New Horizons' P.I. Alan Stern on the Jupiter Fly-By, 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. Yes, Alan Stern remains the principal

investigator for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond. In spite of the

other little job he recently picked up that would be associate administrator of

NASA's science mission directorate making him a very very busy guy so we figured when

we got the chance to talk with him again we should grab it.

That chance came just a few days ago.

This means we're going to delay our coverage of the Lunar Regolith Challenge till next week.

Later today we'll drop in on our pal Bruce Betts

for a look at the crowded night sky,

a particularly fun random space fact,

and the latest installment of our weekly space trivia contest which has won a

planetary radio t-shirt for one of you and then there's the news including a new

find by Spirit one of the Mars Exploration Rovers.

Well, what did you think that they were just sitting around collecting dust up there?

Well, yeah, they do that too, but Spirit has discovered that some of that dust and soil and rock is about 90% silica.

The find was made in a little patch that the rover has been working close to for six months.

Now, as far as we we know the only way to create a

deposit of silica like that involves a lot of water. It's among the best

evidence so far that some of the surface of the red planet was once soaking wet.

And what might have been living in that water?

Wouldn't we all like to know?

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