Planting the love of astronomy around the world 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.

Mike Simmons created Astron without borders just seven years ago.

Now his little organization has coordinators in 45 nations, from Argentina to Zambia. Mike returns to our show this week with an update on

AWBs projects and activities worldwide. The National Research Council is one of

the National Academies in the United States.

Last week it released Pathways to Exploration, rationales and approaches for a U.S. program of

human space exploration. We'll have more on this topic next week, but Bill Nye has some initial thoughts in a couple of minutes.

Another space celebrity will introduce this week's random space fact for Bruce Betts.

We begin with a Mars Exploration Rover update

from senior editor Emily Lachdawala.

Emily is it fair to say that we're watching

opportunity drive even further into the red planet's past? I think so. watching opportunity

is driving up a mountain and in kind of a weird way it's actually means that the

rover is driving farther into Martian history learning about these clay minerals that are deposited

on the rim of endeavor.

One of the reasons that you climb in order to go into the past is that you get impact craters

that raise rock strata from their original positions

deep below the surface they get raised up in the forces of the impact and so that's

what opportunity is exploring right now.

Sounds counterintuitive but makes perfect sense when you explain it.

Talk about how opportunity is, in a sense, being guided by this aging instrument on the

...