Hey Venus, we haven't forgotten you little sister this week on planetary radio.

Welcome, I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond.

It is our sister planet, after all, or is it?

That's one of the questions we'll ask Sue Schmekar of JPL.

Sue has been lobbying for a new mission to Second Rock for years, and she makes a good case.

We've got two space trivia contests to wrap up with Bruce Betts, along with

lots of other good stuff about our universe. In this week's What's Up installment,

we start with something new and different. The Parker Solar Probe was

successfully launched in the very early hours of Sunday, August 12th. Our Mary Lus Bender was

there but she began her coverage of the mission a few days before.

The Parker Solar Probe is on a daring mission to touch the sun.

Passing as close as 6 million kilometers, it will pass through our stars Corona

which extends to about 8 million kilometers.

That's far closer than any previous spacecraft and means it will have to withstand intense radiation

and temperatures reaching over 1,300 degrees Celsius, and that's 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

With Parker Solar Probe, it's a voyage of discovery.

We're going to go into the last major region of the solar system to ever be explored by a spacecraft.

That's the Parker Solo Pro Project Scientist Nicky Fox. She's been working on the mission for eight years

and is anxious to start getting data back once we reach the sun in just a few short months.

And we are going to go and better understand the workings of a star.

Our star, it's the one in our backyard, it's really the only one we can go and study right now,

but the applications are huge. Everything is driven by the sun in our solar system.

...