Flying High with Sophia this week on Planetary Radio.

Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm at Kaplan the Planetary

Society come with us aboard Sophia, the Stratospheric Observatory for

Infrared Astronomy. I'll never take a more thrilling flight. That's unless I make it to orbit someday.

Bruce Batts joined me aboard this very special 747 as you'll hear in this week's

What's Up segment. Bill Nye and I got a great tour of Sophia back in December

of 2010, but we never left the ground. Before we check in with the science guy, we'll hear from

senior editor Emily Lockwala as she prepares us for a journey far beyond

Pluto.

Emily it may be slightly old news now but it's new for us here on planetary radio.

Talk to us about what you know of New Horizons heading for another

target. They've finally officially chosen the target of the extended mission.

It's a little world currently known as 2014 MU 69, although we can expect that it'll get a more

mellifluous name sometime in the very near future.

But it's pretty small and it's pretty far away and it's going to take

new horizons a lot longer to get there. It'll be January of 2019 before the

fly-by happens. So this is written up in a really nice article, co-written by

you and our colleague Casey dryer the planetary

society's director of advocacy we'll get to that portion of it in a moment but what do we

know about this object right now not much right not very much at all as a matter of fact we had hoped to know more about the

Extended Mission target back when new horizons launch they had the search campaign going with a lot of Earth-based telescopes to try to find an object

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