A Comet's rich legacy and a helicopter that's ready for Mars this week on planetary radio.

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

solar system and beyond.

We've got it all this week, beginning with a status report on the Mars helicopter that has now

been mated to the 2020 rover at JPL. Then we'll meet two of the happy

scientists who will be working with data and images from the Rosetta Comet Mission for many years to come.

They'll give us a peek at just a fraction of that great science,

and we'll finish with another What's Up up segment courtesy of Bruce Betts.

Most of you probably remember my conversation with Mimi Ong in our July 31st episode,

the first flying machine to head for another world, we're still going

through final testing. Now the little helicopter has been attached to the belly of that new rover. Mimi wasn't available to give us an update so we turned to

Mars helicopter chief engineer J Bob Balaram. Bob is principal member of

technical staff at the Jet Propulsion Lab near Pasadena, California, where he works with the

mobility and robotic systems section.

Bob, thank you for coming on the planetary radio to give us just a quick update on the Mars helicopter project which our

audience is so enthusiastic about me too actually where is it now?

Last week we did both a mechanical and an electrical integration procedure with the

rover.

So mechanically, it consisted of the rover being flipped upside down so that we had access to the belly area, the belly pan area.

And prior to that, the Mars helicopter had already been integrated with its delivery system. This is the system that actually

like lowers the helicopter onto the ground in a safe manner from the underside of the

rover. We also electrically mated with our base station, which is the

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