Celebrating Cassini one last time this week on planetary radio.

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

solar system and beyond. Nothing could top last week's coverage of the

Cassini Mission's grand finale, but I think we come close with this week's bonus length show.

I've included nearly all of our September 18th live tribute to the mission

featuring three of its leaders along with our own Emily Lockwala.

The Planetary Society and I are so grateful to our partners at KPCC Southern California Public Radio.

It was SCPR's wonderful in-person crew that got us Caltech's huge Beckman Auditorium

and took care of all the logistics. As you'll hear, I was joined on stage by KPCC science reporter Jacob Margolis.

He and I started the show by asking the more than 1,100 people in the PACT Auditorium to welcome our guests.

Please welcome to the stage, Cassini Project Scientists,

Linda Spilker, Cassini Program Manager Earl Mays,

and Cassini Spacecraft operations manager Julie Webster. There is one more person joining us, my planetary society colleague, senior editor Emily

Loch Duwala.

She's here in part to represent the scores of citizen scientists who have contributed to this mission, Emily Lockwall.

So welcome everyone and congratulations. I was here Friday morning before 5 a about 4 a.m.

for that glorious bittersweet finish then ran over to JPL to be with, well Emily and Jacob were there for

the press conference, it was one of the greatest mornings of, I have to say, of my life.

We have so much to talk about in limited time, but let's begin with this.

For the benefit of the one or two people in this very sophisticated audience who don't remember or know why, why did we crash Cassini?

Earl.

Well, it's been the plan for seven years, and really the reason was to use every possible piece of that spacecraft in the most optimal scientific way possible.

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