Things are looking up for planetary science this week on planetary radio. Planetary Radio. Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

Bill Adkins and Casey Dreyer are a few minutes away from telling

us about the recently announced 2014 federal budget that increases.

Yes, you heard me, increases funding for the robotic exploration of our solar system.

First, though, visits with Emily Lacuwala and Bill Nye, and later in our cozy light years wide

half hour, a cool new prize for the winner of the

what's up space trivia contest here's the Planetary Society senior editor

hey Emily welcome back this blog entry that we're going to talk about is so new. I mean you

posted it moments before we got under this Skype call so you're going to have to

tell me about it but I do know that I've already seen some pretty cool shots from high above Mars looking down at

what sure appear to be tracks.

That's right.

This post was actually, I've been working on it for weeks and it started with an idle question

as a lot of my posts often do, which is,

what is the best high-rise image to use to map curiosity's progress?

Well, it turns out that the answer to that question is about 30 different high-rise images,

because curiosity is a rover that has plans to drive many, many kilometers

and each single high-rise image is about 5 kilometers across, It has a central color swath that's about

one kilometer across. So there are dozens of high-rise photos that cover

Curiosity's landing site and to understand the answer to my question which is which one do I need to use if I want to show the right part of the traverse

If I want to show where a certain landmark like say dingo gap is I had to write this very lengthy post sorting them all out into order

...