May Jemison and the 100-year Starship Initiative this week on planetary radio. Planetary Radio. Kaplan of the Planetary Society, we're about to take you to Seti Khan for my conversation

with Dr. May Jemison. The former astronaut now heads the project that looks toward

humanity's first interstellar voyage. We've also got Bill Nye and Bruce Bessin Humanities First, Interstellar Voyage.

We've also got Bill Nye, and Bruce Betts will help me give away that Celestial

Telescope, but we begin with the Planetary Society Science and Technology Coordinator

Emily Lachto-Wala. Emily, we're going to look back over, well, probably a little

bit longer of a period here than we normally do because you've been working on this series now complete about the entry, descent, and landing

of the Curiosity rover. You found a lot to tell in this story.

Well, of course, there is a lot to tell and I felt that it was really necessary to put this series together because there's so much, A, misinformation and B, fear on the internet about the landing of curiosity.

And I'm not going to lie to you, it's a challenging thing to land. on the internet about the landing of curiosity.

And I'm not going to lie to you.

It's a challenging thing to land on Mars,

and it's a complicated way of landing a big machine on Mars.

But I do want to promise everybody

that the engineers have really thought every step of this

process through and there are really smart people I know a lot of them

personally and so that I know that you know nothing that I can think about that can

possibly improve this process at all

but really they have thought it through even that very last bit that seems to

scare so many people called the sky crane maneuver which is where the heavy rover, the 900 kilogram rover gets lowered to the ground on these

three nylon tethers, plus a bridle that connects it with the electrical supply, and it just touches down ever so gently on the ground

and then that bridle is cut and the whole jet pack flies off to crash elsewhere.

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