Look up at the sky tonight and the moon and the stars will look just the same as always. But in the past few weeks cosmologists have made so many new discoveries, it's a whole new universe out there. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, how scientist have found missing matter and located a universal up and down. Also, are we entering a new age of planetary exploration?

SEGMENT 1

Richard Zare, chemistry professor at Stanford and head of the National Science Board, analyzed NASA's Mars rocks and found what he believes to be evidence of ancient bacterial life. Zare tells Anne Strainchamps what his find means: if life evolved on Mars, it probably evolved in lots of other places, too. Also, Robert Zubrin is founder of Pioneer Astronautics, a private space exploration company and the author (with Richard Wagner) of "The Case for Mars." He tells Steve Paulson why he believes Mars could be the home for a second human civilization.

SEGMENT 2:

Astronaut Harrison Schmitt tells Jim Fleming why humans should colonize and start mining the moon. He says it would be relatively cheap since humans (including himself) have already been there. Schmitt was a member of the 1972 Apollo Moon Launch and now teaches nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

SEGMENT 3:

Science journalist Timothy Ferris talks with Judith Strasser about some of the news of the universe: it's not symetrical; there's an anti-matter spout in the Milky Way; and they've found more of the missing dark matter. Ferris is the author, most recently, of "The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe(s) Report."

Distribution dates:

• week of 05/11/97 - hour 1