Deal Armstrong, a life of flight, this week on planetary Radio. Radio. Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

NBC Space Correspondent Jay Barbry returns to talk about

his new book, about his friend, the man who is better qualified than anyone else to land

us on the moon.

You'll love Jay's stories.

Bill Nye is on vacation this week, but Bruce Betts is here to tell us about the night sky

and help me give away light sale swag.

We begin with senior editor Emily Loch Duwala

and a conversation about her latest Mars Science Laboratory update.

Emily this week, I pity anybody who doesn't have 3D glasses because when I saw some of the

images that you showed off of Curiosity's path up there on Mars I said said wholly something. The topography is

certainly getting much more interesting. It's a little hard to tell from

where curiosity is sitting just now because the rover is on top of a plateau

that actually has lots of very pointy rocks and it's taking the rover is on top of a plateau that actually has lots of very pointy rocks

and it's taking the rover quite a bit of time to pick her way around those.

But once she gets off this plateau and down into some valleys, there's going to be some really lovely

topography, ridges with fairly steep

drop-offs and all kinds of wonderful landscapes to look at. Is it doing some

damage to additional damage to the wheels? Well the reason that they've picked a particular path that they have is because

curiosity will mostly be spending her time on sand-filled valleys that should be pretty good

to the wheels.

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