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tv   Click  BBC News  July 18, 2019 3:30am-4:01am BST

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the world health organization has declared the outbreak of ebola in the democratic republic of the congo a public health emergency of international concern. it's only the fifth time the designation has been used. the who has stopped short of ordering the closure of international borders. the us house of representatives has voted to sideline a motion to impeach president trump. leading democrats had made it clear they did not support it. at a rally in north carolina, mr trump claimed the attempt at impeachment was a disgrace and a witch—hunt. the infamous mexican drugs baron joaquin ‘el chapo‘ guzman has been jailed for life by a court in new york city. he was convicted of running a smuggling operation moving huge shipments of illegal drugs into the united states. he will also have to hand over billions of dollars. it's about 3:30am. you're up—to—date
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with the headlines. now it's time for click. this is click 1001: a space odyssey. in honour of the 50th anniversary of the apollo 11 moon landing, we've got massive rockets, space station robot arms and we bounce sound off the moon. why? because it's there. we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. so said presidentjohn
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f kennedy in 1962. neil armstrong, edwin "buzz" aldrin, and michael collins — on july the 16th, 1969, three astronauts — neil armstrong, edwin "buzz" aldrin, and michael collins — made ready to fulfil that promise as they prepared for apollo 11. the first crewed mission to land on the moon. three men to represent the culmination of a dream. here at nasa in houston, texas, mission control monitored every aspect of the moon shot. these days it's used to monitor the international space station, the actual control room used for the apollo 11 mission is undergoing a bit of a refurb in honour of the 50th anniversary. marcos flores is one of the current mission controllers for the iss. there was no guarantee that apollo 11 was going to be successful. i mean, it was really cutting edge, dangerous stuff, wasn't it? yeah, definitely. there was a lot of risk involved in the missions themselves and how
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dangerous they were, but also a lot of unknowns in terms of being able to successfully land on the moon. the 36—storey tall saturn v moves out of its huge assembly building and heads for the launchpad. to build the launch vehicle, nasa contracted boeing, north american aviation, the douglas aircraft company and ibm to help build a rocket that would end up being the biggest and most powerful ever built. call that a rocket? this is a rocket. inside here is the saturn v rocket. stage 1 gets you off the launchpad and up to a speed of 6,000mph. 2.5 minutes later, all of this fuel is burnt.
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you don't want to carry an empty casing into space so you ditch it to save on weight. then five rocket engines in stage 2 ignite and send you into the upper atmosphere. at 115 miles up, all that fuel is gone too. you ditch the second stage. and this rocket on stage 3 fires you around the earth and into orbit. then it powers down and, a little while later, it restarts. this time it sends you to the moon. so, here's the thing. that bit there... that's where the people sit. all the rest of it is fuel. laughter
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while the rocket was incredibly powerful, so, at the time, was the computing power required for the apollo programme. even though in popular culture, the computers of the day, which in this case were giant mainframes, are often compared unfavourably to contemporary technology. the 360 75 that we used was a 1 mip machine — one million instructions per second — and it had 1 meg of real memory, or1 million bytes of real memory, and 4 million bytes of auxiliary memory. the numbers you hearfor the iphone that i own are anywhere from 10,000 times as fast as that to even a million to maybe even... i think i've seen one that's 100 million times as fast. homer programmes the actual code
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used for the descent and ascent of the lunar landing module. and onjuly the 20th, 1969 it kicked in, as neil armstrong piloted the lunar lander onto the moon's surface. armstrong: we're going that line. right, we're go. we've had shut down. the eagle has landed. at 0239 hours, armstrong exited the landing module and uttered the immortal phrase. that's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. now, as any good tourist knows, photos are a must. armstrong and aldrin also left a plaque and a flag. and took a phone call from president richard nixon.
