About This Episode

This episode’s guest host is Dr. Amy Mainzer, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She’s the perfect guide for exploring asteroids and comets – and comic co-host Chuck Nice is the perfect guide to make Amy feel at home on StarTalk Radio. Together, they answer your questions about where asteroids and comets come from, where they’re going, how fast they travel, and what happens when they crash into something – like Earth. Find out about the spacecraft we’ve sent to explore the small bodies in our solar system: NEAR, Rosetta, and even New Horizons – once it’s done visiting the dwarf planet, Pluto. Discover why ISON fizzled, why Apophis isn’t so scary, and why there’s a debate over whether Ceres is an asteroid or a dwarf planet. You’ll also learn about the Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud and how playing Asteroids prepared Amy and Chuck for this episode of StarTalk Radio.

NOTE: All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: Cosmic Queries: Comets and Asteroids with Dr. Amy Mainzer.