Eitty Rovian Explorian Explorers this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society. The microrovers are coming and they are going to help

us explore the solar system. At least that's the thinking of a group that has been looking

at the role of these small but possibly very capable robots

as we look toward human missions to the moon, asteroids, and Mars.

Our own Dr. Bruce Bats leads the work. He'll tell us the hows and whys of tiny rovers in a few minutes.

And he'll stick around for our usual what's up conversation, including a listener suggestion of a technology to test in microgravity that took us by surprise.

Bill Nye is thinking about life on Mars again.

We'll hear from him right after our regular visit with the Planetary Society's

Science and Technology Coordinator and Mistress of its blog, Emily Lochuwala.

Emily good to be talking to you once again. I thought that maybe we could start with some of the pretty pictures that you've put up on the web including some moons that you could almost imagine are skating on the rings of Saturn.

Yeah, it's kind of amazes me that Cassini's pictures just never ever get old and all you have to do is get at least two moons together in one shot and it's immediately a wow image and one of the recent images that I just posted has five moons in one shot including three of the big round icy ones which I don't remember seeing altogether in one shot before.

So it's pretty cool. Go check it out.

To say nothing of the rings in the same

shot well the rings are everywhere it's it's kind of hard to avoid them so so yeah and

when Cassini sees them edge on you forget that it's a ring system that's 120,000

kilometers across and the moons you're looking at are usually just a few hundred

kilometers across but but they're compressed into this line across the

screen so that's kind of cool.

Let's talk a little bit about a story that you put up a while ago provided evidence of the fact that you get some joy out of being corrected.

That's right, especially when I'm when I find out that scientists are reading my blog. I know that a lot of scientists read the blog. I have conversations with them at scientific conferences and they comment about things that they've read. I hear it from them too and and scientists being

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