sending a vacuum cleaner to Mars this week on planetary radio. Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

It's called Planet Vac, and it's an amazingly simple

way to collect a soil sample on Mars, or on the moon, or on an asteroid. We'll learn about it from Chris Zachny of Honeybee robotics.

You can also catch the video tour Bruce Betts got at Honeybee.

Later Bruce and I will tell you about two new contests, each with a very cool prize.

Bill Nye is traveling, but we've got Emily Lochuwala with a new angle on the search for

near-Earth asteroids.

Hey Emily, I guess we're going to be playing risk today.

Yeah, that's right.

We're dealing with several aspects of space and Earth science that deal with how you try to figure

out what kinds of hazards that you face and what you should do about

them. This partly comes out of your blog entry from October 24th. One of the last that you'll

be doing based on our experiences at DPS, the big conference.

You called this future impact risk.

Really I guess the question is whether it's worth tracking these things, at least in part.

Yeah, so there's a big question as to where you spend limited resources you know if we had an unlimited amount of money we would just send a mission to every single possibly hazardous asteroid and and we would deal with it that way but we don't. So we have to look for

asteroids that may pose a hazard. We have to try to figure out if they actually do pose

a hazard by tracking them accurately and if we think they might that's when we have to send a mission to

tag it verify its orbit and possibly even do something about it. One of the more

interesting presentations I saw was about an asteroid called 2011 AG5 which

could pass through what's called a keyhole, a very small region of space

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