Oh, uh,

Oh, Oh, Welcome to a special arts and science edition of Planetary Radio.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society and that's Sun Rings composed by Terry Riley and performed

by the world-renowned Kronos Quartet.

We'll talk with the musicians about this magnificent work that features sound recordings from the

Cosmos provided by planetary scientist on Gernet. But we'll also hear from Bill

Nye reporting from Washington DC and we'll pay a what's up visit to Bruce Betts, who will help

me determine which of you out there is going to have the science guy greeting collars to

his or her voicemail.

We begin with Planetary Society senior editor Emily

Loch Duwala. Hey Emily great to catch you just before you leave for this trip

to Washington that Bill Nye is going to tell us about in a second, but let's talk about this May 9th and that

Bill Nye is going to tell us about this May 9th entry in the blog.

And the first thing that I thought when I saw it was,

oh my gosh, that Chinese lunar lander is huge.

It's absolutely enormous.

It's one of actually two landers that they're building, the same way that they did with Chang'a

one and eventually Changa 2.

They're building two spacecraft.

Their nominal mission is to launch and land 1 on the lunar surface to do various kinds of sampling

and they're also going to deploy an opportunity-sized rover onto the surface from the top of the lander.

But they got a second one, so they're probably going to launch the second one, assuming the first one works well.

...