This program is sponsored by the Covley Prize, which honors scientists for breakthroughs

in astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience.

The Covley Prize is a partnership among the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters,

the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, and the U.S.-based Covley Foundation in Los

Angeles, California.

I'm Alan Olga, and this is Clear In Vivit, conversations about connecting and communicating.

I am obsessed with the exploration of the outer solar system, and I think that word explains

why it's basic exploration.

It's sailing across the ocean, looking for new worlds, but instead it's looking progressively

further out in our solar system and discovering something that no one has ever seen before

and trying to understand what that then means is both just an obsession and amazingly

fun.

That's astronomer Mike Brown.

He's famous, or maybe infamous, for demoting Pluto from a planet to a planetary dwarf.

He's now hot on the trail of a new ninth planet, one that's very different from Pluto,

a planet six or seven times bigger than Earth, and way, way far out beyond Neptune.

His explorations of the outer solar system won him the Covley Prize in Astrophysics in

2012.

We're now two weeks away from this year's Covley Prize announcements, and in this special

episode of Clear and Vivit, we're also celebrating another 2012 Covley Laureate.

That's the amazing Millie Dresselhouse, a woman called by her colleagues, The Queen of

Carbon.

...