The Return of the Space Plane, Dream Chaser, this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier. I'm

Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We'll return to Space Symposium this

week for a conversation with Mark Serangelo of the Sierra Nevada Corporation,

builder of the Dreamchaser that should fly to the International Space Station in 2019.

We'll hear a few moments of Bill Nye's appearance at that annual gathering of the space

industry with his guest Bernard Foying and Amy Meinzer.

And Bruce Betts makes me feel better about missing the transit of Mercury in our what's up segment.

We start with senior editor Emily Lock to Wallach.

Emily, we're just a few days late getting to your May what's up around the

solar system report this week.

Still plenty of time to enjoy what's happening this month.

Let's start with Venus and an image of it that was like nothing I'd ever seen before.

Yeah, it's really nice to see Akatsiki getting going

on its science mission finally after a couple of year delay

and an extra several trips around the sun.

This photo is of the night side of Venus, but Venus is a pretty hot place and so if you look at it in near infrared

wavelengths you can see surface features or the lower atmosphere glowing with warm infrared energy and then sometimes upper

atmosphere clouds block some of that warmth so what we're looking at here is a photo

of Venus with swirling clouds where the more opaque clouds are backlit by glowing hot air

underneath and just one little taste of what's to come from this mission. We should

get tons and tons of images like this to be able to see Venus's clouds moving over time.

...