Cosmos 1 ready to set sail on planetary radio. Hi everyone welcome back to public radio's travel show that takes you to the

final frontier I'm Matt Kaplan. Cosmos One, the first real solar sail spacecraft, is

ready for launch from a Russian submarine in March of 2005. We'll have excerpts from the press conference along with the thoughts of Apollo 11

astronaut Buzz Aldrin. First though, let's squeeze in a couple of other space headlines.

Maybe Uranus isn't so boring after all. Observations from the Keck 2

Telescope using its adaptive optics have revealed much more storm and other atmospheric

activity than has ever been seen on the big blue planet. storm and other atmospheric activity

has ever been seen on the big blue planet.

The new images were just released last week

at the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences

annual meeting.

And those weren't the only high resolution snapshots on display.

The European Space Agency's Mars Express Orbiter turned away from the Red Planet to catch

the best ever shots of Phobos.

The amazingly sharp images exposed scores of parallel grooves

running straight across the surface of the tiny moon. So far no one has any idea what dug them, but we all

knew our solar system is a groovy place, didn't we? You can see the pictures and get the

details of these stories at planetary.org.

I'll be back with our coverage of Cosmos One right after this visit with Emily.

Don't go away.

It's a real cliffhanger. her. What body in the solar system has the highest cliffs?

Steep cliffs are seen on nearly all of the terrestrial planets and moons in the solar system.

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