Drill baby drill, but on Mars, 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.

Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory Rover,

is now a fully functioning science station.

We can say that because the last of MSL's amazing set of tools has now been put to use.

We'll talk about the complex sampling system including the first real drill on Mars

with Luther Beagle of the Jet propulsion lab, which built and operates the big rover.

Later we'll talk craters and debt astronomers with Bruce Betts,

and we'll give you another chance to win Bill Nye, the Science Guy's voice on your answering

system.

In lead-off position is the Planetary Society senior editor and popular blogger Emily Lockawala. But even before that, this reminder that I'm probably in Chile's Otakama

desert as you hear this. You can follow my visit to Alma, the Otakama Large

millimeter submillimeter array in my Oticama diary where I'm chronicling this

trip to the driest spot on earth 5,000 meters or 16,500 feet above sea level.

Pictures and sound are there as well. It's all in my blog

at planetary.org.

Emily welcome back. This is an especially interesting topic I think that we have

today. It's focused on a post that you got up on the blog on the 6th of March.

The planetary science in this is fascinating, but it's actually, I think, secondary to the topic you really wanted to talk about.

Yeah that's right as this conversation was unfolding over Twitter it just made me

grateful again for the new medium of Twitter for discussing all kinds of great ideas and having random people suddenly participate in an exciting discussion.

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