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tv   Politics Public Policy Today  CSPAN  July 16, 2015 1:00pm-3:01pm EDT

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u.s. and iran. i think the next issue is, okay, you're going to get this out of the way and up and running, what are the other issues you have to deal with? you have the regional role. i would say they're more than a little bad actor. they're quite a bad actor. then the domestic issues in iran that play a role and there's a real expectation from many within iran many sort of you know, average citizens that now rou rouhani can look at commitment es he made, juvenile death sentence would be sort of a first one. and i think there's an expectation that now the u.s. administration has got then out of the way, that they will begin to come full circle with support from the u.n. to start looking at domestic issues within iran. it seems to me incumbent that the role they play regionally is also going to have to be part of that conversation. but it's going to be a lot more of a difficult conversation, because i could also see them flexing their muscle to say, no we're going to hold on to this because we just lost that. >> you mentioned the domestic politics in iran.
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my last question i want to ask you guys and you're going up to the hill later this afternoon to testify on a different topic, how do you see the lack of action in terms of congress on authorization of the use of force? just the stasis and stalemate, what's your evaluation all of you, what does that mean in where the u.s. in these campaigns and campaigns coming up on the 15th your anniversary of the 9/11 next year. how do you sort of see the politics here at home. >> this may be over cynical but i think it's a reflection of the fact that the body politic to include people on the hill ultimately do not regard isis as that serious a problem. definitely a problem. something worth effort but not something where they're getting phone calls every day saying the united states needs to do something about this. i think we have seen over the last ten years for understandable reasons, a real sharp decline in public
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enthusiasm for american intervention and that's reflected on the fact that people on the hill would rather play politics with an authorization than actually get through. it's forced the administration to, therefore, sort of improvise their way towards action once they decided that's where they wanted to go. i may be overly cynical. one can rarely be too cynical here. >> agree or disagree? >> the only thing i'd say, to me it's more an indication or illustration the dysfunction of congress than anything else. there are some members of congress who are very focused on making this happen. and have really tried. but it keeps getting used as a political tool to stop or start conversations. so, you don't get anywhere. >> great. we'll open it up if anyone has any questions, to the panel at this time. back here. yeah. please tell us who you are and if you have an affiliation. >> john richards, d3 symptoms.
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general allen opened his remarks talking about the pivotal role in dash's rise and hopefully in their fall later on. could you talk about what's needed and what's happening in that realm? >> this is one of the toughest sort of parts of this crack, right? the state department, you know has been engaged in an effort for quite some time to try to like, get a campaign up and running to sort of go toe to toe idealogically to help discredit -- in regions where it has some traction. it's difficult for the united states to play a leadership role because we don't have credibility with that audience. this needs to be led by the region. the good news here is what we're beginning to see with this joint center with the uae, and putting that into place where uae and others in the region can take a larger leadership role in
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the counter campaign to me -- it's not going to solve this any time soon but it's showing progress in the right direction. >> take two at once? >> yeah, two at once and then we'll wrap. >> thank you very much. >> thank you very much. alexander kravitz from inside the iraq. one question for ms. margon. general allen talked about hundreds of displaced families returning to -- i think he said -- tikrit, you spoke about thousands of homes being burnt in tikrit. and i don't know -- what i'd like to ask is do you have more specific figures on the repopulation of tikrit? because i think that that's a barometer for the success. you take it over, but are the local populations actually coming back?
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and for mr. lang general allen talked about, you know giving a chance to functioning federalism. and other policies of the iraqi government. normally you would think that we would go in as was the case you know, with the surge. there's military. it's a multidimensional effort. you think we would go in with programs, for example, the usdia supporting the government. but essentially it's closing down in iraq. i wondered if you could commented on that because that hasn't come up in discussion. >> thank you very much. >> we'll take one more question down front here. >> thank you. i'm the deputy chief of the embassy and i have two questions. first question is, with regard to possible kick starting of the stalemate political political
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negotiations inside syria, what role do you see of iran and russia taking such an effort? and my second question has to do with lebanon. neighbor of sip press and very precarious. what do you see the dangers of lebanon. >> thank you. maybe sarah and then steve, if you don't mind. >> on the numbers we don't have exact numbers of who has gone back. how quickly and how soon local populations felt comfortable going back. many felt afraid to go back because they weren't sure who was running -- who the authorities were and how they would be treated when they got home. but also because they weren't sure what they would be going home to. slowly we have seen populations come back. i don't have the exact numbers. our forthcoming report, i can't give you a daylight. hopefully within the next month
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or so, we'll have some of this information. and it's one of the things we continue to watch closely to see not just who goes back, but what they're going back to and how they begin to regain their lively hoods and engage with the authorities and also how they work with the central government in baghdad to rebuild a lot of what has been destroyed. that's something very important to watch. >> a great question on usaid. right now the money for assistance that's primarily beingbe ing channeled in two fronts. two, this u.n. trust fund. spent a long time working at the u.n. and i understand the concept and what it's going to do. the question is whether or not that can be responsive enough to support the kind of political initiatives, politically at the community level that are going to be necessary to bring people back on side. there are offices like the office of transition initiatives at usaid that can do this kind of work.
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it's not clear to me they have been -- in any significant way yet. i don't think that's a question of lack of initiative on their part but whether or not they have really been brought in fully to this effort. i think that you identify a core problem, so far with the nature of the campaign and it's not just the u.s. government here, but others who can do more to stabilize the funds through the coalition but get it on the ground and get it working. there aren't many shops and many offices that can actually operate in these environments. we need to go to those who can and have them show proof of life. >> yes, sir. >> very quickly, it's important to note u.s. is leader on humanitarian lead. we provide so much money and no other government comes close. if nothing else, we have that type of engagement. there's also a huge block on getting aid to go across border and access a lot of the populations in need. the u.n. has tried repeatedly to
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move forward on this to get cross-border aid going. there has been, you know, a lot of dysfunction and organization at the u.n. there's been a real lack of will and inability to work closely with some of the local groups who provide this aid, and then of course, you have -- in iraq you have certain areas that are just really hard to get to. and in syria you have the potential for the syrian government to besiege communities to nobody can get access to them unless there's some local negotiation which is very tedious and difficult to do. >> do you have a response on the lebanon question? because i know you were there late last year. and then we can turn to steve on talk about iran and russia on syria. >> no country in the region is bearing the nature of the refugee load but lob none is. jordan comes close, but the strains on lebanese society i mean, it's no secret to any of
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us how severe they've become. and sarah's right. the u.s. government has done a lot in terms of providing humanitarian assistance to go in and try to absorb some of these tensions. what's need, from what we can tell s more support directly to the lebanese government to help maintain the sort of -- the services of the infrastructure, social, economic that are also taking a beating from the refugee populations that are living outside of camps. that's most of the refugees. and again, i don't know if that should be coming from the united states and maybe a bit more assistance coming from the region. there's a lot of wealthy countries in the region, in the gulf, who have a real stake in regional stability. and it's incumbent on them to do a little more to help their neighbors pull through this. >> great. steve? >> the american priority and it really should have been our priority from the very beginning of the syrian civil war would be to end the war to get the
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fighting to stop, full stop. and i think the united states has just errored by insisting at the beginning assad foreclose a deal in which he might have retained a role. we also errored by excluding iran from that process. you'll recall when the geneva process was going on. so, to partly predict what i said earlier, it's possible that the deal announced today will open the door to a diplomatic process. if it was iran given a role to play. that might help facilitate trying to reach a deal. i would not be optimistic about that. i think ending the syrian war is going to be extremely difficult regardless of it. we might see a slight difference in the dynamics and composition going forward. just with respect to lebanon as harden said, has had tremendous impact on lebanon. it's hard to believe lebanon won't be continually buffeted by the turmoil happening in the region. i don't think this provides much of an opportunity for isis to
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expand there. if you look at lebanon's composition composition, it would have no resonance with the christian population, no resonance with the shia population in lebanon so it's not likely to pick off lebanon or even play a substantial role there going forward. >> great. thank you, steve. thanks, sarah and hardin and please join me in thanking our panelists for a great discussion. >> thank you. federal reserve chair janet yellen is on capitol hill today for the second day in a row to deliver the fed's semiannual monetary report to congress. today she goes before the senate banking committee as 2:30 p.m. eastern. you can see it live here on c-span3. this weekend on c-span's road to the white house, two major political events from iowa and we're the only place you can watch or listen to these events in their entirety.