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nixon: hello, neil and buzz. i'm talking to you by telephone from the oval room at the white house, and this certainly has to be the most historic phone call ever made. and what did we learn from the apollo missions that we still use today? we are leveraging a lot of the experience that we gained with the vehicles themselves in terms of the rocket design, the capsule design, and what it takes for us to safely, you know, send that body up to space and bring it back down. so let's head to the front of the international space station. so let's head to the front of the international space station. that's not something you get to say every day. so we are now in front of the international space station. allison mcintyre is chief of nasa's space vehicle mock—up facility and she is giving us a tour of her realm. we're in amongst past spacecraft, prototypes of future ships, and a replica of the international space station that's used
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to train future astronauts. we have a canadian, david saint—jacques, three americans and then two russian crewmembers. every american who's flown to space since 1980 has has trained in this facility. so this morning we had an emergency scenario, so you can actually you pump smoke into a module and they run their procedures through it. and nasa is responsible for all the integrated training. so while the crewmembers may go to russia to get their russian systems training, to europe to get training on the columbus european space agency's module, here we do integrated training, the emergency scenarios, and then these routine operations, which is sort of a day in the life. even though you've got part of the space shuttle in here and you've got a clone of the international space station and spacecraft of the future here, too, there are echoes
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of apollo everywhere. this is orion, which will take astronauts close to the moon in 2022. and its design is very familiar. this is significantly larger than apollo, but a similar shape. and that's because, while technology changes, physics don't change. so the physics of this entering the atmosphere is the same as it was in apollo. everything inside is higher tech and we're incorporating things like exercise equipment, but it has to fit into a very small volume, a toilet has to fit into a very small volume. did apollo not have a toilet? apollo did not have a toilet. they deserve a medaljust for that. yes, yes. to what extent did the apollo missions shape our understanding of how to do the moon? quite a lot. when we first started launching space missions, not just apollo, but mercury and gemini, we didn't know if humans could eat in space, for example.
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just fundamental questions, what will happen to the body when you're free—floating in zero gravity? and there is one extremely important change that we'll see in future missions to the moon. tell me about the people that will be the next people to stand on the moon. so, our administrator has said that the next people to land on the moon will be the next man and the first woman will be on that first mission and put boots on the moon. and so that's very exciting for all of us. honestly, right now, ourastronaut corps is about 40% female. so they have some great astronauts to choose from. they will get the best of the best and it doesn't take much for that to be a female.
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hello and welcome to the week in tech. sticking with space, it was the week that virgin galactic announced its plans to go public in a merger with a new york listed investment firm. the move means a big cash boost for the human space flight company. and the european space agency showed off a 3—d printing skin and bones technique designed for low gravity. the idea being that an injured astronaut could one day rustle up a bone or two while on a voyage to mars. the agency also unveiled a bouncing bot destined for the stars. the aptly named spacebot could navigate the moon, mars, or asteroids by hopping about rough terrain. back down on earth, it was also the week british airways was slapped with a £183 million fine after half a million of its customers‘ details were compromised in a security breach last year. the penalty from the uk watchdog information commissioner's offices
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is the first to be made under new gdpr rules. instagram launched a new anti—bullying ai, nudging users "are you sure you want to post this?" and twitter banned words that dehumanise others on the basis of religion. and just in time for summer, this robo farmer could soon be picking the leaves for your salad. the veggie bot from the university of cambridge uses machine learning to identify and carefully pick ripe lettuces. you might be waiting a while for your dinner, though. being an astronaut on the international space station requires years of training. today, i'm being taught to do one tiny bit of it by amy efting. so this is the cupola? cupola? cupola, yes.
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and this is a replica of what's on board the iss? that's correct. 0k. so what are we going to do? so we are going to be flying the space station robotic arm today, to go and grab a commercial cargo vehicle called dragon, which is developed by spacex. and i'm going to be doing that? you're going to be doing it. 0k. see, contrary to what i thought, a supply craft don't dock automatically. it's all down to the iss crew to extend this 17.5—metre robot and pull them in. there is a docking version of dragon that is coming, but this one, and a lot of the other cargo vehicles right now, they fly up to the station, they get close enough that the arm can reach it, and then the arm is used to go in and grab it and manually attach it. so it's a little bit more controlled process. ok, i'm ready. i'm ready to grab the dragon. 0k. can i go? you're ready, go for it.
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here we go. there are two controllers for the arm to move it up, down, left, right, forward, back and to roll it to the correct orientation. phew. and then when you're within pinching distance, and everything is lined up, there is a trigger to start an automated grabbing sequence. first tip, don't look out the window. beautiful as it is, you can't reallyjudge that much from the actual scene. instead, i need to keep my eyes on the view from the camera mounted on the robot's wrist. already i'm really nervous, is this what astronauts go through every... every time there is a... dock on the iss? yeah. at least you know that you're in a sim so we can always reset if you mess up. but they don't have that luxury on orbit, you know. what can go wrong? so you could bump the dragon, kind of put it away from us and put a weight on it, you could fail to capture it, i guess that would probably be the worst thing.
