We're talking humans to Mars with leaders of NASA this week on planetary radio.

Welcome, I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar

system and beyond.

I spent last week at the Humans to Mars Summit in Washington, D.C., where I was joined on stage by the three NASA Associate

Administrators most directly involved with our journey to Mars.

We'll hear from them in minutes. The NASA rocket that will play a vital role in that

journey is Bill Nye's topic this week. Bruce Betts will join us from the

Planetary Defense Conference underway in Tokyo.

First we look to Senior Editor Emily Lockwala,

who is always looking at our solar system and beyond.

Emily pretty much focusing on one gorgeous image that you put up on May 8th at planetary.org in your blog.

Tell us about this.

Well it's a beautiful image of a star-filled sky, an area of the sky close to the Galactic Center.

So it's just absolutely filled with stars except in the places where little dust clouds block

our view of background stars.

And then at the center there's this brilliant light, this saturated point very bright and that's not a star at all. It's a planet. It's Saturn.

Why don't we see the rings in this shot? Because we can see Titan off to the side you pointed out to us.

Saturn is by far the brightest thing in this image and in order to bring out the detail of all the other stars and the

dust lanes in the photo, the astrophotographer Dame the that the brightest thing, Saturn, gets just saturated.

It's huge, it's brilliant.

And so it's brilliance overwhelms any ability

to see its rings separately from the planet.

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