And well Ai Weiwei may not think AI is the future of the artistic world, it is beneficial for science.

NASA is using the technology to sift through years of data finding connections impossible for a human to detect.

Our next guest is in charge of exploring the secrets.

Dr. Fox is NASA's newly named associate administrator for the space agency science Mission directorate, a very long title, that is joining Walter Isaacson to discuss future space missions, including the recent Artemis II crew announcement.

Walter: Welcome to the show.

>> Thank you very much.

Walter: The Biden administration proposed 80 billion dollars for scientific research were an asset, which you get to oversee.

Tell us what is said that that is exciting?

>> This is the biggest budget that we have had for NASA science, so we are really excited.

We are moving ahead, establishing our Earth system observatory, so thinking about coordinated measurements that look at all different types of climate impact, so we can really protect our planet.

We are looking at the ocean, the water level, looking at tornadoes and hurricanes and studying pollution and all of these different things, doing it in a very coordinated way, and then actually producing, moving on to produce actionable information so it is not just look at this data, is it not interesting?

It is look at this data, and this is what it really means.

Walter: Give me an example of that.

What can we do practically from this day that you are hoping to see?

>> One of our studies is looking at wildfires and where they are located and whether breaking out and where the conditions are in the region so you can start to predict that you could have wildfires or bring in much quicker the ability to contain them, so that is one element.

Also in our budget, we have support for a Mars sample return mission, and that is a very exciting mission.

So you may have seen all of those beautiful images from the Perseverance rover as it is traversing around.

Well it has been driving around, it has been taking samples into sample tubes and putting them into a cache inside the river, and just a few weeks ago the river laid down 10 samples on the Martian surface and has driven away and is going to go take more samples.

We are now designing the mission that will actually go to Mars, and have a lender pick up the samples, and bring them back to earth so we can actually for the first time really study the surface of Mars.

It really excited about that.

That is a joint initiative of the European space agency too.

Walter: What about sending humans from Mars and from Mars to the moon.

>> We are building on the success of our Artemis I launch in November of last year.

There will be crew in Artemis II to go around the moon and Artemis III we will lend people back on the moon.

We are really looking at that from a couple of things.

One is to have a sustained presence at the moon to be able to work and to do science and really do great things at the moon, but also as the first point to then sending people to Mars.

It is also one a coordinated program sending people back to the moon, sending a mission that can actually retrieve samples.

It will be the first time we have ever launched something off another planet.

One big sort of push to really further exploration.

Walter: What does a world of private companies like SpaceX in the missions that you are doing?

>> We are enjoying the partnerships with commercial providers.

At they are helping to open up space for everybody.

Just look at the number of lunches we have come up the number of things we are able to put into space.

Sending crews to the ISS, which is always exciting.

And really helping us to make these technological breakthroughs, so pushing the boundaries of technology and just opening up the ability for us to get to space.

They are extremely important.

We have a program, the commercial lunar payload service program, and that is we are putting NASA science onto landers and rovers provided by commercial partners.

We put out a call, commercial partners were able to bid to host that NASA science, also some commercial science going on there too, but enabling us to get NASA science quickly up to the moon to start doing those experiments.

Walter: One of the great technology advances that has mesmerized us is the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning on huge data sets.

As NASA's chief scientist, you have one of the estate assets around.

How is that transforming what you were doing at NASA?

>> We have a lot of examples of using AI in our data, and often it is being able to find those little signatures that we missed when we are very focused, it may be looking at an event data.

You see a big event happened, and you look at all of the data, and you write your papers.

But often, because we are focused on those things, we do not stand back and look at years and years and years of data in one go.

Walter: Can you give me an example of that?

>> Yes, certainly.

If we think about really big solar storms that cause big space weather events on earth, we have been trying to find if there are precursors, anything in there that might tell us this event is going to be bigger.

One of the challenges we have had is we have not had a really big space weather event for a number of years, so we actually went back and used data that is not even from scientific spacecraft.

It is some of our Air Force partners, and we took some of their engineering data and working with Amazon Web services we got the data set ready to be ingested and be ready, and we were able to find signatures associated with some of the larger events back over the last 50 years and find signatures that going forward we know we should look for the signatures in future large space weather events.

Since we have had such an active sun with great aurora being visible, we have got great candidates for new data sets that we can apply AIML techniques to.

Walter: You talk about solar storms and space weather events.

That is your expertise.

Tell us what those are and how it might affect us on earth?

>> Our sun is an active start.

We think of it as an average start, but it is an important star because it sustains life on our planet.

If you look at the sun visible it looks like a plain disc.

If you look at it in ultraviolet, you can see activity and loops of plasma, magnetic field loops that stick up above the sun's surface.

Every now and then those sunspot groups can be active.

They can almost explode, and these magnetic field lines break.

They snap and let coronal material accelerate away from the sun, and often if the sunspot is facing us here on earth as the sun is rotating, then all of that plasma gets accelerated at millions of miles per hour and can come and impact our planet.

