January 14, 2015 8:05 pm

StarTalk Live! Is Going to LA to Explore Mars

They say turnabout is fair play.

So I guess if I were to say that I’m jealous of all our fans who will get to see StarTalk Live! in LA on January 22, I probably wouldn’t get much sympathy.

After all, we constantly get emails and tweets and comments on Facebook from fans that wish they could attend our NY area performances.

And while it would have been nice to be able to have been in the audience in Provincetown, or Seattle, or SF Sketchfest (either last year or the one coming up on January 23^rd), the LA show is the one that’s really got me wishing I could be there.

In case you didn’t see this morning’s announcement, the science guests for the LA show are going to be NASA/JPL scientists Dr. Suzanne Smrekar, the Deputy Principal Investigator for the Mars InSight program, and Dr. Abigail Allwood, who’s on the team for the Mars 2020 Rover.

The InSight mission, scheduled to launch in 2016, will send a spacecraft based on NASA’s successful Phoenix Mars lander to the red planet, to drill deep beneath the surface to further our understanding of the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system (including Earth) more than four billion years ago. You can read more about InSight here.

The Mars 2020 mission will land another rover on Mars, leveraging technology used in the Curiosity mission to answer key questions about the potential for life on Mars, gather knowledge and demonstrate technologies that address the challenges of future human expeditions to Mars. Find out more about Mars 2020 here.

It promises to be an amazing show: Suzanne and Abigail will be on stage with host Bill Nye the Science Guy, who just happens to be the CEO of The Planetary Society, as well as co-host Eugene Mirman, and guest comedian Tig Notaro.

If you are in Los Angeles area, and you do want to attend the show, you can still get tickets here.

And if you’re not, and you normally enjoy StarTalk Live! via the live-tweeting by Sarah, Stacey and me, never fear: even though we won’t be there to live tweet, we’ve lined up a very special auxiliary member of the StarTalk Social Media Team to keep us all in the loop. More about him, and our other guest tweeter for SF Sketchfest, on the blog next week.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Jeffrey Simons