Chris McKay, Andy Weir, and Larry Ringworld Niven 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. Join me at the Contact Conference in

Sunny Vale, California for brief conversations with three visionaries.

By surest coincidence, I'll also talk with Bill Nye about plans to get humans to Mars sooner

than most of us had thought possible.

And Bruce Betts will once again help

us celebrate the night sky. We begin with a look forward from senior editor

Emily Loch duwala. Start of a new month Emily and it's time therefore to review your what's up around the

solar system piece which is at planetary.org there's far too much here as usual

for us to be able to cover but there are certainly some

highlights one of them for me has to be this beautiful visualization based on

what maven is telling us about the Martian atmosphere.

MAVEN is a mission that's a little bit difficult to write about because it doesn't

instantly produce beautiful pictures.

It takes a lot of work to present the science that it's doing based on the motions of the

upper atmosphere, the magnetosphere, and how the solar wind is interacting with

Mars. And that's exactly what a group at the Goddard Space Flight Center did to

produce these visualizations of how the solar wind is stripping Mars's atmosphere away and they just won some prizes from the AAAS for their work.

And you can see why, it's a gorgeous animation and of course you can see it in this blog entry.

All right, how about to Rosetta? A bit of a scare.

Yeah, it's the kind of scare that this mission has had before, but it doesn't make it any less scary.

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