Sniffing the escaping atmosphere of Mars this week on planetary radio. Planetary Radio.

Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

We'll visit with Bruce Jikaski, leader of the MAVEN mission, leaving for the Red

Planet in November.

Later we'll get a special on the scene, What's Up, from Bruce Bettsts who is at Caltech celebrating 50 years of

planetary science. Bill Nye is off this week as he begins his competition on

dancing with the stars but planetary evangelist Emily Lochuwala is standing by for her regular report.

Emily I'm especially grateful this week because your voice is maybe not quite up to par,

because you were doing some public speaking last week.

Where were you?

I was at the Cincinnati Observatory's annual scope out

public event.

It was really super fun, lots of people,

great volunteers, and quite a big crowd for my

talk so I really enjoyed it excellent well well tell us what you're up to this

week I'm thinking especially of two pieces that are brand new as we speak and

they are both ways to explore a big asteroid.

That's right we're talking about the asteroid Vesta which Dawn of course visited and

mapped very thoroughly now it's on its way to series.

The German Aerospace Agency has just released their third

Atlas for Vesta. The reason it's the Germans who are releasing this is because it's a

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