It can cause large-scale changes in our magnetic atmosphere, magnetosphere that protects us from solar wind and space.

It can power a beautiful aurora just as we have seen recently, but auroras in the sky are a big current system, so that can impact power grids, undersea cables, problems for spacecraft in orbit.

The more we rely on technology, the more we are susceptible to what is happening on our sun.

Walter: Your expertise is in helio-physics, and you did a probe that went right to the edge of the sun.

What did we learn from that?

>> The probe bravely flies through the sun's corona where it is millions of degrees of heat, and we are learning all about the atmosphere of a star.

For decades and decades, we have studied the sun, we have studied it, looked at it in all different wavelengths.

We have been able to study the extended atmosphere of the sun, but we really did not know.

You know that things are happening in certain regions.

You know there is suddenly an increase in heat and energy and causes the corona to accelerate very fast, but you did not know what the processes are because you have not flown through them.

You have not flown and found out what is happening in that region.

Within the solar probe, we have been able to do that.

We found things, the processes we thought could be causing heat, things like magnetic field lines kinking on themselves and stepping back straight, which can release a lot of heat and energy.

That is happening further way than originally thought.

On our first one, we thought it would be nice.

We should see interesting stuff.

We started seeing these features , switchbacks.

They are like S-shaped features in magnetic field lines.

We saw those in the very first orbit.

As we get closer, we see them getting larger and more frequent, and so finding out these reasons that the sun is such an interesting star, and what we learn about our sun we can apply to others in solar systems where we see space weather.

We see big players and big events we see on our son -- sun.

Looking for habitable planets.

What you learn about our sun is directly applicable.

Walter: When you got your degree, were often the only woman in any of the classes.

Tell me about your path, and tell me about the way we can open up the path to more women being in physics and astrophysics?

>> Yeah, so I did do physics, and it was a pretty low percentage of women.

It was tough, it was tough because sometimes you felt like I do not understand something, but I do not want to answer the question because I do not want to be the one who looks dumb.

It takes a little while to get comfortable being OK asking the questions.

I did my degree, I did a Masters in engineering and came back to Imperial College and did my PhD.

Moved to the U.S.

There were not a lot of women.

I have seen a great increase in the number of women coming into the industry, taking up very leading roles, and I think it is important as a woman to talk particularly to girls and say, you can do this, and there is a role for everybody in this type of business.

And to make sure you are being supportive.

I will ask the dumb question.

I will embarrass myself and everyone feels comfortable asking questions.

Little things you can do that make a huge difference to how people interact with one another.

Walter: What is the really big question that you would love to have answered during your career?

>> Oh gosh, so many, but I really think it is are we alone in the universe?

We are focusing with the James Webb telescope finding so many exoplanets, and evened out managing to take measurements of the atmosphere is around exoplanets.

What are the building blocks?

What are the things that actually would sustain life?

We are excited in September of this year we have Osiris rex returning to earth bringing samples from an asteroid, and that asteroid has been around a long time.

We think it was there at the time that our planets were forming, so it has got those molecular building blocks inside the asteroid.

Maybe it will tell us about planet formation, about what caused us to sustain water here and therefore sustain life on our planet.

Then it tells us what kinds of things, what kinds of signatures we might want to look for when we are looking in other stellar systems.

The next big astrophysics mission that we will start will be the habitable worlds observatory, and that is a mission focusing on not just looking for exoplanets or planets that happen to be orbiting stars, but what is it that we would look for to find signatures of life?

Sending Europa clipper to fly through the methane plumes at Europa and see if there signatures of life there.

We have a dragonfly mission that will go to Titan, and they will be looking for signatures of life.

There are the kinds of questions -- not necessarily finding another planet like ours, but just finding life elsewhere.

That is the big question I am excited about.

Walter: Why is that so important?

>> For me, it is just curiosity.

It is that feeling of really, what else is out there?

if you think just back to the 1950's, we did not even think we could go to another planet or go to the moon, and now we have sent our own spacecraft that have left our protective bubble, the two voyageurs that have gone blessed every planet.

Looking at next generation missions that might go very fast out of our heliosphere and explore interstellar space.

Thinking about what it would take to get to the next nearest star, and how do we expand what we know and that is why it is important.

Walter: We talk about the practical reasons we are doing all of these things at NASA, and you have talked about the pure curiosity.

I went to read you one of my favorite quotes in science from a mathematician and physicist, and he said scientists do not study nature because it is useful to do so.

They study it because they take pleasure in it.

>> It could not be more true.

Everything is fascinating to me, quit a scientist is fascinating.

It is the wanting to know more.

Again, talking to kids, being a scientist is not about being super-smart.

It is about being really curious and liking to ask Russians and always wanting to know more.

And it is just a joy.

Being at NASA's event -- we are studying things that are just amazing.

The technology is at the forefront, the science is at the forefront, and there are always more and more questions.

Every mission you fly, you have three questions that are high-level science goals, but a good mission is going to create 30 more questions from those initial ones.

It is just a joy to do it.

Walter: Dr. Fox, thank you so much for joining us.