Moving an asteroid this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

When we talk about asteroids, it's often about how we're going to deflect a giant space rock

from hitting our vulnerable home planet.

Why would you want to bring one closer? Both of those topics were

recently taken up at a workshop sponsored by the Keck Institute for Space Studies.

We'll hear highlights of a public event connected to that workshop that featured a couple of scientists,

two astronaut scientists, and our own Bill Nye.

Later we'll check in with newly minted dungeon master, Bruce Betts. Who knew you could see the night sky from a dungeon?

Up first though is our not so secret agent for planetary science, Emily Lachtoala.

Emily it's not often that we get a story that involves intrigue or at least

imaginary intrigue, but now we have two and it encouraged me to start our conversation with this.

So shaken, not stirred.

You even found a picture of Ernst Stavro Blofeld with his cat in his lap

You have the reason I looked that up was because I saw this picture of the

RTG that's going to be used to power Mars Science Laboratory,

the Curiosity Rover, which they haven't installed into the rover yet.

It's sitting in Florida, but it's this tiny sort of cylinder with veins on it and it looks exactly like the kind of thing that a Bond villain would want to steal and use it to hold the world hostage.

And it does have plutonium in it, which probably gets people's imagination excited.

I do want to state very clearly that the plutonium that is inside MSL's power supply is not the same isotope

that can be used for bomb- and you can't even make the same

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