Back to the planetary defense conference this week on planetary radio. Planetary Radio.

Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Today, two women of planetary science. About 60 years

separate the births of Allison Givings and Carolyn Shoemaker, but they have in common their

love for exploration of our solar

system and their dedication to the study of asteroids that regularly threaten our

delicate planet. You'll hear them along with our regulars Bruce Betts, Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and the Planetary

Society's planetary evangelist Emily Lachto-Wala.

Emily, we're going to talk about the wonderful world of color in space. First I think you may want to

congratulate Virgin Galactic. Absolutely. They had the first powered and first

supersonic flight of spaceship 2 today. The powered part of the flight lasted for all of

16 seconds but they did successfully go to Mach 1.2. It's a major milestone for

Virgin Galactic and they definitely deserve our congratulations.

And what a beautiful photo of this monster flame

shooting out of the rear, this beautiful space plane against this dark, dark sky.

Yeah, there's that photo and there's actually a second photo now that was shot from a

camera mounted on one of the twin tail fins.

Basically looking at the nozzle as its firings.

It's a pretty amazing photo photo so definitely worth checking out.

That's the way stuff coming out of a rocket engine should look. Anyway it's

it's in it's today if you happen to be hearing this on the first day the show is

available that's an April 29 entry. But let's get to

...