What do the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station, and the Moon have in common? They’re all satellites that orbit the Earth! This week, we’re going extraterrestrial to talk about the dreams, discoveries, and debacles that went into Mir and other weirdly cool human-made satellites. Plus, we dig into burning questions, like whether the Sun can be considered a satellite. And we’re big enough space nerds that we try to explain some celestial mechanics.
If you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:
[Truth or Fail]
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9a3y8d/the-man-who-turned-night-into-day
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/monitoring/media_reports/1209034.stm
[Fact Off]
Film satellites:
https://www.space.com/12996-secret-spy-satellites-declassified-nro.html
https://gizmodo.com/5994202/how-the-us-built-its-super-secret-spy-satellite-program
Earwig wing tech:
https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2018/03/earwigs-and-the-art-of-origami.html
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6382/1386
[Ask the Science Couch]
Picking satellite orbits:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OrbitsCatalog/page2.php
http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/spaceobjectregister/index.html
[Butt One More Thing]
Moon poop:
https://boingboing.net/2009/06/16/poop-on-the-moon-and.html
https://gizmodo.com/theres-poop-on-the-moon-1679070982