This is planetary radio. Hello again, friends of the solar system and space exploration, I'm Matt Kaplan.

Remember a few weeks ago when Dr. Bernard Foying was our guest?

The European Space Agency scientists talked about the imminent launch of the ESA's

Smart One Spacecraft.

Well, it happened on September 27.

A small group gathered at Planetary Society headquarters to watch the Arian 5 rocket lift off on the web. Just moments after the launch, we off on the web.

Just moments after the launch, we were on the phone once again with Dr. Foying,

the Society's Director of Projects,

our regular contributor Bruce Betts, was the first to congratulate Dr Dr Foyne and the Smart One team.

And we very much enjoy and appreciate your talking to us at such a momentous time.

Well, thanks for your interest. I have it.

Well, we have quite emotional all that while here.

I bet.

This has been a long time coming for you, hasn't it?

How long have you been working on this?

Yes, well, okay, we had started to think about the project from five years ago, but we had it really approved

four years ago. We took three years to develop the spacecraft and we had some additional time to test and okay now you

starting the next step which is okay being injected fully in a few minutes and

then we will check the

all space quab deploy the solar panels in a few hours we will then start to charge batteries and on the Monday we will

commission pre-commission some experiments that are monitoring the iron engine and on Tuesday morning we will fire the ion engine.

First we make a test fiery and later we will decide after analysis of the data if you can fire it and then try to escape the Earth

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