Nerdette

Yep. Podcats. Not a typo.

This week we take a journey back to 1994, just after an astronomer named Heidi Hammel — as well as the entire scientific community at large — learned that a fragmented comet named Shoemaker-Levy 9 was going to crash into Jupiter at a speed of more than 130,000 miles per hour.

"We have witnessed other impacts,” Heidi tells us. “What was really special about the Jupiter one was we had warning that it was going to happen.” 

This moment was huge for Heidi, who was just a young astronomer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the time. She was asked to lead the team that would analyze photos of the impacts taken by the still-relatively-new Hubble Space Telescope. 

Oh yeah, in this podcast episode Heidi also compares planets to cats and herself to a veterinarian so PODCATS!