Why do we want to go back to the Moon?
Listen now
Description
Two plucky spacecraft, one Russian and one Indian, are currently blasting towards the Moon’s South Pole. Both Russia’s Luna-25 and India’s Chandrayaan-3 are due to touch down next week. They’re heading to that particular region of the Moon in order to hunt for water, the presence of which could have huge implications for our further exploration of the Solar System. Victoria Gill talks to Dr Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, to find out more. Victoria then heads to the Lake District to witness the release of water voles into the ecosystem. Next up, Professor Lewis Griffin, a computer scientist from University College London, tells us how bad we are at distinguishing between real and deepfake voices. He then reveals what implications this might have for scams. Finally, Dr Helen Pilcher tells us all about the intriguing ways that animals can bend time. You can find out more in her book, How Nature Keeps Time. Presenter: Victoria Gill Producer: Hannah Robins Content producer: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell Research: Patrick Hughes Editor: Richard Collings
More Episodes
Today we will be going for gold in more ways than one. Inga Doak, the Head of Sustainability at The Royal Mint, reveals how the company plan to ‘urban mine’ gold from household electronic waste and turn it into jewellery. But with tens of millions of tonnes of e-waste piling up every year, the...
Published 09/05/24
Published 09/05/24
Space junk. It might sound like an out-of-this-world problem that we don’t need to worry about here on Earth – but is it? As we send more and more metal in the form of satellites up into space, scientists are warning it is becoming more of a risk both here – and up there. We dig into the...
Published 08/29/24