Good heavens, teenagers in space on planetary radio. Radio.

Welcome back everyone. I'm Matt Kaplan.

If all goes according to plan, Justin Houchchen will rocket into space before he hits his

20th birthday. We'll meet him on today's show. A big space exploration meeting is

underway in China, Planetary Society Executive Director Lou Friedman

is attending. He'll tell us why and provide a solar sale update. Don't talk to

Bruce Betts about teenagers. He's more worried about marmets in space on this

week's contest. We'll get started by checking in with Emily and her latest Q&A session right

now. Don't touch that dials space cadets.

Hi I'm Emily Loch Duwala with questions and answers.

A listener asked,

what is the solar wind and what do we have to do to protect astronauts from it?

The solar wind is a very hot, very thin, very fast-moving sphere of plasma flowing outward from the sun.

In a sense, it is the outer atmosphere of the sun expanding into interplanetary space.

The particles in the solar wind move so fast that they reach temperatures of tens to hundreds of thousands of degrees.

The force of the expanding solar wind is felt on the atmospheres of all of the planets.

Some small planets and moons have lost all of their

atmospheres in part because of the force of the solar wind. Having a magnetic field protects

a planet's atmosphere from the solar wind, but the upper belts of charged particles

surrounding these planets are blown back from the planet into long streams called

magnetotales, making every planet a kind of giant comet. If this force is so strong, how do we protect astronauts

and spacecraft from the solar wind? Stay tuned to planetary radio to find out. Last fall, China became just the third nation to put a human in orbit on its own

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