A new Space Rock and maybe a new anime character this week on planetary Radio. Radio. Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

It's another one of those overflowing episodes, and why not when you've got a newly discovered

asteroid that is going to get uncomfortably close in less than a year.

We'll talk with one of its discoverers and with our own Bruce Betts.

Bruce heads a grant program that helped make the fine possible. Oh, and that anime character,

Emily Lachto-walla will get to him in a moment.

Emily, I am so glad that you were able to turn good news and bad news into good news and good

news.

Please explain.

Well, that's right. I had, I posted a couple of brief mission updates last week. One of them was on

grail. That's the twin spacecraft that are studying the lunar gravity field and they successfully

got their science mission underway last week. It's going to last less than three months to do their primary

gravity map of the moon and then hopefully they'll get an extension. So that was good news, but then

with this solar storm that has been spraying outward from the sun for the last week.

Several spacecraft have had some issues, none of them permanent.

Venus Express looked to be the one that was worst affected.

It's Star Trekkers, both of them went blind last week for more

than two days which is the longest that has ever happened on this mission but fortunately

the news came back about a day after I posted it that in fact the use of the Star Trekkers had been recovered.

And actually there is a comment on this blog entry from Mark Adler, who used to be the project manager

for Mars Exploration Rover mission, and he reminded me that both of those missions

...