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friday night at 8 qulok p.m. eastern we'll be live in cedar rapids for the iowa democratic party fame of dinner. it will be the first time all five democratic presidential candidates share the stage. saturday at 11:00 a.m. eastern we'll be live in ames where nine leading republican presidential candidates scheduled to speak. on c-span, c-span radio and c-span.org. c-span's road to the white house 2016, we take you there. >> early next month, a forum with republican presidential candidates, c-span is partnering with new hampshire union leader for the newspaper's voters' first forum on monday august 3rd. all 17 sxurnt likely gop candidates have been invited to participate. the forum is live from st. ann's college in manchester on c-span, c-span radio and c-span.org. coming up monday august 3rd at 7:00 p.m. eastern time. the ceo of ibm, virginia
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rometty returned to her alma mater, northwestern university to give the commencement address. her speech to the class of 2015 runs 15 minutes. >> i tell you based on that hooding and hollering -- far for me to finish up here. so let me not only thank meg, president shapiro faculty and trustees that are here. it's a great honor to get this degree, but it is a greater honor to sit and look at all of you, where i once sat, and be up here to deliver your commencement speech. so, i must say to all of you as i remember sitting there, i mean this is your day, and having been one of you i know how hard you worked to get
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there. so, my own congratulations. one more applause for you from me. now, this is what happens with age. i'm going to put my glasses on and i'm going to follow some advice. it was at franklin roosevelt gave his son on speeches. he said, you be brief you be sincere and then you be seated. so, let me share what are three stories from my life and it is really the three lessons learned that i humbly submit to you, that as you leave, somewhere along the line you'll find them to be of use. they come from three people close to me. one you'll recognize my mother. the other, my husband. and then for now, let's just say, quote, a significant other. so this first story comes from my childhood. like many, i grew up in a middle
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class family not far from here in a suburb of chicago. i am the oldest. i have two sisters. i have a brother. and like many of our time time for school, we went to sears for our school clothes. i can remember one just one family vacation, and it was a campout. don't feel sorry for us. it was wonderful and a very happy life. then one day all that changed. i was a teenager and my father left my mother. in fact, he left us all. now, my mother who had never worked a day in our life outside our home, she found herself with four children but soon no money, no home, no food. so, while she never ever complained, she never spoke of what happened. i must say, my brothers and sisters, we watched and we learned. and she had to find a way to keep a roof over our head but she was so proud.
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she did what she had to do which is what we all do. she found a way to go back to school in the day to get a degree and then she worked at night. so we could quickly get by on our own. my mother was so determined to never let anyone define her as a failure, a single mother or anything worse a victim. so, through her actions she taught us all. never let anyone define you. and that is the first lesson i want to leave you with. only you define who you are. only you. now, i have to tell you. happy ending. my mom did get that associate degree and retired after 25 years from a hospital near chicago here and my brother and two sisters, they share among themselves five degrees from dartmouth, georgia tech and northwestern, and thank goodness for this doctor rat because i was losing that race on number
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of degrees. so, this is the biggest thing today. i'm back at the top. my second story comes from early in my career. this is about risk-taking. i have worked for a senior executive and he decided to go to a new job. he came into me one day and said, wonderful, are you the candidate to replace me. so, i was called in the office and with great excitement, told i'd be offered this job. well, i can remember my reaction. it wasn't the same great excitement. i looked at him and said it's too early. i'm not ready. just give me a few more years and i'd be ready for this. i need to go home and i need to go sleep on it. well, that evening my husband up there -- well, up in the stands. not too far. my husband of 35 years -- oh, boy. he says i never mention, and
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then i do and i mess it up, you know? he sat and listened patiently to my story, like he always does. and then he looked at me and he said one thing. he said, do you think a man would have answered the question that way? he said i know you, in six months you'll be ready for something else. you know what? he was right. i went in the next day and i took that job. and that takes me to my second lesson to leave you with. growth and comfort never co-exist. i want to you close your eyes f they're not already, and ask yourself, when have you learned the most? i guarantee it's when you felt at risk. so, when you feel anxious, maybe tomorrow when you leave and start a new job, i guarantee that that is a good sign. and this has proven to be a really important realization to me throughout my whole career. i've always looked for challenges and i have found plenty, so that now takes me to my last story.
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this is that one that is about my, quote, significant other. it's not about the past. it's about the present and a future. a future i believe walking into. so, it's early 2011. ibm research has built a computing system. something that the world has never seen. it's called -- i'm in a tv studio. i'm in a tv studio and i'm watching watson play "jeopardy!" against the two most successful human champions there have ever been. now, i knew watson. it stood on decades of our research, but now, now i'm watching it on television, doing something else. watson talks converses with alex trebek, watson understands puns metaphors, clues, buzzes, wagers, wins. it is an amazing moment. and one more time on the way home, i call my husband. and i say and i remember it to this day i think i just saw
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history. well, i will come back to that story of watson in a second. but let me first just share a really brief perspective on the world i think you're walking into. i believe years from now, historians will look back and they will look at this as a dawn of a new era. it will be one made possible by two things. first, it's the development of a new era of computing. something we call cognitive. now, surprising as it may seem to all of you, no matter what your age, the world has only known two air ras of computing. now, i am not going to make you all engineers. do not worry about this. right about now you're thinking that. the first was machines, it was a tabulating era. they were machines that counted. things that did the national census. this did the social security system. the second era, programmable systems. it's everything you know to this day. if this, do that. everything. the smartest systems your smartphone, your pc, no matter what it is.
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now, they do exactly what we tell them to do. now, you and we are entering a third era. watson is an example of this. it's the first cognitive system. these are systems that you don't program them. they learn. they analyze more data than you'll ever remember or handle and they understand natural language, like i speak today. they'll understand ideas and context and actually the language of a profession. now, more importantly, like humans, i say these sms reason. they deal with what i call the gray area. when you go to make a decision, you think of and you form a hypothesis hypothesis, you test it against everything in your mind but you do it quickly, an answer. some people call this artificial intelligence. now, a.i., but the reality is this technology will enhance our thinking. so instead of artificial
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intelligence i think it will augment our intelligence. and it will not be a world of man versus machine. it will be a world of man plus machine. in fact, i predict in our near future, every important decision mankind makes will be informed by a cognitive system like watson n watson. and our lives and the world will be better off for it. while this is really hard to appreciate now i think this dawn means you sit at a very unique point in history. but note, there's one more thing the age you're facing is made possible by one other. a new natural resource. you recognize it around you. it is just the sheer amount of data. and one day you'll look back and what steam was to the 18th century, electricity to the 19th hydrocarbons to the 20th we are going to say that data was to the 21st century.
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its sheer volume is staggering. in fact, every day for all the nontechnicals, 500 million dvds worth of data is created. for all of you, 80% of the world's data was created during your junior and senior years at that amount. this is why i think of it as a natural resource and it will be the fa nom that of our time. and one more thing -- the volume. whether it's your images, the photos you've taken, kren source, peep blogging texting, which is what some of you are doing maybe right now, i must tell you, normal systems won't understand it. which now brings me back to my story. and it brings me back to watson. if you haven't guessed, he is my, quote, significant other. my husband was the only one that didn't want me to use significant other in this speech, i want you to know. now, since that day in "jeopardy!" 2011, watson's come a long way. finance, retail, insurance.
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but most of all, hard at work in health care. and, in fact we've had the honor of helping renowned institutions like memorial sloan kerting, the cancer anderson genome center, the list goes on. doctors will strain with that same exponential increase. by 2020 medical information it will double every 72 days. but with the era we're about to enter, collaborators like watson, the ability to digest all that information then form high positive hypotheses about your diagnosis, your treatment, doctors will have a chance. now it brings me forward to september 2012. it's another personal moment i will always remember. i was going to the theater with my husband in new york city. and i hear someone yell out my name. i turn around and it's the ceo of a health care company i've worked with. she looks at me and she says, we
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will change the face of health care. and i fast forward to today. i tell many of my ibmers look, ibm has been privileged to paf some of the greatest roles in history. whether it was to do that census, to help land the man on the moon, but make no mistake watson and health care will be our modern day moon shot. and we will do our part to change the face of health care. these are the moments we work for. which leads me to lesson three, the ending of that story. my final lesson to you. work on something that matters. have a purpose. now, northwestern has prepared you richly for this but there's so much potential ahead. choose your work with a purpose. and you are all high achievers. you wanted to get here to this day, you got here. and you have many more goals in the years ahead. but do not confuse a goal with purpose.
