17/05/2014 Click

Hello, darling. Slight problem.

I think this week's shoot is going to go on

a bit longer than I thought.

I think I've got on the wrong flight. Yeah.

No.

I won't be needing dinner tonight, no.

Get ready for blast-off. This week, Click is heading to space.

On the way up we'll take in some spectacular views of Earth,

swing by the moon on a spacecraft you could make at home

and then head half a billion kilometres into the unknown

to hook up with a comet that could reveal the secrets of life on Earth.

Welcome to Click. I'm Spencer Kelly and welcome to ESTEC,

the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands.

This is where the European Space Agency develops its spacecraft.

That is a full-size replica of the Columbus module, which is

currently orbiting Earth as part of the International Space Station,

and this is my happy face.

Some kids want to drive trains.

I've always wanted to go into space,

and here at ESTEC, researchers from 35 countries,

and with similar dreams,

work together to explore other worlds

and progress further out into the void.

The place is a real mix of replica spacecraft and working prototypes.

This is the closest I will ever get

to being on board the International Space Station

and I have to say, it's awesome enough for me.

Of course, the major difference

if you're on board the real thing is, first of all, no way is up

and secondly, if there's a problem, there's no way down.

The smallest problems on Earth can be fatal in space.

That's why absolutely everything that goes up is tested to

breaking point first.

In these vacuum chambers, the smallest components

and new materials are being blasted with the extreme heat,

cold and solar radiation of an orbit around Mercury.

Entire spacecraft undergo the same kinds of tests in similar,

if much larger, environments

because even on unmanned missions equipment failure can mean

mission failure and a tonne of money lost in the vacuum.

Launching a satellite into orbit is a big, expensive deal,

but not all satellites are anywhere near that size. Look at this.

This is a CubeSat.

Each one is a regulation 10 x 10 x 10cm,

and these are packed into the gaps in a launcher.

Because they're made of cheaper, off-the-shelf components,

it means that smaller institutions like universities can build

their own and then explore space.

CubeSats have been used for all sorts of projects so far,

and Richard Taylor has been looking at some of the stunning

results one of them has produced.

This modest office in downtown San Francisco is light years

away from your traditional satellite manufacturing lab.

But it's from here that the 40-strong team of engineers is

working on building the biggest

constellation of satellites the world has ever seen.

Earlier this year, the first few camera-equipped CubeSats were

ejected out of the International Space Station and into orbit.

When we saw the satellites come out of the International Space Station,

it blew my mind because to see the things we have actually

built here in this lab in orbit,

with the Earth behind them, was fantastic.

These CubeSats are now sending back their first images

as they pass over Earth five miles a second.

Nowadays, we put more capability into these little satellites,

the few kilograms,

than you can possibly imagine.

They're much more capable than a satellite was five years ago

that was ten tonnes.

The pictures are detailed enough to pick out individual trees

which will give an unparalleled insight into activity

on the planet's surface.

Instead of seeing a hole in the Amazon a few months after

trees have been taken down there, we can see some loggers

and provide warning that that's happening.

Right now, the team is working on augmenting the few of these

so-called doves currently in low-Earth orbit.

They aim to have 131 by the end of next year,

giving an almost blanket snapshot of Earth.

But this revolution in satellite imaging is not confined to

simply still pictures.

This is the first high-definition commercial video of planet Earth.

It was taken from a satellite launched in December

by another Silicon Valley start-up, Skybox,

already rumoured to be in acquisition talks with Google.

Able to pick out moving cars, it means an even more concentrated

and deeper understanding of activity on the planet.

If you show somebody a still image of an area,

they can gain some understanding of what's happening,

but if you show someone even just a few-second clip of video about

an area, we intuitively understand a lot about what's happening.

Skybox satellites are monitored closely from mission control,

essential to protect its investment.

Though costing under 20 million each,

they're far less than the multi-billion-dollar creations

which characterise older satellite technology.

And this is where the satellites are physically assembled.

This one here, a carbon copy of the satellite currently in orbit around Earth.

