A Life Spent Searching for Life Beyond Earth.

This week on Planetary Radio.

I'm Sarah al-Ahmed of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar

system and beyond. Gentry Lee spent nearly five decades at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

He helped land the first spacecraft on Mars.

He served on the Voyager Review Board.

He helped create Cosmos with Carl Sagan and co-authored science fiction novels with Arthur C. Clark.

Now his extraordinary life is the subject of a new documentary called Starman.

Gentry joined me at the Planetary Society's headquarters just one day after his retirement from JPL.

We talked about the search for life in our solar system,

what it meant to be part of the only generation that would ever explore it for the first time,

and why he believes that if we discover life elsewhere, it will be the greatest scientific discovery in history.

Then our chief scientist Bruce Betts joins me for What's Up, where he'll tell us about the Planetary Society's history of supporting the search for life beyond Earth.

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Gentry Lee spent his career at the forefront of one of the most profound questions humanity has ever asked.

Are we alone in the universe?

But his path to that question didn't begin as you might expect.

Before he was landing spacecraft on Mars,

Gentry was a kid computing baseball batting averages in his head,

...