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you may find that purpose in business or public service academia. you choose. but i hope in my hope for you is that you leave today with a purpose to change the world in some way. so, congratulations again to the class of 2015 and to everyone who made this day possible for you. and to paraphrase my earlier quote from franklin roosevelt i hope i was brief i know i was sincere, and i now i'll be seated. congratulations. [ cheers and applause ] [ applause ]
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>> thank you for those beautiful inspirery words. federal reserve chair janet yellen is on capitol hill today, for the second day in row, delivering the fed's semiannual monetary policy report. today she be before the senate banking committee, about one hour from now. you can see it live here on c-span3. when congress is in session, c-span3 brings you more of the best access to congress. with live coverage of hearings news conferences and key public affairs events. and every weekend, it's american history tv. traveling to historic sites, discussion with authors and
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historians and eyewitness accounts of events that define the nation. c-span3, coverage of congress and american history tv. nasa yesterday released photographs from pluto taken by the space agency's new horizons mission as it went past the dwarf planet 3 billion miles from earth. nasa released the images at a news briefing at its facility in laurel, maryland. this is an hour. >> good afternoon. welcome to the johns hopkins applied physics laboratory in lower maryland. my name is dwayne brown with nasa nasa's office of communication. to set the stage for today's press conference, please welcome to the podium associate administrator science mission director in washington, d.c. dr. john grunsfeld.
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[ applause ] >> welcome, everyone. it's a full auditorium here at the johns hopkins university applied physics lab. i was a little bit worried no one would show up. actually, i wasn't worried at all. anybody get any sleep last night? i'm not hearing too many affirmations of a good night's sleep. i'm not going to ask the team, because i know they were probably pretty excited about this morning's data pass, as was i. i'd like to take on you a short tour to frame the discussion. and i'm not going to say a whole lot. the first image that i'd like to bring up was taken just about two hours ago by the solar dynamics observatory. i hope you recognize that object. and i think you know where we're going. mercury. from the messenger mission, venus. from magellan.
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if anybody doesn't recognize the next planet, i'd like you to leave the auditorium. security will escort you to area 51. [ laughter and applause ] >> the red planet mars. i had to get a hubble image in there somewhere. [ applause ] i realize i missed siriz which the spacecraft is orbiting right now. jupiter with the moons and shadows. cassini at saturn. what a wonderful mission. this is just a striking image. uranus. somebody made a wise crack that i put it sideways. neptune. and for a grand finale, i turn it over to allen stearn, the principal investigator of the
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pluto new horizons mission. [ applause ] >> before we turn it over to allen, i've got a few words to say. yesterday, america's space program took another historic leap for humankind. today, the new horizons team is bringing what was previously a blurred point of light into focus. we'll have presentations from our panel. we'll open it up for questions with media here. on social media. and we'll go to the phone lines. you can join the conversation on
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social immediate, yeah twitter facebook at #pollute toelutoflyby. if you have questions, send those into #asknasa. of course, the images and information you will hear today, for more days and weeks and months, will be online at www.nasa.gov/newhorizons. you've heard from dr. john grunsfeld. of course, allen stearn needs no introduction. so i will go to hal weaver, who is project scientist from the johns hopkins applied physics laboratory. followed by will grundy, new horizons co-investigator, lowell observatory in flagstaff, arizona. he will be followed by kathy olkin, deputy project scientist from the southwest research institute. and john spencer, another new horizons co-investigator from the southwest research institute. and with that, allen, it's all
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yours. >> thank you. well, i had a pretty good day yesterday. how about you? [ cheers and applause ] new horizons is now more than a million miles on the other side of pluto. that's how fast we're moving. having made closest approach yesterday morning. the spacecraft is in good health. it communicated with the earth again for a period of -- a number of hours this morning, beginning about 5:50. we got data down from five of the scientific instruments already. we're going to report on some of those results. but frankly, we're just skimming the top of it. there's a lot in just the things we're going to talk to you about. we have big news. from the first resolved image of
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hydra, pluto's outer-most moon to sharing has been active. thank you. go ahead. [ applause ] and there are mountains in the kuper belt. you'll enjoy that. the system is amazing. now, all of our news today relates to the surfaces of pluto and its satellite. we'll be talking more about the surfaces in the press event on friday down at nasa headquarters. but we'll also be bringing in atmospheric results at this point. i do want to report one piece of news but it's more or less operational. that's that the the spectrometer got a great data set from the ground from the uv solar oscillation, which we're already learning things about pluto's atmosphere so stay tuned on friday for that. with that, i'll turn it over to hal weaver, who is our project scientist. hal's going to give you a little
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bit of hydrotherapy. hal? >> thank you very much, allen. well, pluto and sharon are going to steal the day today. i mean this is going to be -- these are awesome images you'll see in a few minutes. but let's not forget that pluto has four small moons as well that we want to collect data on. starting from closest to pluto and going out is styx, nyx, curburo and hydra. this morning we got the first really well-resolved images of hydra, which is shown at the native scale. two miles per pixel. this is about the same number of pixels across hydra. that we had apros pluto in mid-june. so, we're ecstatic about this. prior to the new horizons revealing of hydra here we were completely uncertain about how big hydra was. it could have been anywhere from 20 miles across to almost 100 miles across.
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new horizons has made it easy. just count the number of pixels across. 28 by 19 miles. the elongated object, hydra is not a planet. it's about 30% larger in one dimension than in the other. there's some very interesting things about hydra. you see some variations in the brightness across the surface. if you can go to the next slide. this shows -- and what we did here was actually subsample the image by a factor of four from the native so it's four times subsampled to, you know, take away that pixel ated look. and overlay contours showing the brightness, changes, and we took cuts across to measure the approximate places where you have the longest dimensions, in the green, and the shorter dimension in the yellow. the surface of hydra is surprisingly large.
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you know, it's about 45% reflectivity reflectivity. about 45% of the sunlight gets reflected away. that can only mean that hydra's surface is probably composed primarily of water ice. it's the only way to get it that bright. and that's cool. it's intermediate in brightness between sharon and pluto. the nice thing about what we have -- we have coming up actually, more observationings of high drashgs which will be even higher resolution a factor of two or three better. so, we're look forward to those. but it's great. we've already seen hydra revealed and it looks very interesting. thank you. >> okay. very nice. [ applause ] >> will grundy leads our composition team and is going to report some results that they've
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obtained. >> okay. so, the ralph instrument is the instrument where we're relying mostly for surface compositions and it's composed of two parts. the color camera and infrared imaging speck trom ter called lisa. we don't get any data down today from either of those instruments, and so what i'm showing you is data that came down in the fail-safe data set. that came down overnight between the 12th and the 13th. so this is a little earlier. this is a base map that's just showing you the geometry. you can see that the heart region is just rotating on. so this was a little while ago. could i have the next time step? this is an overlay of lisa data. so what i did is each of those large blocky pixels, about 150 kilometers across, is an infrared spectrum. and the value of an infrared spectrum is it tells you what that pixel is made out of. we're going to get much higher
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resolution data than that, but this is what's in the can now in the fail-safe data set. these colors are just three fran red wave lengths. we get 256 wave lengths. so we could make an enormous variety of color maps to pull out specific compositional information. this particular one is focusing on methane. i put an absorption band at about 1.65 microns into the blue color channel. a continuum region between two methane bands into the green channel. and a much stronger methane band into the red channel. all i'm doing here is showing, again, at lower resolution than the color images yesterday, the diversity of terrains. what i'm going to do now is to pick out a couple of specific regions, although you can see there's many different regions here. so if i could get the next time stamp, please. these two regions of interest, one's a 3 by 3 pixel block, and another one is a squiggly thing that's in one of the dark
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regions. so, i'm concentrating on the polar cap and i'm concentrating on one of the dark regions. if we go to the last time step i have, these are the two spectra we have. you can see they're both quite different from each other. they both have methane. but the overall shape of the spectrum is very different. and we can really be spending years modeling these and thinking about what they tell us. there's a lot of information. we only have a small subset of the wave lengths at this point, because we just don't have the bandwidth to get more down. but this is providing a lot of information about the different regions and how they work. >> thank you, will. [ applause ] yesterday we showed you a beautiful image of pluto that was made just before the closest approach and sent to the ground as part of those fail-safe data
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sets. today we're going to show an image of a similar resolution on the big satellite sharon and deputy project scientist kathy olkin is going to discuss those results. >> so, originally i thought sharon might be an ancient terrain covered in craters. many people on the team thought that might have been the case. and so sharon just blew our socks off when we had the new image today. so if we can pull it up so you can take a look at it. [ applause ] so we were just thrilled. all morning the team has been abuzz. look at this! look at that! oh, my god, that's amazing! so, i'll walk you guys through some of the things we've seen in the image and tell you what we're thinking about. and i'm going to start in the north and kind of work my way down.
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so you've seen the darkish area that is at the north pole. and informally, we've been referring to that as moreador. so, that's awesome. that's awesome. so morador is the darkest area near the pole. you can see, this is a natural color image. and so the red around it, the red coloring that we've seen, extends beyond just the deepest, darkest part of that polar region morador. we think that the dark coloring could perhaps be a thin veneer. you can see locations at the north pole where a crater has perhaps dug into that region, and excavated underneath it. so you can see those brighter regions that may be craters. so that's part of the reason why i say we think it could be a thin veneer.
