Dawn comes to Proto Planet Vesta this week on planetary Radio. Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

Don is the ion engine driven spacecraft that will orbit the two biggest bodies in our

solar system's asteroid belt. Mission manager Mark Raymond is back with a status report just as his

probe has taken its first image of giant Vesta. No one is more excited about this

imminent encounter than our own Emily Lachto-walla.

She'll explain her enthusiasm in a few seconds, followed by our weekly commentary from Bill Nye,

the Science and Planetary Guy.

We wrap up with Bruce Betts, freshly returned from saving the Earth at his near-Earth Object

Conference in Romania.

Time for the Planetary Society Science and Technology Coordinator.

Emily, as you know, my guest today is Mark Raymond of the Dawn Mission, who has made all those

wonderful contributions to the blog, and I will be telling him how excited you are about his spacecraft sneaking up on Vesta.

Yeah, and I'm just, I can't wait to see every picture that's going to come down from the spacecraft

because, you know, this is really a whole new class of worlds that we've never

explored before we've seen small moons in the outer solar system and we've seen some fairly

tiny asteroids but we've never seen this class of really big asteroids.

And asteroid doesn't do them justice.

They're proto-plandets.

And we've never seen anything like it before, so I can't wait.

Well, we will ask him about that, and I'm sure we'll have him back on as that spacecraft arrives at Vesta, which is not very far off.

Let's go on to a couple of the other blog entries from last week, both of which were written by guest bloggers.

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