Kechil is at Jodrell Bank near Manchester in the UK for a few months. This is a radio astronomy establishment next to an enormous dish. You can blow up a radio astronomy dish - but only this one, designed like a bouncy castle to teach and inspire.

Solar Eclipse on 1 September at 09:43, maximum at 10:48. Fantastic news about the discovery of a potentially water-supporting planet orbiting around our nearest star! What a stroke of luck. All we need to do is work out how to travel 40 trillion kms- but perhaps we just need to send a small probe and wait a long time.

Kechil is at Jodrell Bank near Manchester, which is a radio astronomy establishment with a great big dish. Prof Tim O' Brien is here chatting about the monster, and what it does.

"Music and astronomy have had a long relationship. As Pythagoras said: there is geometry in the humming of the strings...there is music in the spacing of the spheres."

With it being a Friday, the day of the Pub Quiz, Kechil Kirkham Quizzes Rebecca Baatjes, Fine Music Radio's production assistant, in a radio friendly quiz.

Kechil goes to the SKA (Square Kilometre Array) offices in Pinelands, Cape Town to speak to Rupert Spann, operator supervisor for MeerKAT

"Nowadays we know a fair amount about planetary motion. We can predict very precisely where planets will be, and we understand the laws governing their motion..."

"Last

week

three

astronauts

travelled

to

the

International

Space

Station.

Nothing

new

about

that,

except

that

they

took

two

days

to

get

there.

The

ISS

is

only

about

350kms

from

the

surface

of

the

Earth,

and

in

case

you

didn’t

know

it

is

a

mere

100km

to

outer

space,

straight

up

all

the

way.

So

it’s

not

very

far,

and

in

space

there

is

no

friction,

or

only

a

little

close

to

Earth,

to

slow

down

your

craft.

It

used

to

take

a

couple

of

days

to

get

to

the

ISS

until

the

Russians

Gigures

out

a

smarter

way

to

get

the

Soyuz

capsule

to

dock."

The latest news from space is that the Juno probe has arrived at Jupiter.

"Last week I mentioned DARK MATTER, by way of describing the latest findings that the universe is expanding faster than previously thought. We don't really know what this "Dark Matter" is - this elusive substance that composes most of the material universe, but it could be, that it's made of black hole..."