Not heaven but Mars on Earth, this week on planetary radio.

Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan. The seventh international conference

on Mars arrived at Caltech in Pasadena, California last week. 500 or so would be

Martians gathered for nearly five days to present, review, and argue

over the latest flood of data about the Red Planet.

We begin several weeks of related coverage with this episode of our show.

You'll hear from former JPL director Bruce Murray.

Kenneth Tanaka, the United States Geological Survey on Digging Down through the Polar Ice and Greg

Delore of UC Berkeley on a new way to discover water deep under the surface.

Next week we'll take you to a celebration of Mars that honored beloved author

Ray Bradbury. We've also got a brand new non-Martian Q&A from Emily Lac du Wala this

week and a special Mars Conference edition of What's Up with Bruce Bats.

That's at T-minus 20 minutes and counting.

Let's hold that countdown for a few space headlines.

Space Shuttle Endeavor has made it to Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.

NASA is hoping for an early August launch on an 11 day mission to, where else, the International Space Station.

What if extraterrestrial life was sitting in front of our noses but we couldn't recognize

it? That's the fear addressed by a new report from the National

Research Council. The NRC says we may be spending too much effort on finding life that looks

like us, at least chemically, ammonia-based life, silicon,

it's no joke you can learn more at planetary.org.

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