This is planetary radio. Another busy show this week.

Hi everyone, I'm at Kaplan.

Did you hear the big news about the 2007 Mars Scout Mission?

We'll have that story for you right after Emily.

And then we'll spend some time with Bernard Foying of the European Space Agency learning about the Smart One mission to the Moon.

Last week we asked you what you'd name a Mars mission.

Join Bruce and me at the end of the show to learn whose entry made us laugh the most.

Fun and games and space science on planetary radio. Here's Emily.

Hi, I'm Emily Lochuwala with questions and answers. We were asked, is it possible for planets

to form around binary stars? Science fiction movies set on other worlds often show skies with two stars

indicating that the world is orbiting a binary star system. These star systems are

very common. A survey of stars close to the Sun reveals that half are actually binary

star systems. In fact, the second closest star to Earth, Alpha Centauri, is actually a pair

of Sun-like stars orbiting each other at an average distance of 23 astronomical units,

roughly the same as the distance between our sun and the planet Uranus.

But is it really possible for planets to form in such a binary star system?

Stay tuned to planetary radio featured all four of the finalists for the

2007 Mars Scout mission. Well, NASA made its choice and the happy winners were the members of the Phoenix Lander team.

Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona is the Project Scientist for Phoenix.

Here's a bit of our conversation with him two weeks ago.

We've put together a Scout Mission using the 01 lander, which has been in storage ever since it was

noupled, and many of the instruments from Polish ever since it was compelled.

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