Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science

By The Planetary Society

Technology

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Space exploration, astronomy and planetary science. (Weekly)

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LAST EPISODE

The Wonderful: a new docume...

09.22.2021

Director Clare Lewins and NASA astronaut Cady Coleman discuss the new documentary “The Wonderful: Stories from the Space Station.”

Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science episodes:

09.22.2021 The Wonderful: a new documentary about the International Space Station Director Clare Lewins and NASA astronaut Cady Coleman discuss the new documentary “The Wonderful: Stories from the Space Station.”
09.15.2021 The Case for a Return to Enceladus Flying a spacecraft through geysers spewing from Saturn’s moon Enceladus might reveal the building blocks of life or even life itself.
09.08.2021 An ESCAPADE to Mars, on the cheap Can NASA send robotic explorers to Mars for a tiny fraction of what most missions cost?
09.03.2021 Space Policy Edition: The cultural rituals of space advocacy, with Linda Billings Space outreach expert and social scientist Linda Billings talks with host Casey Dreier about the language space advocates use to share their message.
09.01.2021 Liquid Water Under the Martian Polar Ice? Maybe Not New research indicates that what appeared to be liquid water hiding under Mars’ polar ice may actually be a form of clay.
08.25.2021 Europa Clipper Sails Toward Launch Mission system manager Al Cangahuala says the robotic explorer of Jupiter’s ocean moon is making steady progress toward a 2024 launch.
08.18.2021 Cassini, Voyager and beyond with Linda Spilker Cassini mission project scientist returns with new science from ocean moon Enceladus and anniversaries to celebrate with the Voyager mission.
08.11.2021 How Perseverance drives itself around Mars The Perseverance rover’s chief robotics engineer takes us for a spin across Mars.
08.06.2021 Space Policy Edition: Mars via the Nuclear Option NASA’s Bhavya Lal returns to explain the challenges and big advantages of nuclear propulsion in space.
08.04.2021 Alan Stern Says It’s Time for Suborbital Science Planetary scientist and New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern says great science will ride on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and Blue Origin’s New Shepard.
07.28.2021 Andy Chaikin on Apollo 15 and the lessons of Apollo Space historian and author of A Man on the Moon Andy Chaikin returns as we celebrate Apollo 15’s 50th anniversary.
07.21.2021 Amy Mainzer and a New Asteroid-Hunting Space Telescope NASA has approved development of the NEO Surveyor space telescope. Project lead Amy Mainzer will share her hopes for this vital planetary defense tool.
07.14.2021 We’re Going Back to Venus Leaders of the DAVINCI and VERITAS missions tell us what their spacecraft will reveal about the planet that is so much like Earth and yet so terribly different.
07.07.2021 Visiting the James Webb Space Telescope Host Mat Kaplan visits the James Webb Space Telescope in California to see the observatory before it launches and speak with project leaders.
07.02.2021 Space Policy Edition: The Pentagon's UFO Report, Featuring Sarah Scoles The Pentagon has released its assessment of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. Casey Dreier and science journalist Sarah Scoles talk about what’s behind the renewed interest in UFOs and Sarah’s book, They are Already Here.
06.30.2021 Finding Life by Looking for Complexity University of Glasgow chemist Lee Cronin believes he and his collaborators have found a way to recognize life as we know it and as we don’t know it.
06.23.2021 The Pearly Clouds of Mars Atmospheric scientist Mark Lemmon discusses the beautiful clouds on Mars imaged by NASA's Curiosity rover.
06.16.2021 Amateur Astronomers Saving the World Planetary Society grants have enabled amateur astronomers to discover and track asteroids that cross Earth’s path. We’ll meet two of them.
06.09.2021 Experimental Cosmologist Brian Keating A fascinating conversation with Brian Keating, director of the Simons Observatory that will search for our cosmic origins from a mountaintop in Chile’s Atacama region.
06.04.2021 Space Policy Edition: NASA's 2022 Budget Request Says "Yes" The White House’s proposed 2022 NASA budget is almost entirely great news, as is the announcement that two complementary orbiters will explore Venus.
06.02.2021 Mighty Jupiter Revealed The Juno mission will continue its exploration of Jupiter till 2025, thanks to a four-year extension granted by NASA. Principal investigator Scott Bolton brings us up to date.