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so, let's see. and also, you can see that that area is kind of a polygon shape. so there's -- and then the red color is more diffuse around it. moving down across, a little bit lower, going from the northeast to the southwest, is a series of troughs and cliffs. and that's just striking to me. it's amazing to see this image. they extend about 600 miles across the planet. so this is a huge area. and it could be that it's due to internal processing. and we will be looking at that in more detail. just below that region, the line that you see cutting across from the northeast to the southwest, more east-west than north-south, is a region where it's relatively smooth. there's less craters. so perhaps it's been geologically active or recently
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resurfacing that area. so that's very exciting to see as well. two features that i want to go back up a little bit higher on the -- near the top at about the 2:00 position. you see a canyon. you can see a long, linear feature. and you can actually at the very top see kind of a notch, where you're looking through to the space on the other side. and that canyon is really quite deep. it's about 4 to 6 miles deep. i find that fascinating. so it's a small world with deep canyons, troughs, cliffs, dark regions that are still slightly mysterious to us. there's another canyon on the other side, at maybe the 10:00 or 11:00 position, and that one is about three miles deep. there is so much interesting science in this one image alone. and we have higher resolution
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image that we'll get that won't cover all of charon, but it will cut across the northern part and it will get some of the dark area and then some of the middle area. and it's going to be about a factor of five better in resolution. so as we've been saying pluto did not disappoint. i can add that charon did not disappoint either. thank you. [ applause ] >> yesterday when we showed that beautiful image of pluto, we noted that we would have imagery with ten times the resolution on the ground by today. in fact, john spencer is going to tell us about the first -- just the first frame of that mosaic that's already down on the ground. which is already giving us a big surprise. john?
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>> thank you, allen. so, yeah, we've got a whole bunch of high-resolution observations now safely on board the spacecraft. this is just a taste, just one small part of one of those observations. and if i can have the first slide. don't get excited yet. this is what we saw yesterday. and this is spectacular image. but we now are focusing in on small details on this amazing world. before i go to that, i should say that we now have an informal name for the heart. the heart is a good name, but we want to honor the discovery of pluto and we are now calling this tumbo reggio. [ applause ]
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and so if i can have the slide back. we're now going to focus on a small region just near the bottom of this image which is near the day/night line where we have shading that throws the relief into sharp focus. and so we're going to be focusing on an area just a little bit to the left of the bottom of the frame. and if we can now run the movie. okay. we're zooming in on this area. here's the image. here it comes. [ applause ]
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yeah, that was our reaction, too. so this is -- this is a small part of the mosaic that covers the whole of tumbo reggio and the whole region around it, covering quite a variety of terrains. this is one of the things that really caught our attention. from the scale you can tell it's about 150 miles across. we've seen features as small as half a mile here. you can see the apl campus on this kind of image. the most stunning thing about -- well, there's many stunning things, but the most striking gee logically is we have not yet found a single impact cate other this image. this means this is a very young surface because pluto is being bombarded by other objects in the kuiper belt and craters
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happen. so, we just eyeballing it, we think it has to be probably less than 100 million years old, which is a small fraction of the 4.5 of the solar system. it might be active right now. with no craters you can't put a lolington how active it might be. these mountains here we're seeing are quite spectacular. these are up to 11,000 feet high. now we know the surface of pluto is covered in a lot of nitrogen ice, methane ice, you can't make mountains of that stuff. it's just too soft. doesn't have the strength to make mountains. so we are seeing the bedrock, or bed ice of pluto. we're seeing the icy crust. water ice is strong enough at pluto temperatures to hold up big mountains and that's what we think we're seeing here. the nitrogen and methane are
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just a coating. and we're seeing that here. now, what's particularly exciting to me about this is this is the first time we've seen icy world that isn't orbiting other planets. we see strange geological features on many of these moons. and we often usually attribute this to tidal heating defamation of this giant planet and interactions with other moons. that can't happen on pluto. there's no giant body that can be deforming pluto on an ongoing regular basis to heat the interior. charon is just too small to do that. so this is telling us you do not need tidal heating to power ongoing recent geological activity on icy worlds. that's a really important discovery we just made this morning.
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[ applause ] >> so i know this is just the first of the many amazing lessons we're going to get from pluto. there will be more on friday. we'll have more of this mosaic to show you on friday, which is going to show equally amazing things i'm sure. so stay tuned. >> right. and i'm going to follow up on this same image so we can leave it on the screen for you to enjoy. another couple of implications that we've reached as a result of this discovery just to expand on what john said which is very very important we now have an isolated small planet that's showing activity after 4.5 billion years. we thought this might be the case after voyager 2 discovered
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triton orbiting neptune also virtually has no impact craters. but we couldn't be sure for just the reason john said. because there's always an out that tidal energy could have powered activity tidal energy due to breaking into orbit around neptune could have been powering the activity on triton. so that may have been the case for triton but it can't be the case for pluto. and now we've settled the fact that these very small planets can be very active after a long time. and i think it's going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing boards to try to understand how exactly you do that. there's another implication. something things work out in science. a couple months ago in may, kelsey singer, and myself submitted a paper to the astrophysical journal making some predictions. to follow up on that, as john
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said the steep topography means the bedrock that makes those mountains must be made of water ice. even before the composition team tells us that they found places where the nitrogen veneer has been eroded or scraped off and we see water ice on pluto for the first time, we can be sure the water there in great abundance. models predicted that but it's nice to see it driven home. the other thing that means as john said, is the volatiles are the veneer on the surface. now, the sticky point in this is that pluto's atmosphere is being lost to space at rate of a few times to the 27th molecule per second tons per second. and over the age of the solar system, that corresponds to the loss of an equivalent layer of
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between 300 meters of nitrogen and three kilometers of nitrogen. if we only see a veneer, what's going on. what kelsey and i predicted in that paper is if he saw steep topography in pluto, then there must be interm activity that's dredging nitrogen up through geysers or some other process that's active into the present on this planet. now, we haven't found geysers and volcanos, but this is very strong evidence that will send us looking as we get more and more data across the surface of the hemisphere to look for exactly these phenomena. interesting enough that paper submitted in may was accepted today. how's that?
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[ applause ] >> i should point out the editor of the journal is only learning of the results we're telling you because she's watching it. all right. that's summarizes the primary things we wanted to tell you about the data that landed just this morning. each of the images and data sets have a lot more to tell us about pluto's history and small planets and how they are formed and evolve. i want to make one more comment about tumbo reggio. we could see the heart very far from pluto. when we were still 70 million miles out and only barely resolving the planet little better than hubble can do from three billion miles away you can see that shining like a beacon. because it's the most prominent feature on the planet that's we want to call it tom balreggio.
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one more hand for tom, please. [ applause ] >> ladies and gentlemen, before we take questions from the media here and on the phone lines on social media, i want to take a moment to say it has been a remarkable week. it has been magical and as we transition from the johns hopkins applied physics laboratory to here nasa press conferences, the world has been watching. dr. john grumsfeld five time astronaut hubble repairman and head of almost 100 missions with new horizons being one of them. he's a household name and household -- nationally and international.
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and the new horizons team and the johns hopkins, household names. show the world how much you appreciate that and what they have done this week with as nice and as loud as you can round of applause for their accomplishments. [ cheers and applause ]
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[ cheers and applause ] >> okay. now let's get to the questions. if you can raise your hand high, we have a full house. i want to make sure i can get as many as i can and see you clearly. let's start with here and wait for the mic and give you name and affiliation, please. >> irene with reuters. there's a lot to digest. so i guess one of the first questions i have is for cathy. does the realization that charon is active have any implications for the origin theories that it was splat off of pluto in another body? thanks. >> i don't think that -- i don't know quite yet.
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so what i'd say off the top of my head is that i was thinking we would see lots of craters and that would tell us something about how long ago charon acreded. that would tell us something about that giant impact. the fact we don't see the craters makes that difficult to do. but i don't know that we are going to have to put our thinking caps on and understand how this all fits together and what it means. so this image just came down today, and we're making a lot of it right now. but that's my kind of -- yeah. yeah. >> briefly, we don't know how many craters there are. some of the details are obscured we'll get better images as kathy said, tomorrow. speculating now would be very embarrassing because we'd be proved wrong very quickly.
