A deep dive into asteroid Benu with Dante Loretta, this week on planetary radio.

Welcome, I'm Ad Kaplan of of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond.

It was just last week that we celebrated this successful collection of material from that asteroid

that the Osiris Rec spacecraft has been circling for nearly two years.

Now we know just how successful that encounter was. Principal investigator Dante Loretta

is here with the exciting and surprising details. First though we'll look to the

future and a new proposal for orbiting and landing on

Saturn's Moon Enceladus. The night sky still beckons and Bruce Betts answers the

call. We'll also congratulate a first-time winner of our space trivia

contest. The Downlink is the Planetary Society's weekly newsletter. It's a great place to start

your own exploration of the solar system, and it's

topped this week by an explosive image of that encounter with Benu. I mean that

pretty much literally as what looks like scores of small fragments explode

away from the sample collector on Osiris Rex.

Up on Mars the long suffering,riving mole is entirely beneath the surface.

The Inside Landers' scoop is piling more Martian dirt on top of the hole in what I've just

realized maybe Mars's first construction project.

It may take months, but the Insight team hopes the mole will still dig much deeper to reveal

much more about the interior of the red planet.

From Mars to Pluto, where data collected by New Horizons has explained how the planet, not a planet, take your pick, has formed ice caps on its mountains.

It's not how they form on Earth, by the way.

And the men and women living on board the International Space Station can breathe easy again.

...