August 11, 2016 9:00 pm

For Curiosity’s 4th Anniversary, Revisit “StarTalk Live! Satisfying Our Curiosity about Mars (Part 1)”

Can you believe it’s been 4 years since Curiosity landed on Mars?

Since then, we’ve celebrated a few other milestones in exploring our Solar System. New Horizons reached – and passed – Pluto, Juno has entered orbit around Jupiter, and Rosetta has explored – and Philae has landed on – Comet 67P.

But on September 14, 2012, StarTalk Live descended on the Bell House in Brooklyn, NY to celebrate the fact that we’d landed the school-bus-sized Curiosity Rover on the Red Planet. In addition to host Neil deGrasse Tyson, co-host Eugene Mirman, and comedians Jim Gaffigan and Sarah Silverman, we had another guest, astrobiologist David Grinspoon, who was the co-investigator on the Radiation Assessment Detector, one of the experiments on the Mars Science Laboratory that went to Mars with Curiosity.

Since that night, David Grinspoon, aka Dr. FunkySpoon, has gone on to be a fan-favorite guest on our show, in addition to serving as a guest host when Neil was off recording Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, and, most recently, to become one of the hosts of StarTalk All-Stars, our newest show featuring a revolving slate of science educators.

You’ll be able to hear (and watch!) David’s first episode as a StarTalk All-Star on August 30^th, but until then, we’re serving up a double shot of Dr. FunkySpoon tomorrow night. That’s because we’ve extended his StarTalk Live! appearance with 11 minutes of new content, where David and Chuck Nice talk about the human impact on Earth during the Anthropocene epoch, from climate change to a new entry into the geologic record, this one created by man: plastiglomerates.

Please join us for our Extended Classic: StarTalk Live! Satisfying Our Curiosity about Mars (Part 1) this Friday, August 11 at 7pm EDT, on our website, or on iTunes Podcasts, SoundCloud, Google Play Music, Stitcher and TuneIn.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Jeffrey Simons