So what has curiosity found on Mars? That's this week on planetary radio. Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

As I record this, it has only been a few hours since members of the Curiosity Rover team

address the media and the world.

We'll listen to Project Scientist John Grozinger, and then we'll get on-the-spot comment from

our own Emily Lochuwala, who attended the briefing.

Bruce Betts will be along later, but right now we'll jump directly to this week's visit with the Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye, the Science

and Planetary Guy.

Bill, I guess it's a couple of newsworthy items that you found this week and you see

a relationship between these two stories.

Oh yeah, they're going to require they, the powers that be, are going to require commercial

space vehicles.

This is people buying tickets to fly in space to wear pressurized spacesuits to supply

pressurized spacesuits to their passengers, which is quite a thing. They're going to look

like astronauts. And of course Virgin Galactic is going to have them look, you know, how to say, cool, sexy.

That's right. But then also, I could not help but notice that it is reported by the instrument on the Curiosity rover, which the acronym is

read, radiation assessment detector.

There's less radiation at the surface of Mars than people were, if I may, worried about.

So if you were to be an astronaut in a new space suit, in a new fancy space suit, say with a more compact

helmet, especially, you would have no more radiation exposure than people have in low Earth orbit

Which is a surprising result Mars doesn't have as much magnet, has virtually no magnetic field.

You expect Mars to have more cosmic rays and so on at the surface, but there's enough

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