Orbital Path

Orbital Path is a PRX astronomy series built around Michelle Thaller, an astronomer who ends episodes by calling herself 'a little bit of dead stardust'. The phrase fits a show that keeps tying the far universe back to life on Earth. Asteroids appear as a possible source of the water in Earth's oceans. One of them, a rock several miles across that hit Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula about 65 million years ago, is blamed for the climate change that ended the dinosaurs. A satellite launch turns into a story about Alaska's retreating glaciers and polar sea ice that has lost its old, thick layer. The subject range is wide. Titles such as 'Black Holes from the Dawn of Light', 'Hello, Asteroid!', 'Space Lasers for the Home Planet' and 'Episode 21: First Light' run from a record-distant black hole to the ice at the poles. The format shifts with the subject. Some episodes are built on conversations with researchers. Astrophysicist Chiara Mingarelli, introduced as obsessed with the biggest and weirdest black holes, appears in an episode that explains how early quasars reionized the universe and let light travel freely. The one titled 'Brian Greene goes to 11 — again' turns to the nature of time, with the idea that no moment ever truly disappears and a question about why gravity may behave differently from light, electricity and magnetism. Other episodes are recorded on location. For the ICESat-2 launch, Thaller is inside the control room at Vandenberg Air Force Base, where she says the mood is all business while the crowd outside cheers. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center she tours Building 29, the Integration and Test Facility, which she compares to a fantasy garage with clean rooms and doors big enough to roll whole spacecraft through. A giant steampunk-looking chamber there gets a plain-language walkthrough, right down to what cryogenic means. Down a painted cinderblock hallway is the office of John Mather, who won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for the COBE project, and a crocheted model of the satellite that draws an affectionate 'Isn't that sweet?' Thaller's delivery is warm and openly delighted. She says the thrill of a launch never wears off, and when time travel comes up she names a Quetzalcoatlus as the creature she would most like to see. The humor stays light: a TARDIS joke, and closing credits that thank John Barth and Genevieve Sponsler for antics that change from episode to episode, from reading a tattered copy of The Little Prince to playing laser tag back at PRX. Credits name David Schulman as producer and Andrea Mustaine as editor. The series is complete: 'Building 29' presents itself as the last episode, choosing a gentle farewell over a supernova-style exit. For a first listen, 'Episode 21: First Light' shows the on-location side of the show, and 'Black Holes from the Dawn of Light' shows the conversational one.