Young Amy Mainzer was one of the few children who looked forward to a trip to the dentist. In those pre-Internet times, the waiting room was one of the few places she could read about NASA’s Voyager missions.
“Information was hard to come by back in the day,” said the now-grown Mainzer, an astronomer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “I remember I would wait to go to the dentist’s office so I could see National Geographic magazine and find the pictures in there.”
Pint-size Amy would have adored Ready Jet Go!, a computer-animated series for kids ages 3 to 8 that heads into its second season on PBS today (April 2). The show revolves around the adventures of Jet Propulsion, a humanoid alien from the planet Bortron 7, and his gaggle of friends as they skip through the solar system learning about science and astronomy.