We're off to Euro planet this week on planetary radio. Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final

frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan.

Hundreds of presentations were made at last week's European Planetary Science Conference.

One of them came from Doug Ellison, but what really kept Doug busy were his reports to the world from the Potsdam

Germany meeting site. We'll conduct our debriefing of Doug on today's show.

Emily Loch Duolle is coming up with her report on the messenger spacecraft's close call at Venus

And Bruce Betts puts the payload before the booster during today's What's Up review of the night sky

News? Yeah, we've got news from everywhere in the

universe. Everywhere that is except for this big hole in the cosmos. I am not

kidding. Astronomers using the very large array radio telescope have found

a big hole, a gigantic void in the universe that is devoid of matter.

It doesn't even contain dark matter and it does not fit anywhere in

current cosmological theory. I think we'll need to talk with these folks at

the University of Minnesota. Endeavor is back safe and sound.

The STS 118 mission ended with the August 21 touchdown of the space shuttle.

NASA says the Dawn mission to the two biggest asteroids will launch no sooner than

September 26. The Japanese lunar orbiter called Kaguya will lift off on

September 12 if all goes well reaching the moon just five days later.

Speaking of Japanese missions, little Hayabusa's long tale of interplanetary survival just

gets better and better.

Engineers have announced that they've managed to get three Survival just gets better and better.

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