This is planetary radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. What do you do when there's a planet in

your solar system that is so distant you really know almost nothing about it? You

go there of course. Alan Stern is principal investigator for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond,

launching in 2006 if all goes well.

He'll be here to talk about this mammoth voyage and a few of the other projects

that make him a very busy planetary astronomer. Bruce Betts is on the road doing microgravity research, sort of, and calling in with a new trivia

question.

First though, Emily is talking about the weather and it's looking stormy. Hi, I'm Emily Loch Doala with questions and answers.

A listener asked, why are Jupiter's great red spot, Neptune's great dark spot, and their small subdued counterparts on Saturn all in the southern hemispheres of these planets?

All of these huge cloud systems in the atmospheres of the giant outer planets appear to be

storms in which atmospheric gases are rising and expanding.

If that's true, they are similar to storms in Earth's mid-latitudes and should not be seen to favor either hemisphere.

The question of why giant planet storms seem to be confined to the southern hemisphere has plagued

planetary scientists, and we just don't know the answer.

It may just be a coincidence because while Jupiter's great red spot has been observed for over 300 years,

other storms in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune don't appear to be as long-lived.

Stay tuned to planetary radio to find out more. On May 29 of this year, the Los Angeles Times featured a page 1 article titled,

So Far, yet now so near.

If the star of that piece was the planet Pluto, you could say Alan Stern was best supporting actor.

Dr Stern directs the Department of Space Studies

at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder,

Colorado.

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