How the Seas of Mars came to be this week on planetary radio. Gone Planetary Radio. Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

Alexis Rodriguez leads a group of planetary scientists that has a new theory about the vast amounts

of water that once ran across the surface of the red planet.

Does it provide a clue about where to look for Martian fossils?

Emily Lochuwallo reports on the latest space triumph for China,

while Bill Nye, the science and Planetary Guy, will chime in with his

regular commentary, and wait till you hear today's rendition of Random Space Fact.

That will be right after Bruce Betts tells us about the night sky and just before we give away a very cool new t-shirt design as usual. We'll start with the Planetary Society's chief blogger

Emily I think we need to start with another notable success by China.

That's right, the Chang' Mission which launched at the beginning of October actually has returned its first images from its incredibly low orbit

over the moon, only 15 kilometers above the surface.

It's orbiting that low in order to take good pictures apparently for a future landing and they seem to have been quite

successful. The pictures are pretty amazing.

There is one that is quite breathtaking of Laplace A, a beautiful crater. The lighting is perfect.

That's right. You know, it's really amazing what a difference lighting makes. It's very dramatic and this

spacecraft apparently has stereo capability with its cameras in order to map the topography of the surface

so it can turn its photos into 3D

perspective views and yeah it's a really fine view of Laplace crater. A related

topic to this is how these images were revealed and I tell you I would love to see

President Obama standing on a stage pulling a drape off of a beautiful new image

from someplace in the solar system. The Chinese had their

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