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but this looks like it's something much more recent. so, again, we have a story that we have some way of keeping heat going and activity going in objects for quite a long time. >> rick. those mountains look really big. do you have any theories of how they originated? i mean, are they volcanos? or tectonic? >> we have no idea at this point. we mentioned that they're about 11,000 feet high. so they look to be tens of miles wide. so these are pretty substantial mountains. they stand up against the rocky mountains or other significant mountain ranges here on the earth. but we want to see a lot more
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about the distribution and we are getting so much data soon, that right now we're still scratching our heads. >> kelly. john to follow irene's question, the large gash across charon, is that in any way related to a tidal despinning, or this, plus the smooth areas telling you there's something churning inside? can you put a date on that yet? >> we have to have better images to do that. we know there aren't very many craters. in terms of the timing of all this we'll need better images we'll get very soon. >> chip reed with cbs news. i'd like to ask you a question with no scientific words in it. i interviewed you by the fly by and the only prediction you would make is we would see something wonderful. have your expectations been met? what is the most wonderful thing you've seen so far?
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>> i'll give you a technical answer. you think? i think the whole system is amazing and my prediction written 20 years ago on a little slip of paper held in a manila envelope since 1993 was proven right by new horizons. the pluto system is something wonderful. >> bill? >> yeah, question for cathy. bill with cbs. the structure of that dark northern region on this photo is so much more different areas seem to be within that area. does this inform anything about the pluto atmosphere transport thoughts we've been talking about. how this was deposited on the surface? thanks. >> yeah. there's definitely subregions inside that region. and you can see it in this picture. if you zoom in, you can see it in more detail as well. there are a number of different
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theories about what that dark region might be. i don't know that the distribution of the darker parts within it actually in detail inform that. to really inform that, i'm looking forward to getting the specterscopic information back from the ralph instrument. >> another aspect, a lot of us are looking forward to the stereo data because we can do a topographic reconstruction. if that's a basin, it will be pretty obvious, for example. if it's a raised plateau that would mean something else. >> nick stocken magazine. with regards to both the features on pluto and charon, what beside tidal energy could be powering active geology? >> we think we -- well, okay.
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let me think. as you can tell, i don't want to say -- we have a couple of options. one would be that raid -- we know there is radioactive material inside pluto and charon as there are inside any body. radioactive heat is powering a lot of the energy in the earth. this may be telling us even very small bodies if they're icy radioactive heat is enough to produce the activity. but there may be way as body can store heat from its formation for a long period of time. maybe you can have an ocean which is very gradually freezing. as it does gradually freeze, that releases heat into the crust and maybe that can power activity. whether this is the heat generation is ongoing or still living off this reserve of stored energy from its formation, that's for a lot more
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work to decide. >> one thing we can say for sure is that tidal energy is not at work here. we know that because pluto and charon are in tidal equilibrium. charon is spinning at the same rate as pluto spins. there's no exchange of tidal energy anymore. that process took place pretty quickly after the giant impact. very small fraction of the age of the solar system. that must have all been a long time ago. it's not contributing to the energy budget currently. >> we'll take three questions. one question as only so we can get through media. we'll go to the phone lines take a couple questions from social media and come back here. >> cliff mcmurray, i'm one of the people in the room that can remember when the first pictures came back from mariner 4.
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at the time you could hear the balloons popping, the atmosphere is thinner that i thought it was. tonight i hear excitement, but i don't hear balloons popping. it seems pluto is kind of the world that we thought it would be. would you like to comment on that? is that because we're that much further along in our knowledge today? >> i would say i'm completely surprised and i would disagree with the assertion. in my case, i certainly didn't expect charon to show nearly the degree of different terrains and variety or the surface that it does show. that's a complete surprise. that's a balloon popping. in addition, i think just having one image of about 1% of the surface of pluto as a planet and finding mountain ranges like the rockies is a balloon popping. my colleagues may disagree with me, why don't we ask them.
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>> who would suppose that there were ice mountains? and you know, we can -- it's just blowing my mind. we have had such a hard time finding any evidence for water ice on the surface of pluto. we haven't yet. we are going to have some data that's going to really reveal that for sure. but that's the only way to get these huge mountains. that's a big surprise, i think. >> i can speak to that as well. that image yesterday that showed an amazing diversity of compositional units on the surface and the photographs that show an amazing diversity of morphology geomorphology on the surface points to a great diversity of processes that are shaping the surface. i think all of us thought it was probably a few processes that were at work. now it looks like this is a much more complicated system where
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the interplay of chemistry and thermodynamics is leading to a huge pallet of processes that are working in different ways on different parts of the surface. that to me is amazing. this will keep us busy for a long time to come. >> can i just -- i would never have believed that the first close up picture we get of pluto didn't have a single impact crater on it. astonishing. [ applause ] >> emily. i'm wondering if will could read the spectra for us. while you're getting that on the screen, if it's time for us to consider that maybe the charon forming impact could have happened more recently and that could explain the recent looking geology? >> one more time past this one. right. so these spectra are both methane ice spectra, really, all
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of those dips that you see are methane ice. the other features are much more subtle and they're going to require modeling to pull them out. but just to draw your eyes to the right hand side of it, you see how the blue colored one goes down to almost zero. and the red one doesn't go down to zero. that tells me that there's something else present in the red terrain that scattered light where methane absorbed quite strongly. there's an example of the sort of thing you can do. corner me later and we can chat as long as you like about this stuff. i don't want to put people to sleep. there's a huge amount of information in this data. >> let's go to the phone line. i believe we have a question on the phone line. do we have a question? >> caller: can you hear me? >> i can hear you now.
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>> caller: the question i have actually i hoped to ask last night. i am looking at the spectral image, a question for allen, what's specificity are you going to be able to get from this information from ralph and alice as you go on? and how will you be able to map it up against the terrain? you talked about a thin veneer of this stuff. some of the stuff is looking like waste i saw when i was teaching chemistry. where you be able to map this? and down to the point of more than just methane but very specific organic chemicals. >> i had a hard time. that was not loud enough. >> could you speak a little later and repeat? we apologize. repeat the question one last time. >> caller: how much specificity will you have -- the spectrometry -- mapped against these features.
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>> okay. i think the question is about how well we'll be able to determine the composition of the surface and spot other organic on the surface. we'll have very high resolution compared to what will is showing you here, about -- not quite 100 times but spatially we'll have roughly the five to ten kilometer range. every pixel, we can look at things ten times smaller. 1% smaller by area. which means we don't average over large blocks of terrain but can instead really see the details, interfaced between units. any craters that we find there are windows into the interior. i'll let will speak to the range of organics we could find on the surface, that's his area. >> there are a lot of different chemicals that have diagnostic features in this wave length range. that's why we picked this
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wavelength range. but there are also substances that have no visible absorptions, argon is a good example. we just can't detect it because it doesn't have any vibrations in our wave length. the alice instrument will be able to see it if it's on the atmosphere but on the surface we're blind to it. it's a mixed bag. we'll be able to learn a lot more than what we know about it today. >> can i add to that? >> maybe we can give a examples of what we could expect to find -- >> sure, the things like carbon chain with hydrogen stuck to it, we could distinguish between methane, propane, ethane and so on. there's a wide range of organic compounds that could likely be
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produced in that surface keli mcgregor stray. >> i was going to add there's other ices also that have spectral features in this region. there's water ice nitrogen ice, this is a very diagnostic region. not only that you can see slopes across the spectrum. so even some things that don't have sharp features, you can identify the possibilities that they're there by the slopes in the infrared spectra. >> okay. let's see what's going on in the social media world. i know it is abuzz. we'll turn it over to emily. >> i'm from nasa headquarters. we have a lot of questions on social. the first one is from david. what, if anything, can we learn about our own planet from this information new horizons has provided? >> well, we expect that the data that will return teaches us a lot about the formation of the
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earth/moon system. we're going to get atmospheric data sets and it will let us study the escape of pluto's atmosphere. the alice instrument should give us powerful constraint on that escape rate. pluto's atmosphere is escaping through a process with a big fancy name called hydrodynamic escape that you just don't find on any of the planets in the solar system except pluto. now, the interesting thing about that is that the same process did operate in the early atmospheres of a number of planets, including the earth. the earth is believed to have lost its poisonous hydrogen helium envelope due to hydrodynamic escape. so we've never been able to study this on a planetary scale yet by going to pluto and determining exactly how fast the atmosphere is escaping and knowing the input conditions, the solar flux at the time that we made the fly-by for example,
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and the heliosphere radiation environment in the plasma. will give us a good handle for the first time on numerical models used to understand the early earth and loss of our atmosphere. and the water from early mars. we're looking forward to learning things for uminpluto system that will translate into a better understanding of other planets in the solar system. >> i'm going to ask the mic handers to help me. some folks have been raising their hands for a long time. mic handlers, give them the mic cue them up and give me. let's go back to social media. two more questions and we'll come back here. >> this is from herald he's asking how large of a percentage of pluto will be viewed and will there be any blind spots? >> i'm happy to take that. so we're going to cover the entire illuminated part of
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pluto. all the parts that rotate into view. it takes 6.4 days for pluto to rotate. we'll have some at higher resolutions than others. but there is just like on earth, when you have the winter pole and it's dark there, the sun doesn't rise, there's something similar on pluto. that winter pole of pluto, we're going to make a special observation to try and observe that. and we're going to use the light that goes from the sun and reflects of pluto's large moon, charon and then reflects to pluto. we will use charon shine to look at the winter pole of pluto. we'll be seeing all of it but at different resolutions. >> just not getting your hopes up too much on the charon shine. this is a difficult observation. charon shine is feeble and we'll do the best to pull detail out of those images.
