The Final Countdown at Saturn, this week on planetary radio.

Welcome, I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar

system and beyond. She's back. Our most frequent guest, Cassini Project

scientist Linda Spilker, is here with another report on that magnificent mission as it

enters its last months. It includes Cassini's top 10 science discoveries for

2016. Bill Nye sees political momentum building toward a human mission to

Mars which is where we'll join Bruce Betts standing on top of the solar system's

biggest volcano for his what-up segment, Emily Lochu Lautuala is the Planetary

Society's senior editor.

Emily, big news in your most recent blog post, not the kind of news we typically get from you there, and the last one we're

going to see for a while, I take it.

You know, it's been about four years that I have been working on a book about curiosity, and

I finally had to face the fact that I was never going to finish it.

I was never going to finish, catch up with a rover if I didn't stop everything else to finish up the book.

So I'm taking a three month sabbatical from most of my other

duties at the Planetary Society in order to wrap up work on this enormous

tome on the Curiosity Mission. Now I remember when you first told me that you had been asked to create this new book

and I thought, wow, it's kind of early to be writing that.

Don't the additional two years sort of help a lot with what you're going to be writing about?

Well they do and especially in that they allow me to talk about a more interesting part of

the mission than the first year of the mission when they were mostly working the kinks out

although they did make some important

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