Still making a deep impact this week on planetary radio. I'm at the Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan.

It made a deep impact on all of us half a year ago and an even

deeper one on Comet Temple 1. Remember what a kick that was? Jessica Sunshine hasn't forgotten.

This mission scientist is still pouring over the data.

She'll talk about some of the very surprising things we've learned.

And stick around for the last visit ever with Bruce Betts.

Okay, okay. the last one in 2005. Just enough time for

a handful of space headlines. Ring around the Big Blue Planet, thanks to the Hubble Space

Telescope two new ones have been

found at Uranus the stories at planetary.org. The US Congress has approved NASA's

budget included in the bill is a directive that NASA create a program to find and

track all near-Earth objects that are bigger than 100 meters.

And while we'll have much more on the returning stardust probe next week,

we should note that the spacecraft and its cargo of comet and

interstellar particles comes home on January 15.

Are there spots on Mars where future astronauts will be protected from deadly radiation?

As usual, Emily has the answers.

I'll be right back with Jessica Sunshine. Sunchine. Hi, I'm Emily Loch Duwala with questions and answers.

A listener asked, are Mars's local crustal magnetic fields strong enough to protect astronauts from incoming radiation?

On the whole, Mars's intrinsic magnetic field is much weaker than Earth's.

But Mars Global Surveyor has recently discovered that patches of Mars's crust are magnetized strongly enough that they act like magnetic umbrellas.

...