NASA's bold new plan this week on planetary radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We usually talk about space

exploration on this show, not the dollars and politics that make it possible.

Today is different. On Monday, February 1, NASA and the Obama

administration proposed a major game change. We'll talk with Planetary Society

Executive Director Lou Friedman about this new direction.

Bill Nye's commentary is on the same topic.

Bruce Betts will still be dropping by to tell us where to look for planets and more in

the night sky, and he'll help me give

away a planetary radio t-shirt.

First up, though, is our regular conversation with Emily Lochuwala about the latest and

greatest news in the Planetary Society blog.

Emily, I know you have some young company there, but glad to be talking with you again

and featured in the blog, this wonderful pair of images of Pluto.

Yeah, these are actually maps that were composed of very complicated computer analysis of nearly 400 images taken by Hubble's

advanced camera for surveys over 2002 and 2003. Why did it take so long for us to

get these? Is it just because of all that computational difficulty?

That's right.

The individual images that Hubble took were only about four pixels across, so you really

can't tell very much detail about what Pluto looks like in any individual image. So the way that they made these pictures is basically he had a computer program, this is the researcher Mark Buey, had a computer program that made a guess as to what the map should look like, then it computed what the view, the four-pixel

across view would look like for each of those 385 pictures and compared the results to the

actual images.

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