This is planetary radio. Hello everyone. I'm Matt Kaplan. Space Shuttle Columbia carried scores of scientific experiments.

When tragedy struck, it was assumed those experiments were lost,

along with the heroes that accompanied them high above the Earth. Now it appears the impossible may have happened.

We'll talk with Lou Friedman of the Planetary Society and David Warm Flash, co-principal investigator for one of those experiments.

They are at the Kennedy Space Center, and they have quite a tale to tell.

Later we'll talk with Bruce Betts about what's up.

First, though, here's an encore presentation of Q&A with

Emily. I'll beala with questions and answers. A listener asked, I heard that it actually rains diamonds on Neptune. Is that true? How?

We asked Laura Benedetti, who published the Diamonds on Neptune story in Science magazine magazine to answer the question.

Yes, it's probably true that diamonds reined on Neptune at least early in its history

and possibly still today.

The atmospheres of both Uranus and Neptune contain methane, a simple molecule containing carbon.

The conditions deep inside these planets are extreme, with very high pressures due to the weight

of overlying material, and very high temperatures left over from the gravitational energy of planetary formation.

In laboratory experiments simulating these extreme conditions,

methane becomes unstable and breaks down and pure carbon is formed as diamond.

If the same reaction occurs in the atmospheres of Uranus and Neptune, the resulting diamonds

would drop like rain or hail or maybe like grains of sand sinking to the ocean floor.

What other weird environments exist in our solar system?

Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. We are not quite live but almost so talking with Lou Friedman and he is at

Kate Canaveral.

Lou exactly.

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