Searching for E.T.'s flash of brilliance this week onetary radio. Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

Harvard's Paul Horwitz and his colleague Curtis Mead

are watching the sky for a burst of laser light

that may tell us in a billionth of a second

that we are not alone. Stick around for my conversation with him.

Bruce Betts only wishes he had a laser communication system for today's What's Up segment.

It wouldn't even have to be interstellar. The Laddie spacecraft's test of laser broadband

from the moon worked just fine.

Bill Nye reacts to a particularly strong statement by the NASA administrator and Emily

Lochu Wallace stayed up late to watch the launch of India's Mars

orbital mission. Here is the Planetary Society's senior editor. Emily I bet you know as much as any American observing this now about the Mars

Orbiter mission, Mom in India, you've written this really interesting long post. You wrote it on Halloween, October 31st. You are pretty

excited about this mission. I'm very excited about this mission. Of course, it's always

exciting when a new agency enters the fray of planetary exploration.

India hopes to be the next space agency to send a spacecraft beyond Earth orbit, in this case

to Mars. Their mission is the Mars Orbiter mission, which they do abbreviate mom. I can't bring myself to do that.

And it's planned to launch on Tuesday, November 5th at about 1 a.m. Pacific time,

1430, 2.30 in the afternoon, Indian Standard time.

It's going to be quite a long road to get to Mars for them though,

because they don't currently have a launch vehicle that can send a spacecraft on a direct to Mars for them though because they don't currently have a launch vehicle

that can send a spacecraft on a direct to Mars trajectory. So it has to be into Earth

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