Tasting the air of distant worlds with Twinkle this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm

at the Planetary Society. Twinkle is the tiny satellite that will attempt to

analyze the atmospheres of 100 exoplanets, worlds circling other

stars.

We'll talk with its project manager.

Bill Nye will also drop by and Bruce Betts is waiting in the wings with another what's up look at the night sky

along with a new space trivia contest.

You're about to hear an extended conversation with senior editor Emily Lochuwala.

Her reviews of new children's books about space and science have arrived just in time for

enlightened holiday shopping.

You'll find them in Emily's November 24th blog entry at planetary.org.

I asked her how she comes up with her recommendations.

One of my goals this year was to find new book series about the planets for my children's public school library. I had gone in

there earlier this year and helped the librarian call some old and outdated books

but they needed replacement, especially ones on Mars and Mercury because we've had

so much mission activity there.

So I requested a lot of non-fiction series from publishers and I found a few criteria to be useful.

Obviously there shouldn't be any major factual errors but I

wanted there to be things that would grab kids attention like wow facts about planets

and not just the same ones we've always heard about. I wanted to make sure that they discussed some recent science,

that they mentioned that there was active exploration happening

...