Here Comes the Sun and It’s All Right

The sun: to know it is to love it. But what do we really know about earth’s closest star? We know it’s warm. It makes plants grow. And it’s way up there in the sky, just thirty million miles past Mercury.
But other than that, the sun is still a mystery in many ways. After all, it’s not easy to get close to something that’s twenty-seven million degrees Fahrenheit.
Hopefully, though, in the next five years, we’ll know a lot more. That’s when the Solar Orbiter is set to launch. A project of the European Space Agency, the Solar Orbiter will get closer to the sun than any satellite up until now. And according to our partner the BBC, the contract for the Solar Orbiter is set to be signed today.
Dr. Michio Kaku knows a lot about outer space and about future possibilities. A theoretical physicist, he’s the author of the New York Times bestseller “Physics of the Future.” He’s here to walk us through what we might learn from this new space project.