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we're looking with the sun in our eyes. we'll have fun pulling that out but we'll certainly do our best. >> this question is from will. how do you think pluto has been able to maintain its own geo activity for so long? >> that was a great question. >> right. the -- certainly if you have rocks and pluto pretty much has to have silicate rocks in its interior to make its density come out right. silicate rocks come with uranium and various radiogenic elements. that give off heat as they decay. the naive expectation, or naive now in hindsight, was a world this size just wouldn't get enough heat to drive this kind of activity. and now we see that it can. or like john said, there's a lot
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of heat in a internal ocean. as the internal ocean freezes, that liberates the latent heat. and also will tend to make the world expand in size. because ice is larger than liquid, depending on which phase of ice you make. which could also produce tet tonic features. >> i want to thank the world on social media sending your questions with #asknasa. and following the conversation throughout the world on #plutofly-by. so help me out. name and affiliation. >> cory powell with discover magazine. back to the question about diversity of processes you're seeing in this new close-up pluto image, i'm wondering if you could walk us through the image a little bit? i realize you're not at the stage where you can provide answers, but i would like to see the kind of questions you have posed. you have a hilly terrain, there's something that looked like a fault.
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what are the things you're going to be investigating there? >> that's a good one. >> very nice job. >> we have the surface that looks kind of humoky and something that looked like a fault. the terrain to the lower right looks really strange. and it's like piles of stuff with grooves on it. to be technical. and then we have smooth plains filling in some of the low spots that we can say more about on friday i think. this being erosion that's being mountain building, there's been whatever produces lumpy terrain with grooves on it. and it -- it's baffling in a very interesting and wonderful way. and i hope when we get more context we can fill in how this fits in with the rest of the geology. it will start to make some sense.
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we can only hope. >> i'll allen boyle with nbc news. i wanted to return to the ice mountains, is that actually in tom baraggio. do you see any pattern to that might suggest the formation of those mountains? are they being pushed up like ridges? allen mentioned the rockies. is there a similar process going on here? thank you. >> yeah. this is right at the base of the heart, if you like, sort of where it wraps around the edge of the wale. but it's still in the bright terrain at the base of the heart. that's where this is. and, again, in terms of distribution of the mountains we'll have to wait to see when we get the bigger pixel view and things may make more sense. >> claire mcmurray.
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some of the features on that very good resolution square kind of long and thin, my eye sight is not the best. i can't tell whether they're trough like or hump like. maybe you're waiting for the other direction image. could there possibly be similar to lava tubes? >> we -- i don't see anything that leaps out to me as looking like a lava tube. some of that surface looks like the surface of a lava flow. i don't think it would be the surface of a lava flow but maybe an amalgous process happening on a larger scale. there is -- i should comment that yeah, there are a lot of linear parallel features as you
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say, and maybe it's falling at the surface, some strange kind of erosion. yeah we'll have fun figuring it out. i should say, we will get -- i'm not sure if this exactly area is covered at high resolution. it probably is. we have more detail of this areas when all the data comes down. >> leo wainwright with irish television. your findings on internal heating today, are they a game changer for the way we should be thinking about other objects in the edgeworth belt? i'm thinking in particular, if i could take it to the extreme, does it raise the prospects of water worlds out there, and does it increase the excitement about what we might see out there? >> i'll take a crack at it. yeah, i think it could be a game changer. charon is the size of some of
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the smaller worlds in the belt. we don't know how recent the activity is on charon until we can count the craters. it's clearly had things happening geologically recently. we think of it as candy coated lumps of ice. this means they could be equally diverse and equally amazing if we ever get a spacecraft out there to see them close up. >> we're coming up on the top of the hour. i'll try to get as many as we can. we'll have a cluster and will have to shut this down. >> josh. i notice today we haven't talked about the touch stones. moons we've explored that we could think of as analogous to pluto and charon. is that because they don't look similar enough, or how much can we learn from what we already know from exploration to understand what's going on?
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>> we're starting to make those analogues. the first thing is it doesn't look like triton, which is the world that we have thought up to now is the most similar object in the solar system to pluto. triton doesn't have this kind of rugged terrain. it has a lot of strange materials. it doesn't look at all like this. there's something very different about pluto and geology. and charon looks a little bit like some of the moons of uranus i would say. arial where we have invoked tidal heating as an explanation. as i said, now we are seeing that we can get these kind of -- this kind of activity on worlds that do not have tidal heating. we'll have to go back and look at those. >> i can add to that. you know, part of the reason
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you're not hearing us say pluto looks like this world or that world is because pluto has so much diversity, we're seeing so many different features. there's lots of different processes going on here. we'll probably end up pulling it apart and say this part resembled that on this world. but there's nothing like it. >> okay. so we're going to take two quick questions and then, unfortunately, i'm going to have to end. if you have questions we'll see if we can follow those up at a later time. >> thank you. i think this question may be for allen. or whoever you want to delegate to. you've shown us a first look at hydroactivity on charon i'm wondering today in the missions operations room how that feels to see it come down?
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to open it and know yesterday you had one photo and now you have something ten times better and tomorrow it's going to get even better. thank you. >> he'll feel terrible. >> yeah there's a lot of depression in the science team. we don't understand anything. people were thinking of just catching flights. honestly, i said a few days before the approach there were a lot of smiles. you could feel the momentum. we were finally getting to the stage where we could see topography on the surface. now, you know, i think i can characterize the four individual rooms where people are at work as something close to bedlam. because, you know, particularly today, today is probably our biggest challenge. first we're definitely living on less sleep than normal. but the imagery came down beginning just before 6:00 a.m., and this event began, you know,
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nine hours later. we had more data that's coming down today. the next time we talk to you is in 48 hours. if we have many times as long to work with the data and discuss what we think the results are. then the next time we come back and talk to you will be yet a week later, still. so this is really, you know, hot off the press. but i asked my colleagues to pitch in. i don't think any one of us could have imagined that it was this good of a toy store. >> this is what we came for. >> this exceeds what we came for. [ applause ] >> okay, frank, take us home. >> last week, i believe you were surprised by the difference in color between charon and pluto. have you seen anything since
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yesterday that is beginning to inform that question? >> i can speak for myself. i don't think so yet. one of the interesting things that i think i'll just remark on is the image that we showed yesterday showing very strong color contrasts on pluto's surface. and i wouldn't be surprised if there are some units that might be charon like. we'll have to see when we get the higher resolution and more global color data sets. we'll take a look. something is making these two words very, very different. one has an atmosphere, the other does not. one is covered in water ice, the other is covered in volicals. it's a puzzle. a real puzzle. >> okay. we're going to end here. as you've heard this is just the beginning. the story is far, far from being
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over. we will transition to the next news conference at nasa headquarters at 1:00 p.m. eastern on friday. there will be an advisory going on tomorrow. follow the mission and the incredible images and information on social media. join the conversation, follow the conversation. #plutofly-by and send the questions in and all of this information is online on nasa.gov/newhorizons. it's been a remarkable week. the nasa new horizons and applied physics lab and all of the partners on this mission, are truly household names throughout the world. thank you for joining us here at the applied physics lab. we'll see you at nasa headquarters. [ applause ]
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federal reserve chair janet yellen's on capitol hill today. and in a few moments she'll begin her testimony before the senate banking committee. a live look here on capitol hill with the fed chair preparing to testify before the committee. it's her second day on the hill to deliver the fed's semi-annual monetary policy report to congress. we had been planning on bringing you the hearing live here on c-span3, but with the house of representatives finishing up work a little earlier than anticipated today, we've moved the hearing over to our companion network c-span. so you can see the hearing with the fed chair in its entirety live over on c-span. this weekend on c-span's road to the white house, two major political events from iowa. and we're the only place you can watch or listen to these events in their entirety. friday night at 8:00 eastern we'll be live in cedar rapids
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for the iowa democratic party hall of fame dinner. it will mark the first time that all five democratic presidential candidates share the same stage. and all day saturday beginning at 11:00 a.m. eastern we'll be live in ames for the family leadership summit where nine leading republican presidential candidates are scheduled to speak. on c-span c-span radio and c-span.org. c-span's road to the white house 2016, we take you there. and early next month a forum with republican presidential candidates, c-span is partnering with the new hampshire union leader for the newspaper's voters first forum on monday august 3rd. all current likely gop candidates have been invited to participate. the forum will be live on c-span, c-span radio and c-span.org monday august 3rd at 7:00 p.m. eastern.
