Kepler finds its first five planets 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 of the Planetary Society. After just 10

months in space, the Kepler Telescope has already found five new worlds and is

well on its way to the hope for discovery of planets like our own.

Principal investigator Bill Barruki returns to our microphones with a progress report.

Then, is it an asteroid or a burned out rocket stage.

Either way, it made a run at the Earth a few days ago.

Emily Lachto-Wala will tell us more.

Bill Nye calls in from LaGuardia Airport with evidence that there may be plenty of solar systems

like ours out there in the Milky Way and will enjoy a lovely winter's day in Pasadena with

Bruce Betts as we hear about the night sky and get another space trivia

contest underway. A diamond in the rough or rather a diamond in the void the European

Space Agency's Rosetta Spacecraft, still on its way to rendezvous

with a comet in 2014, encountered an asteroid called 2867 Stein's. You'll know what I mean by a diamond when you check out the beautiful

animation of this fly-by that has just been released by ESA. The animation and a nice

article by Emily are at planetary.org.

If you're hearing this early in the week, you still have time to send birthday greetings to the second human to walk on the moon.

Buzz Aldrin turns 80 soon and the

planetary society is throwing him a party. We hope you'll join in. Time to

check in with the Society Science and Technology Coordinator, Emily Lachtoala is also

mistress of the Planetary Society blog that so many of us faithfully follow. She always

brings us her hand-picked selection of the best stories she is covered in the last week.

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