An Earth-sized planet right next door 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.

It has been nearly two months since we learned that the first Earth-sized exoplanet

had been discovered orbiting Alpha Centauri B.

We'll talk with Xavier Dumasque, the lead author of the paper that revealed this find.

Later in the show will reveal what you, our listeners, thought Curiosity should have found on Mars,

but we'll begin by visiting once again with senior

editor Emily locked to wallow. Emily was great to see you and work with you at that

big galaxy event that our friends at cartel put on last Friday. We'll come back to

that in a moment. But first, I guess it was in preparation for that that you found

some really historic images. Yeah, I was asking myself what some of the first pictures were

from from space and I found these

Mariner 4 photos and of course Mariner 4 took under 20 pictures a very small number of

pictures of Mars and there were a first view of a Mars that was covered in craters.

And there's a wonderful comparison showing, you know, much, much better images that we can make now,

my we've come a long ways, compared to what was sent back by Merrittivore, and the difference is so striking.

Actually, it's funny that you mentioned that comparison, because the comparison isn't even

to a very modern camera, it's to the Viking images. Because if you look at a modern camera's images of Mars they're so tight they're so tightly focused on small areas that you really can't see the wide

expanses that mariners that the mariners and Vikings saw. Yeah, that's why there's a context camera, right?

That's right.

Let's turn to this Galaxy event.

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