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tuesday morning president obama announced a nuclear deal with iran. a few hours later the house foreign affairs committee held a hearing on the agreement. former senator joe lieberman former cia director hayden and nicholas burns among the witnesses. congressman ed rois of california chaired the three hour, 45-minute hearing. >> this hearing will come to order. today the committee continues to examine the obama administration's nuclear diplomacy with iran. we thank our witnesses for joining us this morning. and the administration of course is just announced a hugely consequential agreement in testimony before this committee secretary kerry told us these negotiations would be used to dismantle iran's nuclear program. that was the goal.
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instead this agreement allows iran to retain a vast enrichment capacity, to continue its research and development and gain industrialized nuclear program once key provisions of this agreement begin to expire in as little as ten years. the president told us iran does not need to have an underground fortified facility like fordow in order to have a nuclear peaceful program. yet this military complex will now stay open. while the obama administration officials first told us that iran's missile program would have to be addressed as part of a final agreement, they failed to mention that addressing the program means taking restriction restrictions off. we're talking here about the icbm program that iran has taking those off in just eight years. as secretary of defense carter
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testified just last week, quote, the reason that we want to stop iran from having an icbm program is that the i in icbm stands for intercontinental, which means having the capability of flying from iran to the united states, unquote. and as we know countries build icbms for one reason to deliver weapons. and recently in this negotiation at the very end of the negotiation this is what russia and iran pushed for, the ability for russia to transfer this technology, this is what russia would like to do transfer this technology to the regime. at that same hearing our top military official gave his best military advice. quote, under no circumstances should we relieve the pressure on iran, unquote, when it comes
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to the arms embargo. but that comes off in just five years. on the critical issue of inspections, just a few months ago secretary of energy moniz said that, quote we expect to have anywhere any time access, unquote. but anywhere any time has weakened to something called managed access. managed access more accurately should be called manipulated access as any process with russia, china and iran at the table will be treated exactly that way. it will be managed. it will be manipulated. the inspection regime will be manipulated by those with something to hide. and this has been the past experience with iran that has cheated on every agreement so far. we might feel better if the united states was able to permanently constrain iran's warring nuclear program.
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but the key restriction, the ability to enrich at high levels begins to expire in as little as ten years. that's ten years. most americans will take three times longer to pay off their mortgages. ten years from now. once these restrictions expire, iran could enrich on an industrial scale claiming the desire to sell enriched uranium on the international market as france does. iran could also enrich uranium to levels near weapon grade claiming the desire to power a nuclear navy as brazil is doing. all these activities are permissible under the mpt. and all would be endorsed by this agreement. indeed the president himself, president obama said of his own agreement, in year 13 14, 15, iran's breakout times would have
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shrunk almost down to zero, end quote. as a result iran and its allies will be left with no effective measures to prevent iran from initiating an accelerated nuclear program to produce the materials needed for a nuclear weapon. and iran surely would be able to speed toward a nuclear weapon faster than international sanctions could be placed and re-established on that regime. one nonproliferation expert told the committee last week that this sunset clause is in his words a disaster. the essence of this agreement is permanent concessions in exchange for temporary benefits. and that's only if iran doesn't cheat. like it has in the past and as north korea cheated. the deal is in many ways a bet, the bet that the administration is taking is that in ten or 15
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years we will have a kinder gentler iran. just a few days ago iranian president rowhani joined a crowd crowd, a crowd which if you followed the piece in the "new york times," the crowd were chanting death to america. this was their rally on the weekend. and the posters read, death to zionism. and as rowhani was walking this reporter asked the question about the nuclear negotiations. and president rowhani said the future is bright, as people behind him were chanting death to america, death to america. so president obama has decided to place all his chips on the fact that the death to america chants will soon disappear. this committee has to ask itself whether we are willing to roll
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the dice too. i'll now turn to our ranking member for any opening comments he may have. >> thank you, chairman royce. i appreciate the chairman's continued focus on making sure this committee gets the opportunity to thoroughly discuss and debate the merits of this newly announced agreement with iran. and once the final deal submitted to congress, the chairman and ranking member will move quickly to set up briefings and hearing as we move forward toward a vote on the deal. in the 18 months since the p5+1 began negotiating with iran, an effort to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapon, we've had a lot of discussions about centrifuges and stockpiles and breakout times. we now know basically what an agreement looks like in terms of infrastructure. but we still await details as to exactly what kind of access iaea investigators will get, how potential violations will be dealt with, how the so-called snapback mechanism will work and what a new u.n. security council resolution will look like. secretary kerry and his team has
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spent an enormous amount of time and energy on these negotiations. and i appreciate their ability to negotiate significant limitations on enrichment and nuclear stockpiles. i hesitate to speculate on the deal as a whole until we receive all of the details. i have some serious concerns however about various aspects of the deal which were extensively reported from vienna this week. in particular one iran's need to come clean on past nuclear activities, access to all suspected nuclear sites, the timings relief and impact on the region and four ensuring arms embargo remains in place to prevent the spread of weapons to terrorist. first, along with most of my colleagues i've been clear from the outset that iran must come clean on past nuclear weapons work. a demand repeatedly made by the administration. yet iran has been unwilling to cooperate with the iaea on its parallel investigation into the possible military dimensions of its program. iran's intransigence has made it difficult for many of us to
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imagine how we can expect iran to comply with the terms of a deal. if they stonewall the iaea for a decade, will they continue to find ways to do so under the comprehensive deal, or will a deal make that impossible? this is why upholding the integrity of the iaea's investigation is so vital right now. so i will await details as to exactly what the new road map signed by the iran and iaea will entail. further, i'm concerned about ak says. we're told this agreement is not based on trust it's based on transparency and verification. so i wait to see in greater detail how the final agreement deals with resolving iaea access to respective sites. will we have the access needed or will iran be able to block inspectors? if parts of the media are correct, will that be enough to gather information needed? how far have we strayed from the any time anywhere inspections experts said should be part of any deal? third, i remain concerned about the timing and implications of
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sanctions relief. how extensive are the nuclear related steps iran has to take in order to receive relief? how will stonewalling or suspected cheating on its commitments be dealt with? and will iran have access to its frozen assets well over $100 billion all at once and by what date? and where does the money go? i know that this was touched on last week in part one of this hearing. iran's behavior is not going to change as part of this agreement. that's something that's been acknowledged. in fact, iran's support for nefarious regional actors and designated terrorist organizations has potential to grow under any deal. and while it's true that some of the sanctions relief will have to go towards fixing domestic economic problems, one can imagine the havoc that iran easter ror proxies could wreak with even a billion dollars more. this needs to be something we understand better. that brings me to my fourth and perhaps most troubling concern which emerged as a sticking point in the final days of negotiations. the lifting of the u.n. arms embargo. now, i understand that international sanctions are intertwined and they're complex.
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and i understand that there's a current disagreement among the p5+1 and iran as to what constitutes a nuclear sanction. but it's extraordinarily difficult to imagine that the u.n. security council resolution it will result from the comprehensive agreement will not continue the existing restrictions on iran's ability to export dangerous and military hardware to its terror proxies years to come. quite frankly, the apparent resolution of this issue in some ways is baffling to me. why do we believe that iran's dangerous support for terror groups will change in five years, or that its desire for ballistic missile technology will wane in eight years? from the beginning the administration has said it's dealing with a nuclear issue separate from our other issues with this regime, holding of american citizens or sponsorship of terrorism which will be dramatically more dangerous when the arms embargo is lifted. finally, i want to again raise the issue of four american citizens held or missing in
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iran. regardless of what transpired in vienna this week iran must know that the united states will never stop working for the release of our citizens. i applaud and i thank the committee for its commitment to seeing these innocent americans return to their families. i appreciate the efforts of our negotiators to raise the issue. and members of this committee and all members of congress should have these americans in their thoughts as they review the terms of this agreement. mr. chairman, i look forward to receiving the details this week so members can begin to evaluate its merits. the agreement can't just be judged on what would happen in the absence of a deal today or tomorrow or 60 days from now it must also be analyzed by what will happen under an agreement in five years in eight years and ten years and beyond. the measure of this deal will be bewetbe whether the national security interest will be strengthened for decades to come. i look forward for analysis in the days and weeks ahead. i yield back. thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you, mr. deutsche.
