A long talk with Emily Lockwala 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. Happy holidays you dear Planrad

listeners you. A special slightly simplified but no less informative show in these days of Christmas

and so many other celebrations will spend most of it with one of your favorites.

Planetary Society Senior Editor Emily Lockawala has just returned from one of the biggest

planetary science conferences of the year and she has lots of news to share from around

our cheery little solar system. Later we'll enjoy a

what's up visit with Bruce Betts that could win you your very own model of

the LightSail Solar Sail Cubesat. Bruce and I will also welcome a surprise visitor. Let's get at it with

Emily.

Emily, welcome back to the show and welcome back from AGU. A big A big show as usual?

That's right. A. G. U. is the American Geophysical Union meeting.

It's a union of a wide variety of scientific disciplines mostly focused on Earth.

So that means it's larger than most of the meetings I go to.

There's usually around 24,000 geophysicists or geoscientists of different kinds attending

this meeting. It is just vast. That is a lot of scientists in one place at one time.

It really is. It's kind of overwhelming and for that reason it's, I'll be honest, it's not one of my favorite meetings,

there's just too much going on,

although one of my absolute favorite things about AGU is the fact that because there's so much science

going on, practically every science journalist shows up, and so it's a real great reunion for those of us in the press room.

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