05.26.2021 The New Great Space Observatories The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine will soon issue the Astro2020 Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey. It will rank four major proposals for exciting, expensive new space-based telescopes. Astrophysicist Grant Tremblay joins us to explain why all four ...
05.19.2021 Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Project Manager MiMi Aung The tiny Mars Helicopter Ingenuity has flown into our hearts. Project manager MiMi Aung and her team may have made it look easy, but Aung explains why it was anything but. Bruce Betts has tips for viewing the upcoming total ...
05.12.2021 Defenders of Earth on Planetary Radio The 2021 Planetary Defense Conference brought together the leading scientists, policymakers and other experts who are working to protect our planet from near-Earth objects (NEOs). The Planetary Society welcomed six of these heroes to a special virtual gathering in late ...
05.07.2021 Space Policy Edition: How Starship at the Moon Brings NASA Closer to Mars In a surprise move, NASA chose SpaceX's Starship as the sole winner of its 3 billion-dollar human lunar lander development contract. Within days, Blue Origin and Dynetics filed official protests, forcing NASA to delay the award. Casey and Mat discuss ...
05.05.2021 Author Andy Weir and Project Hail Mary It is always such fun to welcome back Andy Weir. The author of The Martian and Artemis has just published his most entertaining and inventive novel yet. Project Hail Mary gives an unlikely protagonist the job of saving humanity. Andy ...
04.28.2021 A Conversation with Kyoto Prize Recipient James Gunn There is no Nobel prize for astronomy, so the Kyoto Prize for Astronomy and Astrophysics may be the highest international recognition an astronomer can receive. Princeton University professor of astronomy Jim Gunn is the most recent recipient. Jim recently joined ...
04.21.2021 Is ‘Oumuamua a Piece of a Pluto-Like Planet? And Ingenuity’s First Flight on Mars We begin with a thrilling recap of the successful first flight of NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on Mars. Then we meet two researchers who have come up with a fascinating explanation for the first interstellar object discovered as it passed through ...
04.14.2021 The High Frontier: A New Documentary About Gerard K. O’Neill Physicist and space pioneer Gerard K. O’Neil gathered a community of followers as he led planning for vast, magnificent human settlements in space. Guests Dylan Taylor, Will Henry and Ryan Stuit have produced an inspiring, feature-length tribute to O’Neill that ...
04.07.2021 The First Space Shuttle Pilot: Bob Crippen on the 40th Anniversary of STS-1 Pilot Bob Crippen and Commander John Young became the first astronauts to fly a Space Shuttle into orbit on April 12, 1981. Crippen tells host Mat Kaplan about that mission and shares many more stories from his adventurous life. Mat ...
04.02.2021 Space Policy Edition: Biden Names His NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, former Senator from Florida, congressional astronaut, and father of the Space Launch System, will likely be NASA's next administrator. Casey Dreier and Mat Kaplan also discuss The Planetary Society's global Day of Action, which saw hundreds of Society ...
03.31.2021 NASA’s TESS Exoplanet Mission Finds Over 2,000 Possible New Worlds The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) team has just announced more than 2,200 new exoplanet candidates. Natalia Guerrero of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology manages these discoveries and still finds time to write plays, collaborate on musical performances and host ...
03.24.2021 The Perseverance Rover and a Great First Month on Mars Deputy project scientists Katie Stack Morgan and Ken Williford are living on Mars time and living for Mars. We get an update from them on the work of the Mars 2020 rover. Perseverance is already accomplishing terrific science after just ...
03.17.2021 Return From Ryugu: The Hayabusa2 Leader on His Mission’s Success Hayabusa2 project manager Yuichi Tsuda and his team learned a lot from Hayabusa1, Japan’s troubled-though-successful mission that returned a sample from asteroid Itokawa. Now they are celebrating the recovery of a much larger sample from a different world: asteroid Ryugu. ...
03.10.2021 InSight’s Mole: A Martian Science Odyssey Troy Hudson and a brilliant international team created a device that would hammer its way below the surface of Mars. Mars had other ideas. The Jet Propulsion Lab engineer and scientist returns to tell us the heroic tale of the ...
