This is planetary radio. Hello again everyone.

everyone.

Welcome to this week's show. I'm Matt Kaplan.

One is a Palestinian from Bethlehem studying biology in the U.S.

The other is an Israeli medical student. What they have in common turns out to be much more than the experiment that is currently high above the Earth on the space shuttle Columbia.

We'll meet them in a minute.

Later today, it's monkeys, moons, math, and madness on what's up with Bruce Betts to say nothing of

our space trivia contest results and this week's question.

First up though here's Emily to tell us about dinosaurs blasted into space, sort of.

I'll be right back. Hi, I'm Emily Loch D'Ala with questions and answers. A listener from Laguna Beach, California asked,

could the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs

have sent earthly debris, soil microbes, and dinosaur guts

out into the solar system?

We asked Dr. J. Molosh, a planetary geophysicist at the University of Arizona, to answer this excellent question.

He explained that the impact known as the K-T impact, blasted debris over the entire Earth.

Most of this debris was melt droplets and instruments. blasted debris over the entire earth.

Most of this debris was melt droplets and individual little mineral crystals,

but a few rock fragments and even pieces of the asteroid have been found tens of thousands

of kilometers from Ground Zero. Therefore, it's quite plausible

that some material was also blasted entirely free of Earth. The discovery of Martian and Moon

meteorites in Antarctica makes it clear that impacts can eject material from planets.

But could there really be dinosaur guts in space from the K.T. impact?

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