A special report from the AGU meeting this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan.

The fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union brought tens of thousands

of scientists to San Francisco last week. Many of them were there to hear news about planets

other than Earth. And one of these planetary scientists was our own Emily

Lach-The-walla.

We'll get some of her observations in a few minutes.

Toward the end of the show, Bruce Betts and I will give you another chance to win a planetary radio

t-shirt and a copy of the Christmas planet, a children's book that brings the solar system home

for the holidays. That will be part of our What's up review of the night sky and space history.

Bill Nye will tell us about a special NASA meeting.

And there's another news item I want to share.

On Thursday, December 8, the worldwide members of the Phobos Grunt team received

a letter from Lev Zelengi of the Russian Space Research Institute and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Zilene's message acknowledged the now almost certain loss of the Phobos Grunt or

Soil spacecraft.

Of course this also means the Planetary Society Phobos' life will not make its trip to the

Moon of Mars and back.

Also lost is the Chinese Mars Orbiter that sat atop Phobos Grunt.

Zileney apologized for the failure, thanked the team, and

thank the international space agencies that had joined the attempt to save the

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