President of Northrop Grumman Space Technology, Alexis Lovanos, this week on planetary radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society. It was the first company to build

a space science probe for a new agency called NASA, and it has built scores since then. We'll talk with the leader of this Northrop Grumman division

about a few of its notable successes in space science,

progress on the James Webb Space Telescope,

and why he is so passionate about climate change.

Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, is the life of the party in this week's commentary.

That's food sticks on this week's edition of What's Up? That, a night sky roundup and a new space trivia

contest. Emily locked Walla's way on assignment, but you can always check out her latest

blog entry at planetary.org. she's got a present waiting for you

there. It's a montage of all the asteroids and comets we've gotten a close look

at and they're all displayed at the same scale. Cool? Suitable for framing cool. Here's Bill.

Hey, Bill and I, the planetary guy here, Vice President of the Planetary Society.

Let me ask you this, do you know any marshal? here, vice president of the planetary society.

Let me ask you this, do you know any Martians?

You know anyone descendant from living things on Mars?

Well, maybe you do.

You see, it's possible that everything on Earth that's alive came from something

that was once living on Mars. I mean, this sounds crazy, crazy I admit but it's not beyond scientific

understanding that life actually started on that distant world but through

a commentary or meteoric impact a bunch of Mars big chunks of Mars got thrown into space their orbits decayed Earth's gravitational pole yanked them in and every living thing here really started out from

something that was living there. I mean it is at first incredible but when you

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