Hey there pod people it's Matt with very very brief announcement mostly a thank you

You know the podcast world's getting very competitive. Thank you so much for helping to keep us at the top of our genre anyway. If you look for us

under space or space exploration, that kind of stuff, we do pretty well, thanks to you folks. Can you help a little bit more wherever you listen to us iTunes wherever sound cloud? Please post a rating put up a review. It makes a big difference if you have the time and it only takes a few

moments please help us out that way we don't really ask for much else well we could

and we might but we're not.

Anyway, thank you so much for listening. Special report today on LightSail, passing a big test.

I can tell you now that it did pass its day-in-the-life test that you'll be hearing about from Bruce Betts and

Jason Davis. A few things left to work on, but looks like we're still in good shape for

launch on that Falcon Heavy some months from now.

Here's the show.

A big test for a small solar sale, this week on planetary radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

As I say these words, Light Sail 2 has just completed

an end-to-end rehearsal for its history-making mission high above Earth as soon as late this year.

The Planetary Society's Bruce Betts and Jason Davis were there for the test,

and we'll get their report right after we spend a few minutes with senior editor Emily Loch Duwala.

Emily, we could be talking about your excellent update on Akatsuki beginning to return

science from Venus.

It's a May 19th entry in the blog at planetary.org, but I've got to be in my bonnet and I wanted to talk to you about something that I know you tweeted about and it was this image from Hubble, the Hubble Space Telescope of Mars, which some called, including a certain

anchor person on CBS, perhaps the most vivid image ever of the Red planet. I don't think so. Well it's a

subjective judgment you know let everybody have their opinion I thought it was a

very nice photo of Mars I thought they processed it a bit heavier than I might have. I found its limb

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