Celebrating 50 years of the space age in Moscow this week on planetary radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan. Everything changed on October 4th,

1957. That's when the Soviet Union put the first man-made object in Earth orbit.

Sputnik 1 frightened the West but it also inspired one of the

greatest and fastest scientific advances in human history. Less than 12 years

later men walked on the moon.

This week we'll go to Moscow where Planetary Society Executive Director Lou Friedman helped to

celebrate this milestone.

He'll tell us that it wasn't marked with quite the fanfare you might

have expected. We'll also find out from Emily Lochuwala how we know certain rocks came to

us all the way from Mars.

Bruce Betts will test my skill as a sound effects person as he helps us explore the current

night sky, and I'll close this week's show with my personal reflection on Sputnik's legacy.

You might think by now that we'd have learned everything there is to know about the universe,

but no!

And our space headlines have the proof. Just 424 light years from home is a star not so different from our sun,

except that at just 10 million years of age, it's quite a baby.

Around that star, in the middle of its so-called

habitable zone is a giant ring of warm dust. The scientists who found that

ring with the Spitzer Space Telescope say the dust might someday become a planet

about the size of Mars. Let's hope we're still around when that happens. In the meantime

check out the story at planetary.org.

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