The Leader of the European Space Agency and much more this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society with the first of several great conversations

I recorded at the annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado. We'll meet the Director General of

ESA Jan Werner and that agency's chief scientist Bernard Foying will return to planetary radio. Bill Nye has just returned from Houston to share his excitement

about an accomplishment by SpaceX and the announcement by that company

that it is planning a Mars mission.

Later we'll find out with Bruce Betts what a psycho-pomp is and why it became part of the

weekly space trivia contest.

You're wondering why the piano sonata number 14 has faded up under my voice as well you might

Not that anyone ever needs an excuse to play Beethoven, but it just happens

That this sublime music provides the soundtrack for something special

we want to talk to senior editor Emily Lochuala about. You'll find her April 28th

blog post at planetary.org. This is one of those opportunities that we have

to sort of integrate art with science. That has to do with these animations you've just posted.

Tell us about them.

Yeah, these are produced by a Serbian visual artist who based them on real data, on

Clementine image data showing the coloration of the surface of the moon and on Japanese

Kaguya data showing the topography of the surface of the moon and he rendered

this beautiful slow animation of the phases of the lunar nearside. You need both the color and the

topography because the moon's topography is fairly significant and so you can see the

shapes of all the craters evolving on the Terminator as it slowly sweeps across the

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