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if you were way off you could hit the dragon in some spot. computer: go for approach. one metre. once the markings on the dragon are lined up with the guidelines on the screen, it is time to grab it. ok, now? pull the trigger now. ok, now roll the hands off, now ijust going to rot ok, now roll the hands off, now ijust going to watch it do that sequence... oh, i grabbed the dragon! you got it! yes! this is just one of so many vital skills the iss astronauts need. my test scores are in, and well, call it beginner's luck if you like, but — have to say, i wasn't too shabby. you are a little on the fast side, but you got it done, so that was great, and then what you really want to see is the other axes, your y and z should be really small relative
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to the others, so they were, so that was excellent, you did a really good job. a recent poll suggests that one in six britons believe the moon landing was staged. in the age of the internet, conspiracy theories run rampant, and claiming the moon landings were a hoax is at the head of the pack. companies like nvidia have tried to use technology to prove the moon landings did happen. they built a 3d render using a powerful graphics processing unit, which realistically represents how light behaves on the moon, debunking popular conspiracy theory about the lighting in the moon landing images being wrong. well, we decided to do some digging on our own and examine the evidence that proves, yes, human beings have landed on the moon. radio: 35 seconds and counting, we are still go with apollo 11. jonathan swift, the famous novelist, satirist — "reasoning will never make a man
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correct an ill opinion by which reasoning he never acquired." if someone has an unreasonable opinion about something, based on nonsense, it doesn't matter how much reasoning you do with them, you're never going to reason them out of it, because reason didn't get them there to begin with. there are the famous ones, that you know, the fact that they didn't actually go to the moon, actually launched the rocket and orbited the earth, for a few times, pretended they went to the moon, and came home. oh, radiation, that's the other one. there is no way they could have gone through the deadly van allen belt that surrounds planet earth. there's the anomalies with the photographs, all of which are ridiculous. stanley kubrick directed it in a film set in area 51, somewhere in the desert. the technology to fake the moon landings did not exist in 1969. the technology did exist to get to the moon in 1969, just. radio: three feet down, 2.5,
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picking up some dust. big shadow, it's different but it's very pretty out here. the lunar surface cameras were based on our 500 el systems. we had many modifications. the viewfinders, and the mirror system, all of this was removed to save weight, which then locked into a chest bracket on the astronauts suit. and it was literally moving their body, tilting their body, to frame up the images. you can't see any stars because the contrast range of the surface images is too high. if it's a bright day and you stand outside a house and open the door to the house and look in, you can't see any of the detail because it's too bright where you are. so this is as close as a modern equivalent as we would have. it has a 100 megapixel sensor. we look to the surface today would not be able to capture stars and lunar surface detail in the same image. radio: 0h gee, that's great. is the lighting here decent?
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one of the issues of doing it in a studio is the dust on the moon. and when there is no atmosphere, dust behaves differently to when there atmosphere. so now you would have to have a studio that you evacuated and had a vacuum in. and now all the space suits have to really work and the studio has to be unbelievably fortified to withstand the pressure of the atmospheric pressure outside the studio pushing in on the vacuum. you have to really try really hard, and have great faith in the fact that you could fake it. why don't they have faith in the scientists and the engineers who actually, and the astronauts, and the 20,000 companies that made it happen? there's no faith that lot. but stanley kubrick and his film set, there's lots of faith. the lunar mission comes as a climax of the space race that the united states and soviet union have been competing in since the mid— 19505 for technological and scientific supremacy.
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the soviets possessed advanced tracking capabilities of their own, and have used them to track icbm missiles as well as spaceflight. so their inability to detect a conspiracy of this nature seems unlikely. moreover, they would have had every incentive to expose this in order to score a major propaganda victory. apollo engineers were very well aware of the van allen belt. a, it wasn't in them for very long, and b, it charted a course actually where the van allen belt it is quite weak anyway. you would think that having moon rocks on the earth would be living proof that the conspiracy theories can be debunked. those rocks are still being studied today. some of them are sealed up, never yet been touched, because the scientist, even back in the '605 in the 705, knew that technology would get better with time and they would be able to make new scientific discoveries. we have, left by the apollo astronauts on the moon, retro reflectors, these
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are passive experiments, where, a bit like cats‘ eyes, we can fire a laser at them. bounce lasers from the earth to the moon to understand the changing behaviours of the moon and its orbit. it is sadly not enough for the deniers, they will always see conspiracy. while moon landing conspiracies have been around for decades, they certainly have a new lease on life in the age of the internet. things like facebook groups, let all these disparate ideas where people come together and find each other in a way we have never had before. so the romans had conspiracy theories, theyjust didn't have the internet. now we still have conspiracy theories, because we are humans and our brains are fallible, and we have the internet, it's a perfect storm. the moon is so far away, nearly 250,000 miles in fact. but somehow, lj rich has found a way to get closer. whistles. if you can't make it to the moon, don't worry —