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this morning we're pleased to be joined by distinguished panel senator lieberman represented connecticut for 24 years. he was chairman of the homeland security and governmental affairs committee. he is currently the co-chair of the iran task force at the foundation for the defense of democracies. and he is senior counsel at the firm in new york. general michael hayden is former director of the central intelligence agency, previously general hayden served in multiple and other leadership positions including as the director of the national security agency and principle deputy director of national intelligence. ambassador nick burns is the roy and barbara goodman family professor of diplomacy international relations at the harvard school of international government. he served in the united states foreign service for 27 years during which time he served as the undersecretary of state for political affairs and the ambassador to multiple.
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dr. ray senior fellow at the counsel for foreign relations previously adviser for iran at the state department. he has authored two books on iran. without objection the witnesses' full prepared statements will be made part of the record. members here will have five calendar days to submit statements and questions and any extraneous material that you might have for the record. and we will begin with senator lieberman, if you would like to summarize and we'll go to questions after your opening testimony. >> thanks very much chairman royce, congressman deutsche and members of the committee. i'm grateful for the opportunity to testify before you today at a really critical time. the negotiation between iran and the p5+1 has now produced an agreement which will come before you shortly. each of you will have to decide whether to endorse or reject it.
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i personally looking back at my 24 years of service in congress cannot think of a more consequential vote that each of you will cast in congress for the future security of the united states and indeed the security of the world. and i cannot think of a better committee to lead the house of representatives in its review of the proposed agreement with iran because this committee under the leadership of chairman royce, ranking member engel and today congressman deutsche has really built a strong record of nonpartisanship repeatedly putting the interest of america ahead of the interest of either political party. if there was ever a time for that kind of nonpartisan leadership, it is now on this agreement. the fact is chairman royce, congressman deutsche, your opening comments tells me that's exactly the way you'll go after this. first before i get to my reaction to what happened today to thank president obama,
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secretary kerry, secretary moniz and all their staff for the extraordinary effort they put into these negotiations. you will hear in a moment that i have very serious questions about the agreement that these negotiations have produced but i have no questions about the sincerity and good motivation of the administration in pursuing the negotiations. in the time i've had since the agreement was announced a few hours ago and based on the framework agreement that came out in luzon in april i have reached a conclusion which is that there is much more risk for america and reward for iran than should be in this agreement. it is not the good deal with iran that we all wanted. let me explain why i reached that conclusion based on what i know now. i was a member of the united states senate when the first
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sanctions legislation for iran was passed nearly 20 years ago. and privileged to play a role in the drafting and passage of every subsequent sanctions sanctions bill. each of these measures was adopted by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in the house and senate. in each case democrats and republicans in congress came together despite resistance and outright opposition from the executive branch regardless of which party controlled the executive branch at the time. there is no question in my mind that when we united across party lines in congress to pass these sanctions bills, it was with a clear and simple purpose. to prevent iran, the number one state sponsor of terrorism in the world, from ever possessing a nuclear weapons capability. in fact key provisions of the legislation we adopted
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explicitly stated this goal. mr. chairman, congress deutsche members of the committee, this is not what the agreement announced today does. what began as an admirable diplomatic effort to prevent iran from developmenting nuclear weapons capability resulted into a bilateral communication over the scope of the capability. the agreement announced today people por airily delays but ultimately allows iran to become a nuclear weapons state and legitimized iran's position of the nuclear capabilities that it has built up much of it covertly, in violation of international law and in breach of its obligations under the nonproliferation treaty. mr. chairman, this is precisely the out come that for year we in congress fought to prevent.
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this is precisely what we enacted legislative bipartisan sanctions to stop. and this is the biggest reason why i respectfully based on what i know today, ask you to vote against this proposed agreement. for under it iran will be granted permanent and total relief from nuclear sanctions in exchange for temporary and partial limitations on its nuclear projects. that is the essence of why i believe this is a bad deal for america, a bad deal for iran's neighbors in the middle east and a bad deal for the world. the anti-american anti-israel anti-sunni republic of iran will have weapons. this agreement, if approves takes iran's nuclearization which was previously unacceptable and makes it inevitable. mr. chairman you talked about
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the bet here, and congressman deutsche also, this will moderate the regime in iran this is a bet not based on fact. in fact it is a bet based on hope over experience we have had with iran. we have to judge this country not just by what its representatives in the negotiation have said but really more by what the government has done and is doing in. in the months and years since negotiations began with iran, while the foreign ministers is negotiating with the p5 +1 and charming the international media, the regime in taye iran has continued to build up nuclear weapons capabilities expand the support of radical proxies that threaten the sunni air abe neighbors and improve the ballistic missile capacities
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so the weapons one day reach europe and the united states and spew out the most vile and violent rhetoric toward america israel britain and lately saudi arabia. the rhetoric would be badly enough but the iranian government has acted on the rhetoric sponsoring repeated terrorist attacks that have killed americans and israelis arabs, muslims, christians and jews, from argentina, to iraq, from saudi arabia to syria and a lot of places in between. you mentioned the rally, mr. chairman, in tau ran last week. i would add around the same time the edit your of the iran newspaper who is selected by the supreme leader wrote that the united states, quote which currently terrorized humid anity as the sole super power will one
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fine day cease to be visible on the map of the world end quote. how can we have any confidence in an agreement made with such a government. the answer is it is hard, in any case, but the only way we can have confidence is in the inspection and the verification provisions of the agreement are air tight. and this is based on the history of iran deceiving and delaying the international ato theic energy agency, claiming that the inspectors are spies and it is a tool of the united states even though as we all know it is an agency of the united nations. on first look, the inspections provisions in the agreement announced today fall far short -- dangerly short of the anywhere, any-time access that is needed to have confidence that this deal with the iranian regime will be behaved. president obama this morning
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used the term to describe the inspection s where necessary, when necessary. that is a long way from anywhere, any time. the specific language of the agreement which i've gone over this morning creates a process that can go on for at least two weeks of negotiation with iran when the iae a has reason to inspect something going on and then has an appeal process to a higher board. this kind of -- the iaea will have to negotiate with iran to gain access for the inspectors even though iran has a consistent record of refusing timely and reliable access tonight monitors in the past. mr. chairman in summing up, distinguished members of the committee, in the days and weeks ahead, you'll review this agreement in detail. you'll hear different opinions about it and its implications. based on what i know now, i have
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personally concluded that the agreement falls far short of what is needed which is an agreement that reliably and permanently ends iran's nuclear weapons capability in return for an end to the economic sanctions against iran based on the nuclear program. i know there will be some who will try to convince members of congress if congress rejects the deal the result will be catastrophic. some may try to intimidate and demonize critics of the agreement that a vote against the deal is a vote for war. those are false arguments an i urge you to reject them. and i cite as evidence that the most powerful measure congress ever adopted against iran effectively barring its sale of oil tonight markets was undertaken despite explicit washings -- warnings from administration officials at the time that it would collapse the global economy. in fact it opened the door to the diplomacy that previously
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had proven impossible. and in today's context rejecting this bad deal will not result in war or the collapse of diplomacy, it will give the administration a new opportunity to pursue a better deal. i will say as a former member of congress i know how difficult the following weeks will be for you. you will be pushed and pulled by supporters and opponents of this agreement. all i can say and you all know it already in the end, the best you can do is decide in the privacy of your own conscious what you believe is best for the security of the american people including of course your constituents. because this is a digs you and -- a decision you and we will live with for the rest of our lives. this is a vote whose consequences will reverberate in
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the lives of our children, grandchildren and beyond. i thank you, mr. chairman and i look forward to your questions. >> thank you, senator. general hayden. >> thank you, mr. chairman. mr. deutsche, other members for the opportunity to be here today to discuss such an important topic and thank you for allowing me to be in the company of such distinct wished witnesses. when i was in the agency iran was the second discussed topic behind terrorism. we discussed a variety of the aspects of the iran issue. the nuclear program was a central issue. but i mention that to remind us all as important as the iran nuclear question is, it is part of a larger piece. to paraphrase mr. kissinger iran has decide whether it is a country or a cause. we've been negotiating for the past year and a half on the premise that it wants to be a country. but iran's actions suggest it
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still considers itself a cause, a revolutionary power whose identity in fact may be even the domestic survival has to be drawn from a narrative of unrelentless hostility between itself as the legitimate agent of shiaize lawmaker and the rest of the world. we put these two issues aside years ago when we decided to isolate and focus on iran's nuclear ambitions. i get that. i understand that decision. diplomacy is the art of the possible, not the art of the ideal. during the bush administration, we too focused on iran's nuclear efforts but we need to understand that nukts focus doesn't -- nuclear focus doesn't make the other realities go away and even if we get to a successful conclusion of nuclear negotiations, those other issues remain and indeed there is a possibility that the nuclear result will make those other issues even

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