Virgin Galactic in my backyard this week on planetary radio.

Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier and this week to my hometown of Long Beach, California.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Standing by to take you to the grand opening of the

Facility where Virgin Galactic will build its launcher one rocket.

Bill Nye has a salute for the men and women who wanted to make the one-way trip to the red

planet with Mars One, and Bruce Batts will guide us through the night sky.

Beginning this busy show with a busy segment of her own is Emily Lochuwala.

Emily kind of a potpourri today based on your March 6 blog entry that gave us many updates on a whole bunch of

missions.

Let's get started with what's going on out at series.

Well what's going on out at series is that we have a spacecraft in orbit there.

For the first time a spacecraft is orbiting a dwarf planet, it's the first time that a single

spacecraft has orbited two different worlds beyond Earth, talking about Don, of course, and it's just so exciting to have

Dawn finally there and getting ready to start its mapping mission.

I found a pretty interesting random fact about this orbit.

It's actually still going to be spiraling down to its initial science orbit at about 13,500

kilometers above the surface of series,

which just happens to be about exactly the same distance

at which new horizons will be flying past Pluto in July.

That's fascinating. Okay, since we're going to cover a lot here, what's next?

Well, let's go on out to Mars where curiosity has had somewhat of a rough week.

The rover did finish drilling activities at Telegraph Peak in record time, but then lost all that

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