The CTO for the World's largest Aerospace Company 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,

a slight departure from strictly space as we bring you a conversation

with Ray Johnson, the chief technology officer for Lockheed Martin. The company's Orion spacecraft will come up, but I'll mostly talk with

Ray about the effort to encourage more people, and especially young people, to become the

engineers behind projects like Orion.

Bill Nye will join us from the exciting baggage claim at Los Angeles's airport,

while Bruce Betts will get us rolling on a new What's Up Space Trivia Contest,

including a cool new prize.

Planetary Society Science and Technology Coordinator Emily Lochuwala will get us underway.

Welcome back Emily.

Thank you, Matt.

A couple of good things to talk about today.

One of them quite fascinating.

I mean, really maybe an improvement on the periodic table.

We'll get to that in a moment.

How about this big object that's apparently bigger than a lot of people might have guessed.

Yeah, this one kind of snuck up on me because I discovered it just at reading the table of contents

in a scientific peer-reviewed journal and was a description of an interesting sounding trans-Naptunian object named

Salacia. It happens to be a binary. It has a large companion. And I looked at the

article and I was like this thing is a thousand kilometers across. That is big.

That is as big as the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt series and it makes it somewhere around the 10th biggest object in the Kuiper belt give or take a few.

...