The Anatomy of a Rover, Chapter 1, this week on Planetary Radio.

Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan, of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our

solar system and beyond.

We'll visit the Jet Propulsion Lab for a look at just one critically important component of that

Explorer.

Bill Nye is back from the Ice Plains of Greenland to share a story of extreme environments

with us, while it would be Yoda will make a cameo appearance during

this week's What Up segment with Bruce Bats. We begin with the Planetary Society's

senior editor Emily Lochuwala. Emily you had an interesting weekend. I went to my very first

San Diego Comic Con actually it's my very first con of any kind and kind of an

interesting one to choose I think for the first one because it is huge but it was

enjoyable. Tell us about the experience and particularly this panel that you were on.

Well the experience is San Diego has a very large convention center and all of its facilities are taken up by this enormous convention and lots of people wearing costumes that I actually felt fairly pleased with myself how many of the costumes that I recognize and a really diverse group of attendees, lots of families.

So it was actually a really fun scene.

The premise of the panel was that the pace of scientific and technological development is changing

so rapidly that it's a little hard sometimes for science fiction writers to keep up.

And the five panelists, a couple of them expressed some amusing stories about how they'd write a book and then just be waiting with bated breath for the book to get released before technology outstripped what they'd written about in the book.

You know that's something that Andy Weir talked about on this show all the trouble he went to to get Mark Watney to create oxygen and it turns out it would have been much easier thanks to new technology.

Yeah and that's true.

Although I think the fiction panelists

did a good job of changing the direction of the conversation

to talk about other purposes of science fiction

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