Sean Solomon, director of DTM and principal investigator for NASA's MESSENGER mission to Mercury, was recently featured on the BBC radio program Leading Edge. This program, hosted by Geoff Watts, focuses on new developments in the world of science and the questions surrounding them. Watts' interview with Solomon, which aired on Thursday, February 19, centered on NASA's plans to launch the MESSENGER mission this May. The mission involves two phases. In the first, following three flybys of Venus, the spacecrafy will fly by Mercury twice, in 2007 and 2008, and will map nearly the entire planet. The views to be obtained by MESSENGER will be superior in both resolution and coverage to those collected by NASA's Mariner 10 mission in the 1970s, the only previous spacecraft to have visited the innermost planet. In the sceond phase of the MESSENGER mission, to begin in July 2009, the spacecraft will orbit Mercury for one Earth year. During that time an array of seven scientific instruments on the spacecraft will characterize Mercury's interior, surface, atmosphere, and magnetosphere. (An audio file of this program can be downloaded from the Leading Edge website.)