Conquering the Solar System with astronaut Owen Gariate this week on planetary radio. Hi everyone, welcome back to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan. Low Earth orbit was his home

away from home on Skylab. More than 30 years later, Owen Garret has helped create a plan

intended to make us feel at home in much more of our planetary

neighborhood. He'll give us a taste of that blueprint for space exploration on this

week's program. We'll also have Bruce Betts with another What's Up trivia contest.

Here are some tantalizing trans-solar tidbits to tide you over.

The European Space Agency is getting good press and good data from more than the Huygens probe on Titan.

Ion-powered Smart One is gradually adjusting its orbit around the moon and has begun snapping

pictures. You can see a sampling at planetary.org.

The Genesis Solar Wind Sample Return Mission has risen from what many believed was its grave.

The probe smacked into the Utah desert after its parachute failed to open last September.

Just over four months later, the first of those unprecedented samples has now been delivered

to scientists for a study.

And lastly, out there at the bitter edge of our solar system is Sedna, the strange red

object discovered in November of 2003.

Planetary scientist Alan Stern and colleagues have learned that the big planetoid,

two-thirds the size of Pluto, may have formed out there in the region of the Kuiper belt

and may have lots of company. I'll be back with Owen Gariot right after

Emily takes us to Saturn's Moon Titan for one more example of what Huygens is teaching

us about that strange world.

Hi, I'm Emily Loch Duwala with questions and answers.

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