Genesis comes home with a piece of the Sun on

on planetary radio. video.

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the travel show that takes you to the stars.

One star in particular this week, our own sun, as the first sample return

mission in decades arrives back at Earth. Our guest is Don Burnett, the principal investigator

and lead scientist for the Genesis mission

which will be dropping down into the Utah desert on September 8.

First, let's take a quick look at some of the other stories coming to us from around the galaxy.

There's big news in the search for extra solar planets or ESPs.

Astronomers have already found well over a hundred planets circling other stars, but their holy grail is to locate another Earth.

A European team has just found one that's only a few times as big as our home,

and there was at least one other announcement planned as we put together

today's show.

Cassini Huygens is in great shape as it orbits Saturn according to its jet propulsion

lab controllers. The huge spacecraft successfully fired its main engine for

the last time, placing it on precisely the path needed to complete its mission.

And more than 5 million SETI at home team members can now listen

for things that go boink in the night. Boink stands for Berkeley online infrastructure

for network computing.

It's the brand new software for the world's largest distributed computing project

and is expected to make it much easier for research to move beyond the search for extraterrestrial intelligence

and into many other fields that could benefit from the massive computational power

...