Voyager 1 at the edge of the solar system this week on planetary Radio. Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. A very full show this week as we bring

back Voyager Project Scientist Ed Stone. He has had that job for 39 years. First though,

we'll jump into the big story from last week with

Bill followed by our visit with Emily Lochuwala. Hey hey Bill Nye the

planetary guy here. This week the excitement, the crazy new information is from the Kepler mission,

looking at an area of the sky about the size of a grain of salt held at the length of your arm and they look at stars to see if

the stars get just just just ever so slightly dimmer and then Brighton

again according to Kepler's laws, if there were a planet passing between that star and us and the Kepler spacecraft.

And sure enough, these guys have found over 1,200 potential planets.

And they haven't found 12 planets but what seemed to be planets. And of those 1,200,

54 of them seem to be in what we like to call the

habitable zone. The place near a star where the Earth is, where there might be liquid water. On top of that, five of them are small

enough to be about the size of Earth. Oh, but hang on a second. Suppose

there's a great big planet that has an earth-sized moon going around.

So what it means is we have discovered dozens or dozens of dozens of worlds

that might be not different from the earth.

They'd be like the earth.

This idea is so cool, everybody.

So you got this spacecraft that has a period around the sun

of not 365 and a quarter days like the Earth has that's our year but

371 days so it's trailing the earth as it goes around the Sun and that way they can point it at these

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