03.05.2021 Space Policy Edition: SpaceX's Early, Desperate Days (with Eric Berger) The SpaceX of today reuses rockets and launches people into space. But 15 years ago, the future of the company was in doubt as its Falcon 1 rocket repeatedly failed to reach orbit. Eric Berger, Senior Space Editor at Ars ...
03.03.2021 Spinoffs: How NASA Technologies Benefit Life on Earth Cleaning up water pollution, inventing inexpensive ventilators for hospitals, turning waste plastic into sidewalks, and making baby formula more nutritious—these and thousands of other innovations have come directly from research and development for space exploration. NASA technology transfer program executive ...
02.24.2021 Touchdown! The Sights and Sounds of Perseverance on Mars The Mars 2020 rover is on Mars. We have collected the most thrilling moments from the landing and the revelations that followed, including the first sounds recorded on the Red Planet. Bill Nye congratulates the entire Perseverance team and explains ...
02.17.2021 Planetfest ’21: To Mars and Back Again The Planetary Society’s Planetfest ’21 celebrated Mars and the newest visitors to the Red Planet. Mat Kaplan shares some of his Planetfest conversation with Andy Weir, author of The Martian. We also sit down with the leader of the United ...
02.10.2021 The Big Book of Mars: Our Obsession with the Red Planet Mars has commanded our attention and stimulated our imaginations for millenia. Now, as 3 more spacecraft arrive, we talk with author Marc Hartzman about his new book that documents the fascination and fancy generated by the Red Planet. Planetary Society ...
02.05.2021 Space Policy Edition: The Big Picture on U.S. Science Funding Matt Hourihan is perhaps the world's most knowledgeable expert in how the U.S. government funds basic science and development activities. He joins the show to talk about the big picture of where the money goes, how the focus has changed ...
02.03.2021 A Cosmic Odyssey: Decades of Discovery at the Palomar Observatory Astronomer Linda Schweizer spent countless hours interviewing the explorers who revolutionized astronomy through observations made at California’s Palomar Observatory. She tells their fascinating stories and shares their science in her new book Cosmic Odyssey: How Intrepid Astronomers at Palomar Observatory ...
01.27.2021 ‘Oumuamua: Avi Loeb says it may have been artificial Could the first object shown to have originated outside our solar system be a light sail built by an alien civilization? That’s the very controversial hypothesis put forward by distinguished Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb in his new book Extraterrestrial. The ...
01.20.2021 7 More Minutes of Terror: Perseverance Arrives at Mars The 2020 Mars Rover will reach the Red Planet on February 18th after many months in the relative quiet of space. It will then undergo a true trial by fire as it descends to the surface. Jet Propulsion Lab systems ...
01.15.2021 Space Policy Edition: A Mob at the U.S. Capitol This is not your normal episode of the Space Policy Edition, but these are not normal times. The centuries-old U.S. tradition of the peaceful transfer of power ended on 6 January 2021, as a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol ...
01.13.2021 A Symphony for 7 Moons Composer Amanda Lee Falkenberg has created The Moons Symphony. You’ll hear excerpts from each of its 7 movements. They are inspired by and evoke 7 of our solar system’s smaller, unique worlds. Joining Amanda are her advisors and friends, artist ...
01.06.2021 Solar Cruiser: A Giant Sail Prepares for Space It is many times larger than any previous solar sail, and it will pave the way for even bigger spacecraft propelled by light. Solar Cruiser principal investigator Les Johnson tells us about his latest project and looks to humanity crossing ...
12.30.2020 Planetary Society All-Stars Review 2020 Space Milestones Chief Scientist Bruce Betts, Editorial Director Jason Davis, Chief Advocate and Senior Space Policy Advisor Casey Dreier, and Communications Strategy and Canadian Space Policy Advisor Kate Howells join host Mat Kaplan for our annual look back at the closing year’s ...
12.23.2020 Astronaut Stephanie Wilson Might Walk on the Moon Engineer and astronaut Stephanie Wilson was a toddler when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin visited the Moon. She may someday almost literally walk in their footsteps. Stephanie is one of 18 astronauts--9 women and 9 men--chosen for the Artemis Team. ...
12.16.2020 What Do You Need to Make Martian Oxygen? MOXIE! Mike Hecht is in charge of the MOXIE experiment on NASA’s Perseverance rover, arriving on Mars in February. The tiny device will test our ability to turn the Red Planet’s plentiful carbon dioxide into oxygen. Someday a scaled-up version may ...

