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You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.
Regina Barber
Hey, Shortwavers. Regina Barber here, and it's time for my favorite monthly episode of our space news segment, Spacing out with Gina. We're here today with my space buddy, my partner in Spacing out crime, All Things Considered host, Scott Detrow. Welcome back to the show, Scott.
Scott Detrow
I'm excited to be here. Since we last taped, I now have a giant picture of the moon at my desk, and I love it.
Regina Barber
You do? I've seen it.
Scott Detrow
It's big.
Regina Barber
And joining us today, Scott, is our producer, Burley McCoy Burleigh. Welcome to your first Spacing out with Gina.
Burleigh McCoy
Hey, Gina. Hey, Scott. I'm excited to be here. It sounds like my jam. I'm a big nerd.
Scott Detrow
I'm excited. I am excited you're here.
Additional NPR Staff or Guest
Welcome.
Regina Barber
She is a big nerd because she's the other PhD scientist on short Wave. So she's going to feel right at home in our nerd space, I think.
Scott Detrow
You know, I agree. I'll just represent all the non PhD holders out there and do my best.
Regina Barber
I have a question for both of you, though.
Scott Detrow
Yes.
Regina Barber
Have you seen any of the Transformer movies?
Additional NPR Staff or Guest
Of course.
Regina Barber
I haven't seen any of them. Whoa. Have you, Burley?
Burleigh McCoy
Oh, I've definitely seen some, and they were cool at the time, but, like, I think they're kind of forgettable. I don't know.
Regina Barber
It's true.
Burleigh McCoy
No hate mail, please.
Regina Barber
It's true. But, you know, just to link all of this together, our first story in this segment is about Transformers on the moon. But I'm gonna pop your bubble a little, Scott. It's not about Optimus Prime.
Burleigh McCoy
They're very different, but hopefully equally as cool.
Scott Detrow
Are they still robots in disguise?
Regina Barber
Yes, they still shapeshift.
Scott Detrow
Oh, okay. I'll take that.
Regina Barber
They're really small. They're really cute. They're round little guys about the size of a baseball. Essentially, they rolled out of this moon lander, and each half of the sphere moves outward, kind of expanding, revealing this cute little camera in the center. And the halves are now spinning wheels.
Scott Detrow
Okay, that's even better than a Transformer. So it's like. It's like a little car that rolls around then.
Regina Barber
Yeah, sort of. But they kind of waddle. Cause they can kind of waddle over hard terrain and navigate. They navigate on their own. And this was a test for future explorations.
Burleigh McCoy
Oh my God. Waddling around. This reminds me of my toddler a little bit. Like always exploring, always expanding. Which brings me to our next topic, the expansion of the universe.
Scott Detrow
Oh, I'm just gonna applaud that. Really smooth transition. Congratulations. What's the latest, though, on the expanding universe?
Burleigh McCoy
So there's some drama in the astronomy world about how our universe is expanding. Some scientists are debating this right now and. And the stakes of that debate, just the fate of the universe, though most astronomers are still on one side of the debate.
Regina Barber
Right. Like me.
Scott Detrow
And we're gonna talk about Artemis 2 and Artemis 3, which now has a crew.
Regina Barber
Yep, that's right, Scott. So today on the show, we go from the moon to the farthest reaches of the cosmos and back. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from N.
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Regina Barber
start with these little cute autonomous robots that, you know, strolled on the moon.
Scott Detrow
I got a bunch of questions. Let's just start with why, though. Why they were on the moon? You said it was for testing.
Burleigh McCoy
Yeah, they were part of the first successful Japanese lunar mission that landed on the moon a couple years ago. And there's a new study out last week in the journal Science Robotics analyzing how these little guys performed up there on the lunar surface.
Scott Detrow
Other than kind of waddling around and seeming like Wall E characters, what was their scientific job?
Regina Barber
So they took a lot of pictures of the moon's surface and of the lander. They're basically scouting out the terrain ahead of bigger rovers and going places they can't.
Burleigh McCoy
And Scott, just to underline this, they're really small. They only weigh about a half a pound. And that's huge for space travel, right? The lighter something is, the easier and cheaper it is to put up into space.
