Looking for ET's laser beam this week on planetary radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

We welcome back Harvard's Paul Horowitz for an update on the optical search for extraterrestrial

intelligence.

Emily Lachtoala looks inside the Hayabusa probe hoping to find bits of an asteroid,

while Bill Nye practices some rocket science in this week's commentary,

and we will finish as we always do by gazing up at the night sky with Bruce Betts

and getting another space trivia contest underway. It's an overflowing half hour of

space exploration so let's get right to the planetary society's

blogger. Emily where in the US do we find you today? Today I'm in Philadelphia

visiting my mom and so the vacation is sort of continuing, but I know you're back on the job because

you've got a great entry or at least everything that you were able to print about Ida Kawa.

That's right.

Hayabusa, of course, returned a sample capsule from its mission to the tiny

after at Itocawa and back.

They didn't really know beforehand if they would have any samples inside the

capsule because a little pellet mechanism that was supposed to fire and help propel

samples into the canister didn't work properly. But they managed to return the

capsule against all odds and they shipped it back to Japan a couple of weeks ago and they've been very methodically taking it into a clean room and carefully opened up the capsule about a week ago.

And when they looked inside, it looked just shockingly to me pristine it was so

clean which seems it's a bit of bad news and good news I mean the good news is that

because it looks so clean you know that it wasn't really contaminated by any

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