Jon Nguyen: Tour the solar system from home

8,667 views ・ 2015-07-15

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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As a kid, I was fascinated with all things air and space.
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I would watch Nova on PBS.
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Our school would show Bill Nye the Science Guy.
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When I was in elementary school, my next door neighbor,
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he gave me a book for my birthday.
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It was an astronomy book,
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and I poured over that thing for hours on end,
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and it was a combination of all these things
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that inspired me to pursue space exploration
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as my own personal dream, and part of that dream was,
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I always wanted to just fly around the solar system
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and visit different planets and visit moons and spacecraft.
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Well, a number of years later, I graduated from UCLA
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and I found myself at NASA,
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working for the jet propulsion laboratory,
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and there our team was challenged
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to create a 3D visualization of the solar system,
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and today I want to show you what we've done so far.
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Now, the kicker is, everything I'm about to do here
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you can do at home, because we built this
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for the public for you guys to use.
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So what you're looking at right now is the Earth.
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You can see the United States and California
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and San Diego, and you can use the mouse
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or the keyboard to spin things around.
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Now, this isn't new. Anyone who's used Google Earth
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has seen this before, but one thing we like to say
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in our group is, we do the opposite of Google Earth.
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Google Earth goes from this view down to your backyard.
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We go from this view out to the stars.
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So the Earth is cool, but what we really want to show
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are the spacecraft,
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so I'm going to bring the interface back up,
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and now you're looking at a number of satellites
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orbiting the Earth.
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These are a number of our science space Earth orbiters.
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We haven't included military satellites and weather satellites
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and communication satellites and reconnaissance satellites.
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If we did, it would be a complete mess,
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because there's a lot of stuff out there.
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And the cool thing is, we actually created 3D models
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for a number of these spacecraft, so if you want to visit
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any of these, all you need to do is double-click on them.
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So I'm going to find the International Space Station,
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double-click, and it will take us all the way down to the ISS.
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And now you're riding along with the ISS
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where it is right now.
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And the other cool thing is, not only can we
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move the camera around, we can also control time,
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so I can slide this jog dial here
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to shuttle time forward, and now
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we can see what a sunset on the ISS would look like,
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and they get one every 90 minutes. (Laughter)
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All right, so what about the rest of it?
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Well, I can click on this home button over here,
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and that will take us up to the inner solar system,
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and now we're looking at the rest of the solar system.
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You can see, there's Saturn, there's Jupiter,
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and while we're here, I want to point out something.
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It's actually pretty busy.
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Here we have the Mars Science Laboratory
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on its way to Mars, just launched last weekend.
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Here we have Juno on its cruise to Jupiter, there.
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We have Dawn orbiting Vesta,
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and we have over here New Horizons
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on a straight shot to Pluto.
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And I mention this because
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there's this strange public perception that
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NASA's dead, that the space shuttles stopped flying
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and all of the sudden there's no more spacecraft out there.
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Well, a lot of what NASA does is robotic exploration,
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and we have a lot of spacecraft out there.
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Granted, we're not sending humans up at the moment,
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well at least with our own launch vehicles,
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but NASA is far from dead,
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and one of the reasons why we write a program like this
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is so that people realize that there's so many other things
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that we're doing.
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Anyway, while we're here, again,
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if you want to visit anything,
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all you need to do is double-click.
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So I'm just going to double-click on Vesta,
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and here we have Dawn orbiting Vesta,
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and this is happening right now.
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I'm going to double-click on Uranus, and we can see
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Uranus rotating on its side along with its moons.
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You can see how it's tilted at about 89 degrees.
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And just being able to visit different places
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and go through different times,
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we have data from 1950 to 2050.
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Granted, we don't have everything in between,
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because some of the data is hard to get.
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Just being able to visit places in different times,
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you can explore this for hours,
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literally hours on end,
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but I want to show you one thing in particular,
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so I'm going to open up the destination tab,
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spacecraft outer planet missions, Voyager 1,
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and I'm going to bring up the Titan flyby.
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So now we've gone back in time.
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We're now riding along with Voyager 1.
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The date here is November 11, 1980.
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Now, there's a funny thing going on here.
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It doesn't look like anything's going on.
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It looks like I've paused the program.
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It's actually running at real rate right now,
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one second per second, and in fact,
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Voyager 1 here is flying by Titan at
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I think it's 38,000 miles per hour.
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It only looks like nothing's moving because, well,
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Saturn here is 700,000 miles away,
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and Titan here is 4,000 to 5,000 miles away.
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It's just the vastness of space makes it look like nothing's happening.
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But to make it more interesting,
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I'm going to speed up time, and we can watch
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as Voyager 1 flies by Titan,
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which is a hazy moon of Saturn.
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It actually has a very thick atmosphere.
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And I'm going to recenter the camera on Saturn, here.
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I'm going to pull out, and I want to show you
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Voyager 1 as it flies by Saturn.
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There's a point to be made here.
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With a 3D visualization like this,
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we can not only just say Voyager 1 flew by Saturn.
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There's a whole story to tell here.
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And even better, because it's an interactive application,
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you can tell the story for yourself.
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If you want to pause it, you can pause it.
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If you want to keep going, if you want to change
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the camera angle, you can do that,
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and because of that, I can show you
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that Voyager 1 doesn't just fly by Saturn.
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It actually flies underneath Saturn.
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Now, what happens is, as it flies underneath Saturn,
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Saturn grabs it gravitationally and flings it up
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and out of the solar system,
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so if I just keep letting this go,
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you can see Voyager 1 fly up like that.
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And, in fact, I'm going to go back to the solar system.
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I'm going to go back to today, now,
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and I want to show you where Voyager 1 is.
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Right there, above, way above the solar system,
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way beyond our solar system.
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And here's the thing. Now you know how it got there.
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Now you know why, and to me,
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that's the point of this program.
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You can manipulate it yourself.
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You can fly around yourself and you can learn for yourself.
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You know, the theme today is "The World In Your Grasp."
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Well, we're trying to give you
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the solar system in your grasp — (Laughter) —
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and we hope once it's there,
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you'll be able to learn for yourself
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what we've done out there, and what we're about to do.
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And my personal dream is for kids to take this
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and explore and see the wonders out there
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and be inspired, as I was as a kid,
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to pursue STEM education
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and to pursue a dream in space exploration.
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Thank you. (Applause)
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