Discovery, a launch too far, this week on planetary Radio. Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

A jam-packed show today as we take you to the Kennedy Space Center on the Florida

coast. I was there hoping to see my first ever lift-off.

Sadly, shuttle discovery and the weather did not cooperate. The

launch was scrubbed four times, but we were still able to record some great stuff

for you. Emily Lacuala and Bill Nye will cover last week's other big space story

a visit to Comet Hartley 2. And Bruce Bats will help me give away packing for Mars, Mary Roach's

great book about the science behind life in the

void.

Emily, just one topic that I think we should cover this time around and that was a mission that

was somewhat more successful than the attempt to launch discovery.

That's right.

It was the fifth comet we've ever visited by a spacecraft, the smallest and most active,

Hartley 2 passed by Deep Impact last week on November 4th and it was just

a really fun day I think for everybody involved.

There are some beautiful images that you have posted at the blog, planetary.org, including some animations.

That's right. It was just a spectacular comment to see up close because in basically every picture that they took,

you can see the jets spinning out of the comet and that's pretty unusual.

Usually when you take photos of comets up close spacecraft have to take one exposure

for the nucleus and you can see its rocky shape and another longer exposure to see the jets and then they have

to you know post-process and superimposed to make something that looks like a comet.

...