Now, I'm not actually allowed inside this clean room because

being inside would be a violation of international arms regulations.

And it highlights the potential power that satellites can wield,

offering powerful analysis

not just for humanitarian

or benign corporate purposes,

but for potentially more hostile actions too, radically transforming

access to information for anyone with deep enough pockets to pay.

Do you worry about the information being used in negative ways?

What allows me to sleep at night is,

although any radical change in information will be

exploited for nefarious purposes, the number of applications

that are a benefit to humanity far outweigh those sort of misuses.

Space satellite experts acknowledge this is a watershed moment

but with it comes a warning.

We simply don't know where it will lead.

Richard Taylor. Those CubeSats are a bit different from this thing.

This is an unmanned Russian spy satellite which spent two weeks

in 1988 photographing the Earth from cameras

mounted in the windows at the front, before it re-entered

the atmosphere and plummeted back down to the ground.

In those days, they had to get the films out of the camera

and develop them before they could see the pictures.

Anyway, more from space in a second after

we hear what's been happening back down here on terra firma.

An EU court has ordered Google to amend its search results

at the request of ordinary people in a key test

of the so-called Right To Be Forgotten.

The European Court of Justice said links to irrelevant or outdated

data should be erased on request.

It comes after a Spanish man complained that a search

of his name brought up an old auction notice of his repossessed home.

Critics, including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, warned that

removing the links, even though the actual data remains,

amounts to wide, sweeping censorship.

Electronics giant Samsung has proposed to compensate factory

workers in South Korea who developed cancer while working for it.

Following a long-running dispute,

Samsung apologised for not acting earlier but didn't admit to a direct

correlation between working at its chip plant and developing leukaemia.

Google's headset, Glass, has gone on general sale in the United States

for a cool 1,500.

Glass has been in private beta-testing for several years

and then last month went on sale for just one day.

Now Google says it will sell the headsets to

anyone in the United States. It's expected that the glasses will

get an update and high-profile global launch towards the end of this year.

This isn't your average rocket launch.

While this SpaceX rocket may be loaded with 2,500 tonnes of

precious cargo bound for the International Space Station, there

are a few kilograms in there that could mean the start of something much bigger.

The culmination of over three years of work hidden away

in the spare cargo space is a device that means the personal,

open-source space age has begun.

So our idea is mass-exploration of space by private individuals.

So people helping scientists do research,

but also doing stuff for their own interests.

The first thing we want to see is out, actually, of interest.

It sounds ridiculous to say you could have your own

spacecraft in space for a few hundred pounds,

and is that actually possible? Can that be done?

Michael co-created KickSat,

a crowd-funded project to send over 100 tiny satellites called

sprites into space not for millions, but for less than £200 a pop.

The big idea is to make satellites so tiny that you can send hundreds

or even thousands up at once. Launching stuff into space

can cost up to 100,000 a kilogram, but if you split the bill

a few thousand ways, that suddenly becomes a lot more affordable.

These Lilliputian computers are packed into CubeSats,

those 10 x 10 x 10cm cubes that we saw earlier,

which then hitch a ride to Zero-G in the leftover space on major missions

by the likes of NASA and SpaceX.

Once the rocket has completed its main mission, the CubeSats

are jettisoned and they then deploy the sprites.

But the real value of these tiny satellites is that, like similar

small computers such as the Raspberry Pi, each one is customisable.

Luke is a sixth form student from York.

He heard about KickSat while studying astronomy at school

and since then he's been programming their software. Space software.

I had no idea that I was going to do this,

and then one week I just decided to send an e-mail,

not really expecting much to happen from it.

Then, four months later,

I'm here waiting for the launch of a rocket which has something

which I helped create on it.

If you ask these guys,

KickSat means the start of the age of personal space exploration.

But Michael's next project, Pocket Spacecraft, has much bigger ambitions.

We're really interested in interplanetary exploration.

We want to go out and visit the solar system.

So at Pocket Spacecraft, we're working on a mission to the moon

which hopefully will be launched next year.

What Pocket Spacecraft's mission to the moon aims to do is to

launch at least 2,000 of our thin-film spacecraft.

