We're off to asteroid Bennu this week on planetary radio.

Welcome, I'm Madam

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

On September 8th, Osiris Rex departed Earth on its 7-year mission to seek out the origin of our

solar system. A very happy Dante Loretta, the mission's leader will

celebrate that launch with us. Bill Nye was at Cape Canaveral for the lift-off.

He'll share his impressions.

Later, Bruce Betts will reveal surprising facts about a Soviet space shuttle that never went to space. We start with the Planetary Society's senior

editor Emily Loch Duwala. Emily I just read your blog about what to look forward to for

End of Mission EOM for Rosetta and I can tell you it's

giving me goosebumps for more than one reason. Yes well it is going to be

very exciting to set this spacecraft down on the comet and Rosetta is not going to survive the

landing. It's going to crash into the comet at a very sedate pace, about 90 centimeters per second,

a walking pace, but it's a spacecraft that was never designed to do that.

Moreover, as soon as its high-gain antenna tilts more than one degree off of Earth pointing,

that'll be it for communications.

So it's going to be an exciting mission end all the way down. It's going to be checking out this pit on the comet that they've seen in the sides of it these goosebumps features. Earlier in the mission, they called them dinosaur eggs and they think that possibly

it's a relic of how the comet initially formed in the first place, which would be a very

cool thing to check out.

Extremely exciting and these are called active pits.

What do they mean by that?

Well, they seem to be places where the comet has cometary activity,

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