Want to spend a year living in NASA's Mars simulation?

What you'll learn

• 1 (00:00) **Episode Introduction & Host Banter** - Hosts Regina Barber, Scott Detrow, and Ari Daniel introduce themselves and preview the three space stories to come.
• 2 (04:04) **NASA's Year-Long Mars Simulation: The Setup** - NASA is recruiting volunteers for a four-person, year-long simulated mission to the Moon and Mars, housed at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
• 3 (05:28) **What NASA Hopes to Learn from the Simulation** - The primary goal is to study how crews handle stress, isolation, and long-term separation from loved ones.
• 4 (06:56) **Sugar in Space: Searching for Life's Building Blocks** - Scientists are scanning the interstellar medium for organic molecules that could be precursors to life on Earth.
• 5 (08:50) **Why the Sugar Discovery Matters** - The finding suggests sugars can form without life, potentially in molecular clouds before stars or planets exist.
• 6 (09:51) **New Horizons Wakes Up at the Edge of the Solar System** - NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, famous for its Pluto flyby, has woken from 11 months of hibernation about six billion miles from Earth.
• 7 (11:28) **How New Horizons Communicates from Six Billion Miles Away** - The spacecraft relies on NASA's Deep Space Network, a system of three massive radio dishes on Earth.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app