thank you, dr ken kremer.s to showjust how far china's military development has progressed in the spratly islands — the chain of islands which lie between vietnam and the philippines, with china to the north. all three countries have claims on the spratlys, but china has been building on them. rupert wingfield hayes joined a us navy surveillance flight over the islands. this is his report. this is the chinese navy politely telling the us navy to go away. far out in the south china sea, we're approaching one of china's huge new island bases. it's very clear they do not want us here. for the crew aboard this us navy p8 surveillance plane, this is now a daily encounter. it's a routine occurrence for us on these flights. it happens throughout the flight, when they come over and then we just go back with our standard response. it really has no effect on any operations or anything we do. as we close to 12 nautical miles, we can now see the huge extent of china's development out here. so, what we're seeing on the scr

earlier i spoke to spacejournalist with space up close, dr ken kremer.ace centre in florida. i started by asking him why this mission is such a big deal. why is this a big deal? great question. it's the first time we can really study a star. it took 60 years to developing the technology to fly within 4 million miles of the sun so that is why it is a big deal. we've never done it before, the sun is the source of all life on earth and so we want to understand how the sun operates and space weather and how that impacts us everyday. so you have things like solar winds, right? yes and coronal mass ejections, every once in awhile they get really big and can knock out the power grid, communications and what we are really concerned about is something like the carrington event back in 1859, it was so massive. if it happened today it would knock out all the geostationary satellites, would severely impact the power grids here on earth, would wreak havoc on modern civilisation. it didn't back then because we didn't have that technology but today we do. we want to fi