A Phoenix Lander postmortem with Peter Smith this week on planetary radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the Final

Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Can you really call it a post-mortem

when gigabytes of data are waiting for review and when there's still a slight chance that Phoenix will reawaken in the Martian spring.

Those are just a couple of the topics we'll cover with Principal investigator Peter Smith in a couple of minutes.

Emily Lachto-walla will also take us to the Red Planet for

this week's Q&A segment and Bruce Betts will take a glance at the night sky

just before he lays out a new space trivia contest. You might think we have a one-track mind this week.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It's two tracks if you please and they're still

being left in the Martian dirt by spirit and opportunity.

There's a new and very thorough Mars Exploration Rover update at planetary.org

Bill Nye will share news about a celebration of the rover's fifth anniversary in just a few seconds.

Have no fear there's plenty of other news from around our interplanetary neighborhood in Emily's blog, also at planetary.org. I'll be right back

with Peter Smith. Here's the science guy. Hey Bill Nye the planetary guy here

vice president of the Planetary Society and coming up on the 14th of January,

2009, Happy New Year, by the way, Jim Bell and I are going to talk with everybody at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center,

which is on 70 North Mentor Avenue in Pasadena.

Dr. Bell and I are going to talk about the five-year anniversary of the Spirit and

Opportunity Rovers on Mars. Now understand that for me this goes back to when I

was in college at Cornell University and I had Carl Sagan telling us,

telling his students, about Mars. And then the Viking spacecrafts landed on Mars.

My friends, these two rovers work so well

...