Flying to the Sun this week on planetary Radio. Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's Travel Show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

NASA is preparing to go to the only star within reach, the one our planet is whirling around

right now. We'll talk with program scientist Lika Gahathakerta about how Solar Probe Plus will get to within just 4 million miles of the sun surface.

Emily Lachtoala has both kudos and criticism for Discover magazine this week.

We'll hear that and more from her in a minute.

What does the TV series Top Chef have to say about our space exploration priorities?

That's the question Bill Nye will explore.

And before you know it, we'll be visiting again with Bruce Betts,

learning about the current night sky and how you can win a planetary radio t-shirt.

Asteroids were in the news last week.

You probably heard about the two space rocks that passed by Earth just three days after they were discovered.

Now, while you certainly would not have wanted one of these to land on you,

they weren't nearly big enough to cause more than local or regional heartache. As it happens they just

zipped on by, though well inside the orbit of the moon. The romantically titled 2010

RF12 came within just double the distance of geosynchronous satellites.

NASA scientist Lindley Johnson is in charge of the agency's near-Earth observations.

These are fairly small objects, and they're quite numerous in the inner solar system.

There's probably tens of millions of them.

We pick these up several times a year but actually if we had the capability we

think we'd probably see these on a daily basis. So go ahead, breathe a sigh of

relief, but remember the one with our name on it is still out there.

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