Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science
Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science
Planetary Radio brings you the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. We visit each week with the scientists, engineers, leaders, advocates, and astronauts taking us across the final frontier. Regular features raise your space IQ while they put a smile on your face. Join host Sarah Al-Ahmed and Planetary Society colleagues including Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and Bruce Betts, chief sc…Social links:
World Space Week and farewell to Swift
Dennis Stone, president and co-founder of the World Space Week Association, takes us behind the scenes of the largest annual space event on Earth. From its origins as a volunteer effort in Houston to a UN-declared celebration reaching 50,000 events in over 100 countries, Dennis shares how World Spa…
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The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is ready to launch
After decades of development, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is preparing to launch. Once in orbit, Roman will conduct the widest surveys of the universe ever attempted, probing the nature of dark energy, discovering thousands of new exoplanets, and capturing images of billions of galaxies. …
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Book Club Edition: Becoming Martian by Scott Solomon
Will we change or terraform Mars to better suit humans? Or are we more likely to change ourselves to better fit the red planet? How far can evolution take us in these new and exotic environments? These and many other fascinating questions are at the heart of Rice University professor Scott Solomon’…
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The SpaceX Falcon 9 that crashed into the Moon
A SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage slammed into the moon on August 5 after spending over a year and a half drifting through the Earth-Moon system. Jared Head, museum facilitator at Columbia Memorial Space Center, producer at TMRO, and co-host of All Space Considered at Griffith Observatory, walks us thr…
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Total solar eclipse 2026: Astrophotography and birdsong
On August 12th, 2026, the Moon’s shadow will sweep across Iceland, Greenland, and Spain, bringing the first total solar eclipse visible from Europe since 1999. And because this eclipse happens near sunset, it promises to be one of the most visually stunning in living memory. Astrophotographer Andr…
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Space Policy Edition: “Science: A New Golden Age” - Reimagining U.S. science policy
The White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy recently released "Science: A New Golden Age", a sweeping report that calls for a fundamental reimagining of how the United States funds and conducts science. Explicitly modeled on Vannevar Bush's landmark 1945 report "Science, the Endless F…
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LHS 1140b: The first atmosphere detected on a rocky habitable-zone exoplanet
For the first time, scientists have confirmed an atmosphere on a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of another star. Sarah Al-Ahmed is joined by Collin Cherubim, NASA Hubble Fellow at the University of Chicago, to discuss his team's detection of helium escaping from the super-Earth LHS 1140b, an…
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TERP RAPTOR: A student-built mission to asteroid Apophis
On Friday, April 13, 2029, asteroid Apophis will pass closer to Earth than our geostationary satellites. While NASA, ESA, and JAXA are all sending missions, a team of students at the University of Maryland is building their own spacecraft to join the fleet. TERP RAPTOR is a CubeSat-based mission ro…
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Hot Jupiters: The ‘Roasted Planet’ and the wrong-way hotspot
Two hot Jupiters presented at the 248th American Astronomical Society meeting push our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres to the extreme. Research Scientist Tiffany Kataria from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory shares new JWST observations of HD80606 b, the "Roasted Planet,”a gas giant on one o…
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Book Club Edition: “The Edge of Space-Time” by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
It may be the best book subtitle we’ve encountered in the Planetary Society book club: “Particles, Poetry and the Cosmic Dream Boogie.” Theoretical physicist and black feminist science theorist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein has followed her acclaimed first book, “The Disordered Cosmos,” with this new, e…
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