Hey, there. I'm Maren Hunsberger.
I'm a science communicator and host for Seeker.
And this is the Light Speed Learning Playlist,
all about solar energy.
You probably found your way here
by way of Seeker's awesome documentary series
with YouTube Originals
on the 2019 World Solar Challenge.
In that series, you'll get a chance
to join Veritasium's Derek Muller
on the ground in Australia with Seeker,
where 44 teams from around the world
compete in an incredible race across the Outback.
Teams of engineers and innovators
push their limits in their one-of-a-kind solar race cars
to cut across roughly 3,000 kilometers of desert
from Darwin to Adelaide, powered by the sun.
This is a tough race.
It is the premiere,
most difficult solar race in the world.
MAREN:
pun intended,
daredevil driving, uncontrolled spin-outs,
and fiery crashes.
-It's got tears and triumph.
And it features loads of innovative technology
from the latest solar arrays
to top-secret batteries,
to innovative aerodynamic design...
Which brings us to this Learning Playlist,
where we take a deeper dive
into the science and technology
behind the World Solar Challenge.
That's right. Over the next seven chapters,
with some help from Derek,
we are going to learn all about nuclear fusion,
understand how solar panels turn sunlight into energy,
go under the hood of a solar race car,
break down batteries and build better ones,
dig into aerodynamics
and finally, explore the future
of solar vehicles.
After watching the
you'll be one of the foremost experts on solar power
from start to finish.
Or at the very least,
you'll have a pretty solid understanding of
how it all works.
And just a heads up, each chapter of our playlist
will build on the previous chapter.
So, although you can skip ahead,
and you're welcome to watch the playlist
in whatever order you choose,
you'll probably wanna watch in the order we've laid out.
So, let's start with a little brief
on what we know about the sun so far.
Travel back in time with me to sometime around 1223 BCE.
The oldest known record of a solar eclipse
is from around this time,
and was found in the ancient city of Ugarit,
in what is now modern day Syria.
Since then, our methods for studying the sun
have grown more and more sophisticated.
Now, it's kind of mind-blowing to realize that
up until a few decades ago,
our knowledge of the sun only came from observations
made from here on Earth,
which is approximately 150 million kilometers away.
And then came the Space Age.
In a little over six decades,
we've sent more than 8,000 satellites into space.
And there have been several important missions
undertaken specifically to help us
get a better understanding of our sun,
including the Ulysses mission,
the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory,
or SOHO,
The Genesis mission, Hinode,
and IRIS,
the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph.
These missions, along with several others,
allowed us to get
a much deeper understanding of our sun.
They gave scientists the opportunity
to collect an actual sample of the solar wind,
measure the sun's magnetic fields,
and uncover how solar material moves
through the sun's atmosphere.
More recently,
NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe.
The mission being to touch the sun
by flying into its corona,
that's the outermost part
of the sun's atmosphere,
providing us with a better understanding
of how heat and energy
move through the sun's corona
and what accelerates solar wind.
And even more recently,
the European Space Agency and NASA
launched the Solar Orbiter
to answer our fundamental question
about how the sun is able to create
and control the space environment
throughout our solar system.
Both of these missions
will get within Mercury's orbit, too.
And the Parker Solar Probe will get as close as
6.16 million kilometers to the sun,
which I know may not sound very close,
but keep in mind, that means that the Solar Probe
will be too close to the sun to directly image it.
Thanks to centuries of observations,
we actually know a lot about our sun.
We know that it's a yellow dwarf star
whose gravity helps
hold our solar system together.
We know its size,
we know that it's a giant ball of gas
composed mostly of hydrogen and helium,
which, when combined,
make up more than 98% of its mass.
And we even have a widely-accepted theory
for how the sun formed,
out of the collapse of that same giant,
rotating cloud of gas and dust
that formed the rest of our solar system.
But it's only been within the last 100 years
that we've come to understand
how the sun generates its power,
by a complicated process known as fusion,
which pretty much sustains all life on our planet.
To learn more about this amazing process,
stick around for the next chapter
of our Learning Playlists,
where we break down exactly how
the sun generates so much energy.