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you can always leave a message. whistles. i am in pula, croatia, at an mtf labs event. music tech fest runs it. it's a community of sound lovers who thrive on pushing the boundaries of music using technology. and this evening's entertainment is out of this world — an interactive work of art called "sister moon". right now, people are queueing up behind me talk to the moon. yeah. it's the perfect time of year for this planetary cosmic art project, and proving very popular. now i can hear you. good evening! good evening and wilkommen dwingeloo! via a live internet connection into the cabin, my words are carried on radio waves from the dwingeloo telescope, two hours outside of amsterdam in the netherlands. i'm gonna speak into the microphone, and you two are going to do something with my voice,
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relate it to the moon. yeah, we are going to put it on a radio wave and we're going send it to the moon. 1.25 seconds later, my words reach the moon's surface. my words are bounced back down to earth and i hear them after the return journey — 2.5 seconds in total. hello, moon people. radio: hello moon people. what's the weather like up there? radio: what's the weather like up there? what kind of music do you like? radio: what kind of music do you like? in 1956, this was among the world's first moving radio astronomy antennas. after decommissioning it was lovingly restored, and is now used for science education and art project like this one. i have to say, i have done strange things in my time, but i am not sure quite what they are. next day, i caught up with the artist, martine—nicole rojina,
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to find out how she and the moon got on speaking terms. i always wanted to become an astronaut, and i am in love with celestial bodies and in love with the universe, and i am in love with the fact that we are made of stardust, and i have been watching universe documentaries since i was a kid. and i believe that it has a wonderful tra nsformative effect, to leave your system, literally, go to another sphere, another celestial body, bounce back and what happens is, inside your mind, you are going to see the world from the outside, the earth from the outside, and you are going to realise that actually we are on a spaceship ourselves. a lovely way to democratise celestial communication, and for earthlings like me, it might be the closest i'll ever get to the moon. and that's it from the flight control1 here at nasa — for now. because next week, we will be back to look even further into space.
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i can't wait. don't forget, we are on social media — youtube, facebook, instagram and twitter, at @bbcclick. thanks very much for watching, and we'll see you soon. hello there. parts of eastern england had temperatures very close to 27 degrees during wednesday. i don't think we'll see temperatures as high as that again, not for a little while anyway, because things have been changing from the west. this stripe of cloud brought some outbreaks of rain eastwards during wednesday. behind me here, a lump of cloud that will bring rain on friday. in between, a somewhat clearer zone of weather, so through the day ahead we will see sunshine and showers as well.
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and it will be quite breezy. still some rain to clear away from the south—east corner for the first part of the morning. that rain is mostly light and patchy. behind that we see some spells of sunshine but also some showers. these most plentiful across the northern half of the uk. could be one or two showers across parts of suffolk and essex down into kent as we go through the afternoon, but for the majority of england and wales, it's dry with spells of sunshine. cooler than it has been an breezy as well. perhaps a couple of showers clipping into north—west england and north wales. but for northern ireland and scotland we will see a scattering of showers, some of them some thundery, blowing through quickly on that brisk west or south—westerly breeze. that could make for a somewhat tricky opening day at the open. some showers moving through, some of which could be heavy, possibly thundery, and it will be quite breezy. now, as we go through thursday night into the early hours of friday, the showers continue for a time in the north. further south, with clear skies, it's going to be a cooler, fresher night than we have been used
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to across parts of eastern england. behind me, though, across the south—west of the uk, cloud gathering by the first part of friday morning with some outbreak of rain ahead of our next weather maker. this frontal system developing and pushing in from the south—west. now, it has been very dry lately across the far south of the uk but even here we're going to get a dollop of rain during friday. this wet weather pushing north—eastwa rd and heading into southern and central portions of scotland. northern scotland perhaps staying driest and brightest of all. with this wet weather, there could be the odd flash of lightning, the odd rumble of thunder, it could also be quite breezy. and temperatures at best between 18 and 21 degrees. rain on friday clears away as we enter saturday and then we're back to a day of sunshine and showers, some pretty hefty downpours at times with an odd flash of lightning and rumble of thunder. signs of things turning a little warmer again down towards the south. a drier day for most of us on sunday and the next week, split fortunes. northern areas seeing some
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wind and rain at times. further south, some dry weather, some warm weather and perhaps even some heat, with temperatures climbing once again.
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this is bbc news. welcome if you're watching here in the uk, on pbs in america or around the globe. i'm mike embley. our top stories: the ebola outbreak in the democratic republic of the congo is declared a public health emergency of international concern. president trump hits out at his democratic opponents and ridicules them after a vote to impeach him is sidelined. the world's most notorious drug lord will spend the rest of his life in prison. the man known as el chapo will also have to hand over billions of dollars. your dream came true? exactly. i am a very proud dad now. the conjoined twins who now live full and separate lives. we meet the surgeons who made it all possible. the latest in our exclusive series.

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