11 meters of water covering Mars that's nice but how about a kilometer this week on

planetary radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm at Kaplan.

I said you wouldn't have to wait long to hear a

conversation about the recent announcement of huge amounts of nearly pure water ice

at the Martian South Pole. Well here's your opportunity. Jeffrey Plout is a JPL geologist and

co-principal investigator for the Marsis radar instrument on the Mars Express Orbiter.

He'll tell us why finding all that frozen water wasn't really a surprise.

The big question is, where's the other 99 percent?

Later we'll hear about something in the sky that Bruce Betts is genuinely afraid of even as he

tells us what to look for at night.

And we've got another planetary radio t-shirt for a space trivia contest entrant.

Emily Lachto-all his latest Q&A is just around the corner.

Here's a big story I picked up from Emily.

It seems that Saturn's little moon and Salidus,

however improbable it may sound, has a lot in common with bodies like Europa.

Two just-en-out studies have found one, evidence of a liquid water sea under the

Enceladus South Pole, and two, the water plumes shooting

up out of the 500 kilometer ball contain hydrocarbons and other reactive chemicals.

Unfortunately, the Cassini orbiter isn't capable of detecting more complex molecules

such as amino acids, but they could be there.

So should we be looking for life on Enceladus?

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