Moon mission 2.0: What humanity will learn by going back to the Moon | Michelle Thaller

Give yourself the gift of knowledge — subscribe to Big Think Edge: http://bit.ly/bigthinkedge Going back to the moon will give us fresh insights about the creation of our solar system. - July 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the moon landing — Apollo 11. - Today, we have a strong scientific case for returning to the moon: the original rock samples that we took from the moon revolutionized our view of how Earth and the solar system formed. We could now glean even more insights with fresh, nonchemically-altered samples. - NASA plans to send humans to a crater in the South Pole of the moon because it's safer there, and would allow for better communications with people back on Earth. Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. If you're interested in licensing this or any other Big Think clip for commercial or private use, contact our licensing partner Executive Interviews: https://ift.tt/2IQF1gR Read more at BigThink.com: https://ift.tt/2LXguIM Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://ift.tt/1qJMX5g Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink