Andrew Chakin on the first Earthrise 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 of the Planetary Society. The author of a man on the

moon and a passion for Mars returns to tell us how the most famous picture ever taken in space came to be and how that

image of our planet rising over the horizon of the moon calls us to once again

venture beyond Earth.

Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, says NASA doesn't need to go into space to find the

solar power we can use down here, and Bruce Betts will join me to celebrate the night sky and the great new

mnemonics many of you sent us at least one of them has got to be a better way

to remember how stars are classified. Emily Lachdwala has this holiday

week off. She'll return with a new Q&A segment next time. In the meantime, you can look to her

blog at planetary.org for the latest news from around our solar system and more distant locales.

For example, there's her story about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter taking another major

step toward its planned launch in April. Time for Bill. I'll be right back with

Andrew Chaken. Hey Bill N Nye, the planetary guy,

Vice President of Planetary Society.

And this week, as the holidays wound down,

you may not have noticed that NASA canceled

its space-based solar power initiative, it's SBSP.

And this is probably not a bad thing.

For those of you unfamiliar, the idea is to have enormous antennas in space, many

many times larger than an international space station that would gather solar power

...