Michael and his team of collaborators and volunteers around the world

are working on an even thinner miniature satellite called a Scout,

made from a material only five microns thick.

That's 1/200th of a millimetre.

It's all about using clever design to keep costs and weight down.

The tiny wire around the edge simultaneously keeps the Scout

rigid and acts as the aerial for communications,

and much of the electronics on the Scout are printed using conductive ink.

The only actual components are the solar cells and the central chip.

With funding from the European Space Agency, Pocket Spacecraft is

also working on a mission control app and website, so you'll be able

to monitor the data from your spacecraft once it's up there.

Pocket Spacecraft already has over 2,000 backers,

pledging funds to the 500,000 mission.

Even though space is so vast, the best way to explore it may be

with the tiniest of tools.

What an amazing opportunity to do what these guys did, albeit remotely.

Even if you can't get to the moon, even if you can't get into space,

there's still plenty of exploration

to be done inside the Earth's atmosphere.

We sent the BBC weather presenter Peter Gibbs to Malawi to get

a view of the Earth even he hasn't seen before.

Mvuu National Park.

The scenery's stunning, but myself and my friends Andrew

and Jerry are hoping to get some far higher sights.

The culmination of months of hard work is our chance to launch

a weather balloon into the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

When I saw somebody doing this thing of sending up

cameras into the stratosphere, I thought I had to get involved.

It's actually part of the atmosphere that's very hard to get

any imagery of any other way,

because it's too high for aircraft but it's too low for spacecraft.

Unless you've got something very specialised, these are the

only way you're going to get into that region of the atmosphere.

And I'm not the only one.

All sorts of people are taking cheap, intelligent electronics

and putting it together to send fairly sophisticated

packages to the edge of space and back.

It's great fun but it also has the potential to provide some very

useful science.

Our balloon's carrying a couple of HD action cameras,

temperature sensors, plus radio and satellite trackers

so we know exactly where it is.

All this is wrapped inside a home-made polystyrene box to

deal with temperatures that'll go down to -80 degrees.

So a standard 600g balloon.

Latex rubber. When you fill it with something like hydrogen,

it expands as it rises. It gets so big it actually bursts.

With all that last-minute preparations complete, it's almost

time for lift-off and the nerves are taking over.

-ALL:

-Three, two, one. Go.

Success.

Data on position, speed and altitude are being fed back from

the balloon directly to our radio receiver but also via satellite,

as long as we have Wi-Fi or mobile signal.

I'm desperate to get internet access so I can see whether we

are getting messages, because we really are in the middle of nowhere.

This balloon also has a little something special in it.

We are putting in a Geiger counter.

The professor from Reading University Meteorological Department

has asked us to fly this. That's the real science of this whole thing.

The sun sends a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind

into our atmosphere and it's thought this may influence how clouds form.

There's very little data available from the tropics

so we're helping to fill gaps in the science.

-Andrew, the tracker's working.

-God, I'm so happy.

We're at altitude 15,630 metres.

-16km. So, let's go. Let's go and find it.

-Not long to burst.

-No.

At 22km altitude, the air is so thin it's only

a matter of time before the balloon will swell and burst.

MUFFLED BANG

While it's in the air, we can track its location

but once it hits the ground that's not guaranteed.

The chase is on to retrieve it.

-BEEPING

-Yay!

17.4km.

It's at 1km high.

BEEPING

About half a mile that way.

There it is.

That is totally amazing.

It's always a relief when you find the package.

A great sense of achievement.

It's taken over a year to put this project together, but it's worked.

That's one project that's come to an end.

We want to move to a balloon that goes up and just floats at a set altitude.

With that you can get onto the jet stream.

You can ride the world's winds. Potentially, we could go

right around the world and that's a bit of a dream of ours.

Peter Gibbs.

Now, when you think of space exploration, it's easy to

focus on the spectacular rocket launches.

But they're only the briefest part of a mission that can span

years of planning beforehand and sometimes years of waiting afterwards

while whatever you've launched gets itself into position.

