Jill Carter and Tyler Nordgren this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier. I'm

at the Planetary Society with a conversation in a place called Death Valley

about life across the universe. Astronomer, engineer, and SETI pioneer Jill

tartar will join astronomer, artist, and night photographer of the National Parks

Tyler Nordgren for a very special conversation. Bruce Betts has Big Sky News in this week's What's Up segment

and you'll get the chance to win some of Tyler Norgren's spectacular posters.

Emily Loch Duvalas, the Planetary Society's senior editor. She just wrote about the Mars Science

Laboratory rover's latest accomplishment.

Emily, yeah, I know, we talked about curiosity just last week, but it's not every day that the rover drills a new

hole.

That's right, there's only been 10 of them since the rover landed, and this is the tent at a site

called Lubango on the western edge of the Nachlift Plateau on Mars.

Why this spot?

Well, they're just about to drive off of the top of this plateau that's made of a rock unit

called the Stimson Unit, which they've been driving across for a while, and this is really their last chance to sample it.

And as they've driven across the Stimson, they've seen these places where the rock has fractured, and there's this light-toned

light-toned zones around the fractures that maybe they were altered

by fluids going through the rock. Maybe the fluids leached out some material

or maybe the fluids seeped into the rock and deposited some new elements and those are the kinds of questions

What exactly is happening around these fractures that the curiosity team is trying to test by drilling into a site in one of these halos around a fracture and then pretty soon they're going to drill into a location outside a fracture and then they'll be able to compare the two to each other.

Now am I right that curiosity can only do so many of these

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