Regina Barber
And I talked to Roger Wiens, a planetary scientist who didn't work on this program, and he was thoroughly impressed. He said that the redundancy was a huge benefit to these devices.
Additional NPR Staff or Guest
These are not expensive devices. You can have several of them, and if one or two fails, then you still have others.
Scott Detrow
One other thing, though, I'm thinking about the fact that the Moon has one sixth of the Earth's gravity. So does that affect how they move around?
Burleigh McCoy
Totally, yeah. These little guys actually kind of bounce, though. So it's another reason why they're super cool. They're designed for low gravity so they can explore other places like Mars or even asteroids. Here's Roger again.
Additional NPR Staff or Guest
These could go to small asteroids where hopping is extremely easy. In fact, you got to make sure you don't hop out of out of orbit or something like that. So, yeah, I can see these things going to a number of places. We'll have transformers on various planets and asteroids eventually.
Scott Detrow
Okay, this was a really fun start. We need to shift to something much more existential, though, for all of us, and that is our ever expanding universe. First of all, remind us what this debate has focused on over recent decades.
Burleigh McCoy
Okay, so, Scott, almost 30 years ago, astronomers discovered that our universe is not only expanding, but that expansion is speeding up. But in the last few years, a group of scientists shook up that understanding by claiming that the expansion isn't speeding up, but slowing down. Now, a paper out last week in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society pushes back and the old framework still stands, continuing the debate.
Scott Detrow
So we're back to expanding.
Regina Barber
Expanding and accelerating.
Scott Detrow
Okay, okay. So given that we're back to that point of view, what do the expansion of the universe is slowing down, folks say to that.
Regina Barber
The group of scientists at Yonsei University in South Korea stands by their work. They already posted a rebuttal to this paper. And they say that the standard way astrophysicists measure universe expansion now is fundamentally flawed.
Scott Detrow
So for the non astrophysicists out there, remind us how you measure this.
Regina Barber
I'm gonna let Burleigh do this.
Scott Detrow
Okay. Yeah.
Burleigh McCoy
So astronomers basically measure the brightness of a special type of exploding star, a supernova, and then correct for things like how long it explodes or how Much dust is in the way.
Regina Barber
And this South Korean team has said astronomers, we haven't been including the age of the star's home galaxy in those corrections. So the math is off. And when you include that, the final answer is that the expansion of the universe is slowing down, which would be a massive discovery if that were true.
Scott Detrow
This is quite the big if true.
Regina Barber
Exactly.
Scott Detrow
So, okay, so given all of that though, what is the consensus among other astronomers?
Burleigh McCoy
So the experts we spoke to were skeptical of the slowdown hypothesis. They say the community has been fine tuning the supernova method for almost 30 years. And there are other methods that point to the universe's expansion speeding up.
Regina Barber
Yeah. We talked to Premvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist from Yale University who wasn't involved in this work, and she's still skeptical. But she says these kind of debates are what strengthen science. Scientists by nature are skeptical.
Scott Detrow
And even for an idea that has
Burleigh McCoy
been validated and accepted. Right.
Regina Barber
If there is a new argument, we
Scott Detrow
do take it seriously and we interrogate it. And it's a low stakes debate. Right. Because it's only just like the fate of the universe that that's, that's at stake.
Burleigh McCoy
Instead of everything eventually drifting far apart from each other and dying a cold death billions of years from now, the universe could simply implode. What astronomers called the Big Crunch. Sadly, none of us are going to be around to see that.
Regina Barber
I'm Team Cold Death.
Scott Detrow
Don't know which one I prefer.
Burleigh McCoy
Hard. Hard to choose, huh?
Scott Detrow
Yeah, non issue for me. I guess something that is happening in our time spans though.
Regina Barber
Yeah.
Scott Detrow
Our favorite NASA program, Artemis. We've got to talk about it.
Regina Barber
Totally. The crew for the next mission, Artemis 3 was just selected. And this is the mission that will do lots of maneuvers in space in low Earth orbit. Scott, you spoke with one of the newly selected astronauts, right?