And this year, 2014 marks the end of a ten-year wait before

EASA's most daring mission yet can reach its final stage.

The Rosetta Project lifted off in 2004.

Its mission - to investigate the origins of life on Earth.

Scientists are hoping to find out whether the water frozen into comets

contains complex-enough molecules to have created life here on our world.

To do that, Rosetta is chasing down a comet called 67PCG,

and that's the easy bit.

The audacious plan is to orbit the 4km-wide chunk of ice

and then land a probe on its surface...

..all while half a billion kilometres from Earth,

a distance at which any communication will take half an hour to reach it.

As mission manager Fred Jansen explained,

that makes it too far away to be controlled manually.

Rosetta will have to fly itself.

It is working autonomously, isn't it?

Yes, because everything is preloaded on board in terms of commands.

We load a few days of commands and it's executed by itself

and after two days we load another set of commands.

The universe is the most distant firmware upgrade, I guess.

It's true. I mean, this makes life easier, in a sense,

that you have these ten years, although you have to make sure that

when you launch that all the elements, hardware-wise, are there

to allow you to do what you need to do.

One thing that will be decided by humans is the landing site.

Rosetta will take images of the whole comet, and over about a month,

the candidate sites will be gradually narrowed down

from five to two to one.

The reason for that stepping process is, we continuously come

closer to the comet and our images, the resolution will increase.

So at the time, we have to pick five.

We don't have the resolution to pick the final one.

-Who gets the final say on the final landing point? Is it you?

-Yes.

-How do you feel about that?

-Well, it's my job. It's the way it is.

It's going to be an exciting time and a very nerve-racking one too,

as you've heard.

Right, time to break from the Netherlands for a few minutes

and head back to London or wherever it is that

she keeps that mysterious underground bunker of hers.

Here comes Kate Russell with Webscape.

The rest of the team might have got to visit the

European Space Agency this week

but I've been enjoying a trip aboard the International Space Station.

Virtually speaking, of course.

Thanks to the ISS HD Earth-viewing experiment,

we can all see what it's like to orbit Earth,

which is rather spectacular.

A picture speaks 1,000 words - so the saying goes -

which is perhaps why the craze for infographics has

taken off on the web.

You don't need to be a designer to make your own as there

are a swathe of great tools hoping to cash in on this trend.

We looked at infogr.am a few months ago

and it is definitely a hot contender.

The company is also about to launch a video infographic maker,

which sounds pretty neat.

You can sign up for launch notification on their website.

If you follow me on social media, you might have heard me

talk about how annoying infographics are.

But don't get me wrong, done well,

like the example here from Socialnomics, they are a brilliant

addition to a web page and have been proven to drive more traffic.

There have been lots of psychological studies too,

determining that we learn and retain more from images than words.

But all too often I see them used as a cheap

and easy way to add eye candy to a website,

bringing no clarity to the subject, and in some cases just confusing it.

And that is no help to anyone.

Easel.ly is another neat tool that, as the name would suggest, is

really easy to pick up and start using.

Just choose a theme, then drop in your data to make your graphic.

If you're looking for work, visualize.me

will make an infographic out of your resume,

using data gleamed from your LinkedIn profile.

This is one-click simple

and you'll have an eye-catching introduction to share.

The key thing to consider when designing an infographic is

what kind of visualisation will make the data clearer.

I think this is where lots of makers get it wrong.

IBM has a neat experimental tool that lets you try out

lots of different styles, to see which one works.

It's called Many Eyes.

Head along to the research page

and try on a few styles with just a click.

Kate Russell's Webscape.

And just before we go, I thought I'd show you ESA's Mars Yard.

This is where they've been testing designs for the

ExoMars rover which is due to head to the Red Planet in 2018.

For example, they've been experimenting with different types

and numbers of wheels, and even the best way to control the thing

from back here on Earth.

Well, that is it. It's been a fascinating trip. Not just me, is it?

No, I didn't think so.

Hope you've enjoyed our brief voyage through the future of space travel,

and if you'd like more from us then visit our website.

And get in touch.

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Thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next time.