Emily Lachtowala and Alan Stern, 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.

The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference was last week, and Emily was there.

She'll share some of the highlights with us.

Alan Stern will provide quick updates on the Rosetta Comet mission and his own New Horizons

probe that is nearing Pluto, but he'll also make his case for an effort that is allowing

anyone to unofficially name the half million craters on Mars.

Bruce Betts will go all moony in today's What's Up segment and will begin by making some waves with Bill Nye, the science guy.

Bill, I am so glad that you want to talk about one of the most momentous discoveries

in the was consistent with relativity and so people expected that when the universe

banged in a big way

there would be sort of pulses or waves within the expansion.

It's a very subtle thing and they detected this polarization of the light

in these curl patterns and it's just wild mad and I've heard several people say well this is an intellectual

achievement of good has no practical value and my feeling is we'll just see about that.

I mean when relativity was discovered in my father's day when my father was a very young kid there was no practical application for it

yet everybody in the developed world runs around with a global positioning system, which depends on satellites which work on both general and special relativity.

It's amazing. Who knows what will be next?

There is even speculation that this may be the further indication that there is something

going on between quantum mechanics and relativity that we just have the slightest hint of.

Well, this is where not to be dismissive of my astrophysical colleagues,

heavens, pun intended.

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