Paul Horowitz and a bright new SETI star this week on planetary radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan.

We are just a few days from first light for the biggest telescope east of Texas.

This new instrument won't find any new planets, won't study the edge of the universe. In fact, it won't take pictures of anything.

What it will do is watch for a brilliant flash of laser light telling us we're not alone.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence returns to our show with SETI pioneer Paul

Horowitz and Harvard grad student Andrew Howard.

Later on we'll get a new space trivia contest as we explore the night sky and check what happened this week in space history with Bruce Betts.

Five, count them, five men are whizzing by overhead this week in the International Space Station.

Bruce will have more to say about the new Expedition 13 crew,

but we can tell you that they've safely joined Commander Bill MacArthur and Flight Engineer Valerie Tokaref.

MacArthur and Tokaref are near the end of their six-month float in the ISS.

There's more news from Kacini.

The Saturn Orbiter has found evidence of what may be tens of millions of

small moonlets in the rings.

These missing link satellites, missing link, that's NASA's term, not ours, may be proof that a much bigger moon broke

up eons ago to form those beautiful circles of ice and dust.

The big new rocks are probably about a hundred meters across.

Remember how we reported an early dusk for the Dawn mission to the solar system's biggest asteroids?

Well, thanks to a positive review from a NASA panel, Dawn has risen from the dead.

The probe is back on track for its two-permission to Ceres and Vesta.

You can read the details at planetary.org.

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