More live roving on Mars this week on planetary Radio. Radio. Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

More excerpts from our great conversation

in front of a live audience,

this time with Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger,

JPL Mars Engineering Manager Rob Manning, and planetary scientist Mars Exploration Rover,

Pan-Cam Lead and author Jim Bell. You'll hear Bill Nye, the Science Guide too.

Later, Bruce Betts and I will give away the Cosmos, not the universe, the book. to imaged by curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover.

But first, some interesting news from orbit around the moon.

That's right, this little lunar orbiter named Laddie

is getting a one month mission extension, which is good news. It may not sound like a whole lot, but

mission managers warned from the beginning that this little spacecraft wasn't going to be able to survive

into an extended mission because it's orbiting so low at the moon and has so

little fuel that it would just crash. So the fact that they get a month to

operate a little bit longer there to go at an even lower orbit and scoop up some atmosphere and dust from closer to the lunar

surface is really fantastic news.

So the mission should now end on or around April 21, 2014.

Just how low of an orbit are we talking about?

Well Project Scientist Richard Alphic talked about it being just above the tree tops and of course there

are no tree tops on the moon, but he did mention a figure of 5 kilometers, 5,000 meters, which is very low, even lower than

commercial jets fly when they're going coast to coast.

So it's going to be flying extremely low.

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