defending Earth in front of a live audience this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final, and today takes you to Frascati, Italy.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society, and I've just returned from the 2015 Planetary Defense Conference.

Nearly 250 leaders of the near-Earth Object community

came to the headquarters of a division of the European Space Agency

called Eshrin to share progress in the discovery, tracking, characterization

and eventual deflection of Neos that are on a collision course with Earth.

For five days they made presentations, reviewed posters, and form new collaborations, and

on an evening in the middle of the conference, many of them came to the headquarters of

Aussie, the Italian Space Agency to hear an outstanding international panel of their colleagues.

You're about to hear excerpts of that nearly two-hour event, the almost complete recording is on this

week's show page at planetary.org slash radio and will have a video ready for

planetary TV soon.

Speaking of video, the show opened with a welcoming message from Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye

the Science Guy.

Let's meet another Bill.

William Ailer is a distinguished scientist at the Aerospace Corporation in Southern California.

Bill led creation of the first planetary defense conference.

Why did you see a need for a conference about planetary defense?

Well, it's interesting.

I joined aerospace in 1974, and I normally do spacecraft reentry and space debris things and so forth.

And around 2003, our local... and space things and so forth.

...