How you'll soon check the weather on Mars this week on planetary radio. Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the Final

Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is about to join the crowd at the

Red Planet. Among its instruments is a camera that should be able to pick out details

on the surface as small as a beach ball.

And wouldn't that be an interesting fine?

Emily will tell us more about MRO's cameras in our Q&A segment.

Our guest this week also has an instrument on the new spacecraft, but it's not a camera.

Dan McLeese is behind the Mars Climate Sounder.

It promises to deliver unprecedented reports about the weather and climate on that windy planet,

and it's the third attempt to get the MCS to Mars.

Dan will explain in just a couple of minutes.

Later, Bruce Betts will eclipse his past performances on What's Up,

as he presents yet another chance to win an Explorer's Guide to Mars poster.

In our news this week, is a story Alan Stern couldn't share with us last week.

A team led by the New Horizons principal investigator and Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins

Applied Physics Lab

has discovered that three of Pluto's moons, including Sharon,

were probably created in a single cataclysmic impact with the planet. Their paper is published in the February 23 issue of

nature, but you can also read about it in an article by my colleague Amir Alexander at planetary.org.

NASA's hurricane-damaged facility near New Orleans, Louisiana has just shipped out the external

tank for the next space shuttle flight.

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