How to X-ray a supernova this week on planetary radio? on Planetary Radio. Radio. Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

New Star is the first high energy

X-ray telescope in space. Principal investigator Fiona Harrison

will share the secrets it is revealing about black holes and exploding stars.

Bill Nye has a few enthusiastic words for us about the confirmation of

715 more exoplanets by Kepler scientists,

and Bruce Betts finally gets his latest goody from the

JPL gift shop but only if he tells us what's up and offers a new space trivia contest.

Emily Lochuwala is off this week, taking her spot, is the Planetary

Society's Director of Advocacy, Casey Dreyer. We talked on the morning of March 4th

when big news had just come from NASA HQ in Washington.

Casey, thanks for jumping into this as we speak just really a few minutes after the

big press briefing done by Charles Bolden and NASA's CFO.

Yes, we have the President's Budget Requests, so kind of kicking off the budget cycle for 2015.

Within that budget request, NASA's top line drops down to $17.46 billion. That

represents a cut of about $250 million from the President actually gave it last year.

And we're talking about fiscal year 2015 here, which federal year starts October 1.

But there is this additional almost $900 million,

which is just sort of what icing on the cake?

Yeah, the Opportunity Growth and Security Fund, I believe is what it's called.

And this all has to do with kind of political issues between Congress's spending caps on discretionary

...