Oh, uh, I'm... Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society and that roar was the launch of Orion in the early

hours of Friday, December 5th.

Most of our show this week is dedicated to that very successful test mission.

We'll talk with producer reporter,

Jason Davis, and hear from others who were there.

First though, it's off to Pluto with Emily Lachto-Wala.

Emily, you have a great new piece, posted to Planetary.org on the 4th. locked Horizons, tell us about that. Sure, well, New Horizons has been cruising for an awful long time in order to get to Pluto,

and we're finally, as the mission says, on Pluto's doorstep.

And New Horizons has spent much of its crews hibernating in a sort of sleepy mode where it just rouses itself enough to beep once at Earth every week.

But now it's woken up and is ready to get ready to begin science observations. It'll actually begin those science

observations in January and will continue doing science right through the Pluto

encounter in July and even a few weeks after. So anybody who wants a good overview of this mission and the

great things to come in the next few months, you really should take a look at this

June 4th entry by Emily. It goes through the instruments. It has a great little sort of block diagram of what will be happening during each phase of this close encounter.

And then you have this wonderful table that you've, I think you created of the quality of images

that we can expect to see as we close in on the planet or the dwarf planet.

Yeah it's real important to be patient with New Horizons as it approaches Pluto because it's going really fast and what that means is that it spends most of its time very far away from Pluto.

So the images that we're going to get are not going to be all that spectacular until New Horizons is right on top of Pluto in July.

Beginning in April, they'll still be the best images of Pluto that we've ever had, every single new one that we get, but they'll still be

fairly smudgy and difficult to interpret until right around July.

I don't know if you heard the term that Alan Stern introduced us to on the

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