Blue Dot: 2023 Space Pioneer Award winner Pascal Lee

By Dave Schlom,

Published June 30, 2023 at 10:03 AM PDT

Host Dave Schlom has a fascinating conversation with Dr. Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist from the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA. Lee is the winner of the National Space Society's 2023 Space Pioneer Award for Science and Engineering.

Lee is a visionary scientist and explorer whose passion for Mars exploration led to his co-founding the Mars Institute at NASA/Ames and the creation of the NASA Haughton-Mars Project on Devon Island in the high Arctic.

His leadership on an epic rover simulation trek in the Arctic was portrayed in the 2016 documentary, Passage to Mars. Lee also has a fascinating take on the famous Drake Equation, which tries to evaluate how many civilizations there might be in the Milky Way galaxy. His answer is that it might just be one of us.

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Dave Schlom

Dave Schlom is the longtime host and creator of Blue Dot. From surfing to Voyager in interstellar space, rock guitar to orcas in our imperiled oceans, the topics on Blue Dot are as varied as the host’s interests and connections -- which are pretty limitless! An internationally respected space history journalist, Dave is also deeply fascinated by all aspects of the grand workings of nature’s awesome machinery on scales ranging from galactic to subatomic. And topics take in all aspects of the arts and sciences.

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Matt Fidler

Matt Fidler is a producer and sound designer with over 15 years’ experience producing nationally distributed public radio programs. He has worked for shows such as Freakonomics Radio, Selected Shorts, Studio 360, The New Yorker Radio Hour and The Takeaway. In 2017, Matt launched the language podcast Very Bad Words, hitting the #28 spot in the iTunes podcast charts.

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