A new race to the moon, the Google Lunar X Prize 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 gave you a sample last week. This time it's

the whole enchilada. We'll recap the recent announcement of the biggest engineering

and exploration prize in history.

The X Prize Foundation has $30 million, waiting for the teams that are first to roll a private,

commercially developed rover onto the moon. You'll hear from Buzz Aldrin, SpaceX CEO

Elon Musk, Google co-founder Larry Page, deputy administrator of NASA Shauna Dale

and the man who started it all with the Ansari X Prize

Chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation Peter Deamanders.

We'll still have time for Emily Lockwala's Q&A and Bruce Bats will call in to give away yet another

planetary radio t-shirt. Here are just a few of the headlines streaming into the planetary radio

studios from our bureaus around the solar system and beyond.

As we prepare this week's show, Dawn is ready to break over the horizon.

Dawn, the spacecraft spacecraft that is.

The probe leaves Wednesday, September 26th, on its epic journey to Series and Vesta, the largest

asteroids in our solar neighborhood. You may remember that this launch was delayed so as not to interfere with the departure of the Phoenix Mars Lander.

Emily is playing host to dawn mission guest bloggers at planetary.org.

Also at planetary.org, a story that started 160 million years ago with the collision of two

mammoth asteroids.

A newly published paper in nature says this cataclysm may have

had a profound effect on our own planet. So are they cavern skylights or just big holes? This question about the so-called

seven sisters on Mars rages on. NASA just announced that the Odyssey Orbiter

...