Landing the Perseverance rover on Mars, working in clean rooms to minimize the microbial bug count, and slogging through hundreds of engineering trade-offs with Swati Mohan, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. What are the "seven minutes of terror"? And is there evidence of past life on Mars?

LINKS & REFERENCES:

• Watch Swati voice the landing of Perseverance in 2021.
• Swati's official NASA bio
• More about the Perseverance rover

Swati Mohan spoke with us in a personal capacity. The views expressed in this episode are her own and do not represent the views of NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or any other organization.

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Defusing a crisis after an ambassador hinted at a preemptive strike on Russia, delivering demarches in multiple languages, and surviving the frantic evacuation of the Kabul embassy with John Johnson, a retired diplomat who spent more than twenty years in the US Foreign Service. Do diplomats still send "cables" in the 21st century? And what does "not/not" mean?

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WANT TO BE ON THE SHOW? Leave us a voicemail at (919) 213-0456. We’ll ask you to answer two questions:

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