A scientist on Mars, this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the Final Frontier. I'm

Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Ashwin Vassavada took over as Project

Scientists for Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory Rover, just over a year ago.

He visits with us this week.

Everybody seems to be building new and improved rocket engines.

Bill Nye will introduce us to a few of them.

A lively night sky and a rubber asteroid that just might have your name on it are also ahead

when we talk with Bruce Betts.

Emily Lochuwala is the Planetary Society's senior editor.

Emily welcome back from LPSC. The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, one of my

favorite places to go every year.

Yeah, you could tell just reading all of your tweets from there and there are a lot of them

if people want to check them out at at E.Lachtoala. A lot of stories to tell. We don't have time for a lot of those today.

Where shall we start though? How about Series?

I think Series is a great place to start because Dawn has been there for a while now and actually just a couple of weeks ago completed the

global coverage of all of series at 34 meter resolution their highest

resolution that they'll get an image map and so there were a lot of talks that

featured just gorgeous images. Some of those included the famous bright spots.

Everybody keeps on asking me about the bright spots on series and I get irritated irritate it because I want to talk about something else,

but I have to say that the images that they released

were the bright spots were stunning.

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