Pour yourself a refreshing glass of ancient water this week on planetary radio. Radio. Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society, as much as half of the water on Earth and

everywhere else in our solar system is older than the solar system itself.

That's the amazing and far-reaching conclusion of a paper we'll talk about today when we need

its young lead author.

Bill Nye is back with winners and losers in the race to build an American spaceship that can

carry humans to the International Space Station, and you've never

heard a random space fact like the one Bruce Betts has for us this week as part of

What's Up?

First, though, senior editor Emily Lochuawala reports him by phone about a

visitor from Beyond Pluto that just had a close encounter with the red planet and

the robots orbiting it. As we are speaking, we are just past the closest pass of this

comet siding spring at the red planet. The comet passed by earlier it

took another two hours for Mars to pass through the densest part of the

comet's tail. So far as we know, all the orbiters did fine. It's going to be a couple days

before we see the photos that the orbiters took and I'm hoping for good things but we'll have to wait and see.

Well that's a good start and there will be coverage of course at planetary.org.

Both you and Bruce Betts were tweeting pretty heavily about this.

A lot of international interest.

Let's go on to the Hubble Space Telescope helping another sister craft in space,

New Horizons, once it gets past Pluto. That's right.

Hubble was enlisted in the last dish effort to find a target for New Horizons beyond Pluto.

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