A good day for space in Washington, D.C. this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the Final Frontier. I'm

at the Planetary Society. The United States finally has a budget for the

remainder of this federal fiscal year and that budget has lots of good news for

NASA and space exploration. We'll talk with one of its architects, Congressman

John Culbertson. Also get a brief overview from Planetary Society Director of Advocacy, Casey Dreyer,

checking in from San Francisco, where he was attending the annual meeting of the American

Geophysical Union. Later I'll let you know who has won a signed copy of Randall Monroe's Thing Explainer.

And Bruce Betts will help me provide another chance to win this great new book.

We begin with senior editor Emily Loch Duwala.

Emily I have to say I was really torn this week because you have a

slightly newer entry with a great geological detective story actually a couple of stories about

curiosity on Mars but these Rosetta images are so spectacular that I

I really think you ought to talk about these. We sort of hinted at this treasure

trove last week. It's really quite an amazing treasure trove. It's been a long way to

get these photos. Rosetta carries a couple of cameras and many of the images

we've seen up until now have come from Nav Cam, which is an engineering camera.

It takes pretty cool-looking pictures because the comet's really exciting, but it doesn't hold a candle to

Osiris, which is the science imager.

It's one of the highest resolutions science imagers ever sent to as a distant target. Blow up these images and the detail is absolutely incredible.

So it's been a long way to get the data.

The data that's been released is a little on the old side.

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