Master of the Moon Rocks, this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm at

Kaplan at the Planetary Society. Come with me to Building 31 at the Johnson

Space Center where they study and protect the greatest collection of rocks and other materials that have come

to our planet from across the solar system and beyond.

Wait till you hear who Bill Nye had dinner with.

It wasn't Bruce Betts, but Bruce will take us to one of the most distant objects in our solar system on what's up.

Our first stop is Mars with senior editor and tour guide Emily Loch Duwala.

Emily was time for another of your terrific curiosity updates at planetary.org.

This one is dated the 8th of January and there's a lot to report on.

That's right.

Curiosity has spent about six weeks exploring the Bagnold dune field.

This is a line of very dark colored sand dunes that's very easily visible from

orbit. It's one of the main features you can see in Gail Crater. And Curiosity spent three

years driving kind of at an angle to this dune field trying to get a spot where it's a little

thinner so the rover can drive across it and get to some interesting rocks. They finally

reach the dune field just before Christmas and have started exploring these absolutely incredible impressive. Field just

and have started exploring these absolutely incredible impressive huge active dark sand dunes on Mars.

The scenery is just amazing.

It really is. There are some terrific, well you also have that great self-portrait taken by Mascan, but I'll tell you,

there are a couple of images that are really striking for me.

One of them, and there really are two sets of images of this, is this progression of work done by chem-cam. Tell us about this.

...