Scott Detrow
I did. The day he was selected, I talked with Andre Douglas and one of the things he talked about was going on training missions. He was on the backup Crew for Artemis 2 and trained alongside them. And one of the things they did was go to Iceland. We did a 24 mile hike in two days in Iceland just to go through a hard challenge of land navigation as if we're, you know, learning how to be really good operators. And they do this, you know, as you know, because this mission is supposed to help prepare them for future lunar explorations. So they're looking for places on Earth that are kind of analogs of the Moon of lunar conditions.
Regina Barber
Yeah. And it's also about geology like the rocky terrain and the actual rock compositions are very similar between the moon and Iceland. Apollo astronauts actually trained in Iceland, too, way back when and said it was the closest thing they had seen to the moon's surface. Two NASA astronauts are going back there this July to train in Iceland.
Scott Detrow
And this isn't just for lunar missions. Right. They're actually NASA's. It's farther away, but they're trying to simulate Mars as well right now.
Regina Barber
Yeah, yeah.
Burleigh McCoy
So they've had astronaut hopefuls trek around the lava beds in Hawaii Volcanoes national park with big packs on their backs doing geological fieldwork and dealing with very limited and very delayed communications from a simulated mission control. It's all a way to make sure our astronauts are super well prepared when someday they are out in space doing the real thing.
Regina Barber
And, Scott, there is a simulated Mars mission happening right now at NASA's Johnson Space center in Houston. NASA has four researchers in this 3D printed habitat doing experiments as if they're living on Mars. They went in last October, and they'll stay inside for a little over a year. And maybe, you know, we'll come back and talk about that when they emerge.
Scott Detrow
Sounds great. I think we need a spacing out field trip to Iceland then.
Burleigh McCoy
Let's do that.
Regina Barber
Oh, my gosh. And then we can see the northern lights too, which we've always talked about.
Scott Detrow
Yes, yes.
Commercial Announcer
Okay.
Scott Detrow
Remote show in Iceland. Done.
Regina Barber
Scott Burley, thank you for spacing out with me. I had a great time.
Burleigh McCoy
My mind definitely feels spacey after that.
Scott Detrow
You know, contemplating the expansion of the universe will do that.
Regina Barber
It will. I enjoy it. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend. It really helps our show. And hey, give us a follow on the NPR app or wherever you're listening from so you'll never miss a new episode from us. This episode was Produced by Burleigh McCoy and Kai McNamee. It was edited by Christopher Intagliota and our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez.
Burleigh McCoy
Tyler Jones checked the facts. Robert Rodriguez, Ted Mebane, and Hannah Glovna were the audio engineers. I'm Burleigh McCoy.
Regina Barber
And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from npr. See you Monday.
Scott Detrow
I'm floating away.
Burleigh McCoy
Accelerating or decelerating?
Regina Barber
Decelerating. He stopped.
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Date: June 19, 2026
Hosts: Regina Barber, Scott Detrow
Guest/Producer: Burleigh McCoy
In this lively episode of Short Wave’s monthly “Spacing out with Gina” segment, hosts Regina Barber and Scott Detrow team up with producer and fellow PhD scientist Burleigh McCoy for a rapid tour through recent breakthroughs in space exploration and astronomy. The trio discusses Japan's adorable, shape-shifting lunar robots, the ongoing scientific debate over the universe's expansion, and new details about NASA’s Artemis missions—including astronaut training in surprising locations on Earth. The conversation blends accessible science, light banter, and moments of awe about our ever-expanding knowledge of the cosmos.
Introduction to Robots:
Purpose and Function:
Designed for Low Gravity:
Background:
Measuring Expansion:
Scientific Community Response:
Artemis 3 Crew:
Why Iceland?:
Simulating Mars:
| Segment Topic | Timestamp | |-------------------------------------------------|-------------| | Robots on the Moon — Introduction & Purpose | 00:47–05:16 | | Robots Designed for Low Gravity | 05:16–06:08 | | The Expanding Universe Debate | 06:08–08:54 | | NASA Artemis, Astronaut Training, Iceland | 09:01–11:16 | | Simulated Mars mission at Johnson Space Center | 10:46–11:07 | | Light banter/sign-off | 11:12–12:14 |
This episode is a must-listen for anyone craving a bite-size, entertaining, and informative peek into our lunar future, cosmic mysteries, and the very human side of space exploration.