Q-Eng

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　代表頁に戻る

TED Youth 2012 で NASAチームの一人がモヒガン刈りで講演したので有名。
すごい早口だが難しくはない。Curiosity （探究心）＝火星探査機の名前
速聴向き。 250wpmで TED-Ed平均１75wpmに比し 非常に早い。（参考：発話速度）

難　６分　250wpm　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　2012年　　　　　　　　　　　　　
　
字幕 ： 開始後 で字幕On/Off､ で言語選択。文字の色やサイズﾞはｵﾌﾟｼｮﾝから｡
.　　　　 動画を見るとき、 でフルスクリーンに拡大すると見やすい。

★下記英文は ポップアップ辞書 が使えます｡
　　トランスクリプト（テキスト）のリンクはない。

About 100 days ago, we landed a two-ton SUV on the surface of another planet, on the surface of Mars. This is one of the first pictures we took there with our rover. It's looking out at Mount Sharp. To me, it's, I kind of cry a little bit, choke up, when I see this picture. 　　　SUV＝sport-utility vehicle　　rover：惑星探査機

Why Mars and why do we look at these other planets? And part of it is to understand our own planet, what's the context for us? We live on this amazing planet, but Mars is a lot like Earth. It's similar in size. During the day time, it can get up to 70 degrees in the, uh, Farenheit. So, it's so like Earth, but at the same time, you know, this is a barren landscape, you don't see any trees, you don't see any cactuses growing or anything like that.

So, today I'm going to tell you about how we got from Earth to Mars and why it's so cool. So one of the things we start with is a blank sheet of paper. We knew from the previous missions in 2004, Spirit and Opportunity, there was water on Mars in the past, but, you know, what's the next step? We're looking for an even more fundamental level of what does it take to have life survive?

And so, to have that kind of, you know, knowledge and understanding, we have to carry a mass amount of instruments. We have to carry the kind of labs that people actually have whole rooms devoted to on Earth inside of essentially a small car. And what we did was we shrunk it all down to something that weighs about as much as I do, and then put it inside of this rover that weighs as much as your car does. And that rover is now on the surface of Mars, but it's so heavy, and so it kind of takes a special challenge for us to make it all work and come together.

So we look at our tool, of like what do we have to land stuff on Mars? And one of the options is airbags. We've done it before. Airbags are pretty cool, they bounce around a lot. You could never put a human inside of an airbag because they would get squashed. But, the problem with airbags is, the airbags that you see here, which landed the smaller rover, it's like 400 pounds, the entire rover, were about the size of this room.

So you can imagine the size of airbags it would take to land a two-ton rover on Mars. And then they'd have to be actually made out of materials that don't even exist today, so it'd be some kind of exotic material that we have to develop and may or may not work.

So what about rockets? And this is the way we've like, you know, you see all the rocket ships landing in movies and everything else, all rockets on the bottom, it's a cool idea. It works when they are pretty light still, but the problem is, these rockets have to be pretty strong to actually softly land you on Mars. And so they would be so powerful, they could actually dig holes into the ground and then you would just end up inside of a hole and not be able to drive out of it. So, not the best design.

But what if I could take the rockets and move them up? And that's kind of what we came up with. It's actually a rocket-powered jet pack, we call it the Sky Crane. And basically what it does is, this big rocket sits on top of our rover and when we're ready to land, the rocket is going to hover in place and we slowly lower the rover to the ground. And then we touch down, we're actually on the wheels, we're ready to drive day one.

But in addition to that, you know, the scientists were like well, we actually want to go somewhere interesting. The last two missions, they were really cool, but they basically landed in what was like landing in the plains or desert, not very exciting. We all know, like, from the exciting places on Earth, or like places like the Grand Canyon and things like that, and those are, for the scientists, the most interesting because you see that whole layer, you see years and years of history all in one place. The same thing is true for where we landed. We wanted to land somewhere that was unique, that had this crater wall where things had been dug up for us, where mountains were pushing things up. But, the problem is, if you landed with the older systems, you could have landed on the side of that mountain and just tumbled off, could have been the side of a cliff, could have been on the crater wall, or a large boulder.

So we needed the kind of technology to help us land in a very small area, and that was this little guided entry from Apollo. We took it from the 1960s. We flew over just like the manned vehicle because they had to actually pick up men, you can't just land all over the place, and then we landed, like, spot-on in the middle. And in fact, it was so spot-on that when we did it, we were able to basically, like a quarterback, you know, launching towards Mars, it was like a quarterback, though, the quarterback was in Seattle and throwing at a receiver that was moving here in Giants Stadium. That's how accurate we were, it's kind of awesome.

But, you only get one shot, and so we actually have to design a system that we can build, and test, and operate, and so it's not just about can we get it to Mars, but then, if it's only one chance, how do you make sure that one chance goes so well? And so there's all these processes we have to make sure that things are built properly. And then we go out to the desert. And we drive around, and we test it. We fly things in F-18s to make sure the radar systems work in high speeds.

And then, most importantly, we actually test the team to make sure they know how to operate it. We don't want to accidentally miss it because we send the wrong command, and now it's just going to be rebooting forever. So, that guy, Fred, there, he did a lot of that. And then we launched it on this rocket to Mars. And, you know, the entire thing, we landed 2,000 pounds on Mars, but the entire thing actually weighed about 10,000 pounds when we lifted off from Earth, all the fuel and the solar rays and everything else that we needed. And again, we were so accurate that we landed in this, like, little pin-point on Mars. In the meantime, though, we had to design a landing system that worked. And I told you about the actual physics of it, but here's the catch: Mars is about fourteen minutes away from Earth in lightspeed, which means that if I try to control it with a joy stick, I would be always controlling to fourteen minutes in advance, so it wouldn't work. So we had to give it all the smarts and all the knowledge that it needed in order to make it happen.

And so what we did was, we built in all these smarts and algorithms and everything and we told it here's what you're going to have to do, and it goes from basically the speed, five times the speed of a speeding bullet to about a baby's crawl all within about seven minutes, which is called the seven minutes of terror because I was about to throw up.

But today we are on the surface of Mars, and this was one of the panoramas that we took a couple days after we landed, and I think it's amazing to me because look at this and you can see the Grand Canyon, you can see your own planet, you can imagine walking on the surface. And so, what we're going to do and what we're going to continue to do is to understand why, what makes Mars so special, and what makes Earth even more special that we are all here together today. And so we'll see where Curiosity takes us, not just our rover, but our sense of exploration. Thank you.
-