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Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science

What's Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science episodes:

The Wonderful: a new documentary about the International Space Station

The Case for a Return to Enceladus

An ESCAPADE to Mars, on the cheap

Space Policy Edition: The cultural rituals of space advocacy, with Linda Billings

Liquid Water Under the Martian Polar Ice? Maybe Not

Europa Clipper Sails Toward Launch

Cassini, Voyager and beyond with Linda Spilker

How Perseverance drives itself around Mars

Space Policy Edition: Mars via the Nuclear Option

Alan Stern Says It’s Time for Suborbital Science

Andy Chaikin on Apollo 15 and the lessons of Apollo

Amy Mainzer and a New Asteroid-Hunting Space Telescope

We’re Going Back to Venus

Visiting the James Webb Space Telescope

Space Policy Edition: The Pentagon's UFO Report, Featuring Sarah Scoles

Finding Life by Looking for Complexity

The Pearly Clouds of Mars

Amateur Astronomers Saving the World

Experimental Cosmologist Brian Keating

Space Policy Edition: NASA's 2022 Budget Request Says "Yes"

Mighty Jupiter Revealed

The New Great Space Observatories

Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Project Manager MiMi Aung

Defenders of Earth on Planetary Radio

Space Policy Edition: How Starship at the Moon Brings NASA Closer to Mars

Author Andy Weir and Project Hail Mary

A Conversation with Kyoto Prize Recipient James Gunn

Is ‘Oumuamua a Piece of a Pluto-Like Planet? And Ingenuity’s First Flight on Mars

The High Frontier: A New Documentary About Gerard K. O’Neill

The First Space Shuttle Pilot: Bob Crippen on the 40th Anniversary of STS-1

Space Policy Edition: Biden Names His NASA Administrator

NASA’s TESS Exoplanet Mission Finds Over 2,000 Possible New Worlds

The Perseverance Rover and a Great First Month on Mars

Return From Ryugu: The Hayabusa2 Leader on His Mission’s Success

InSight’s Mole: A Martian Science Odyssey

Space Policy Edition: SpaceX's Early, Desperate Days (with Eric Berger)

Spinoffs: How NASA Technologies Benefit Life on Earth

Touchdown! The Sights and Sounds of Perseverance on Mars

Planetfest ’21: To Mars and Back Again

The Big Book of Mars: Our Obsession with the Red Planet

Space Policy Edition: The Big Picture on U.S. Science Funding

A Cosmic Odyssey: Decades of Discovery at the Palomar Observatory

‘Oumuamua: Avi Loeb says it may have been artificial

7 More Minutes of Terror: Perseverance Arrives at Mars

Space Policy Edition: A Mob at the U.S. Capitol

A Symphony for 7 Moons

Solar Cruiser: A Giant Sail Prepares for Space

Planetary Society All-Stars Review 2020 Space Milestones

Astronaut Stephanie Wilson Might Walk on the Moon

What Do You Need to Make Martian Oxygen? MOXIE!

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