Celebrating 20 years of planetary radio with Bill Nye and others this week on... well, you know.

This is the premiere of Planetary Radio.

Hi everyone, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society and host of Planetary Radio.

Part of the Planetary Society's mission is to explore new worlds and you could say that's what we're doing with this new radio series.

Another part of our mission is to share news and advocacy of space exploration with a world full of space enthusiasts.

Whether you're hearing us live on KUCI in Orange County, California, live via the KUCI website or on the Planetary Society's website, planetary.org, we welcome you to this experiment.

We also hope you'll be with us every week as we explore the exciting potential of this series.

And we think we've got a great beginning plan with today's show. We'll talk with Dr. Lewis Friedman, executive director and one of the founders of the Planetary Society.

Later in the half hour, you'll hear Bruce Betz, the society's director of projects, tell us what's up in the sky in his regular segment called Just That.

What's up? Have you heard about the society's contest that will allow a young person to name NASA's new Mars Rovers?

Bruce will have that story too. But first, let's get underway with another of our regular features. I'll be back in just a minute.

That's how it began on November 25th, 2002. A very special show this week as we mark two decades of planetary radio and begin a third.

You'll hear Planetary Society co-founder Lou Friedman, chief executive officer Bill Nye, chief operating officer, Jennifer Vaughn, and well, would it really be Planetary Radio without chief scientist Bruce Betz and what's up?

We'll forego the usual space headlines in this already long episode. You can always find the latest in our free weekly newsletter, the downlink, it and so much more are at planetary.org.

This is also the time of year when we celebrate the planetary society's accomplishments across the last 12 months. Sarah Alamed is ready to help us acknowledge the biggest among these.

Sarah has been a productive year for us, for our colleagues at the planetary society, for all of our members and donors.

We're going to be telling people how they can find out a lot more about some of our major accomplishments.

I know you've got a few that you want to go through just in a couple of minutes here today. Where do you want to start?

Yeah, well, it has been a really exciting year and as we approach, you know, the end of 2022, it's always good to look back and all the things that we've accomplished together.

One of the major things that I'm really excited that we finally got to do this year is award our first ever step grants.

That's our science and technology empowered by the public grant program and this year we awarded our first two projects.

So those are shaping up awesome and we're really looking forward to seeing the outcome of those projects.

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