar-shaped object. Millions of years into its journey, it was traveling faster than any spacecraft ever built by humans. It’s the first object ever known to visit our solar system that originated in the orbit of another star. Too fast to be trapped by our sun’s gravity, it’s now traveling a path that will take it back into deep, interstellar space. Orbital Path is produced by David Schulman. The program is edited by Andrea Mustain. Production oversight by John Barth and Genevieve Sponsler. Hosted by Dr. Michelle Thaller. Illustration credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

You can listen to From Another Star online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

From Another Star is an episode from Orbital Path by PRX.

This episode is 16:14 long.

This episode was published on Dec 15, 2017.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Orbital Path when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.