This is CNN 10 and I'm Carl.

Jesus.

Welcome, everyone watching worldwide.

If you're just now returning from a summer break, it's great to see you again in the U.

S.

State of California.

This gives you an idea of why the governor just declared a state of emergency.

It applies to five counties in the central and southern areas of the state.

That's where three wildfires are burning.

They've chewed through tens of thousands of acres.

They forced thousands of people to evacuate, and they have destroyed some homes statewide.

California has lost Mawr land toe wildfires this year than in any other year on record.

More than two million acres have burned in 2020.

And though the state has a wildfire season, which typically lasts from the spring through the fall, it often hits its worst point in October and November.

So fire officials are particularly concerned about that.

Over the weekend, California broke temperature records that have stood since the 19 fifties, Though it's been cooler than average in the central part of the United States, areas of the West have seen sweltering heat waves and that can make wildfires worse in the states.

Hot, dry conditions.

Lightning strikes have been blamed for causing many of the wildfires, but a party where a type of firework was set off is responsible for one of the recent ones.

In addition to the round the clock efforts of the firefighters, the State of Emergency Declaration will speed up help and money to the residents who've been affected.

Next story.

There's an election coming up in America.

You might have heard a little something about that.

It will determine all 435 voting seats of the US House of Representatives.

It'll decide 35 of the 100 seats of the U.

S Senate, and it will determine who sits in the White House for the next four years.

In most modern elections, Americans have gotten presidential results.

At some point On election night, enough votes were tallied fast enough to make this happen.

One prominent exception, of course, was in the year 2000, when the Florida recount delay those results for weeks.

Could concerns about Cove in 19 and delays associated with mail in voting keep Americans in suspense after November 3rd of this year.

Campaigning, fundraising debates, more fundraising to conventions, more debates and finally, the vote.

Three U.

S presidential election happens every four years on the first Tuesday in November, but Election Day is really just the last step in a years long process.

It starts with the primary when states vote on who should be the nominee for each political party.

There are two major political parties that most Americans identify with the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

The Republican Party is considered to be on the right of the political spectrum, supporting positions considered more conservative while the Democrats fall on the left supporting positions considered more liberal.

Every summer before the election, the two parties hold week long events called conventions, to officially select their nominee.

Each state will send delegates to the conventions who act as representatives of the results from the primaries.

50 votes for Secretary Clinton and nine votes for Senator Sanders, three candidate who wins the majority of those delegates that accepts the nomination.

Even the sitting president has to be re nominated by their parties.

Congratulations, Dad.

We love you.

But if he or she has already served two terms, They can't run again.

Once the nominees are secured, it's on to the general election.

Although the nominees may attack each other as a campaign, they won't actually face off until the debates a month before the election.

When it's finally time to vote, there are three ways to do it by mail in ballot.

For those who can't make it to the polls by early voting, which happens days or weeks before Election Day and by going to the polls on Election Day historically, Onley about 50 to 60% of eligible Americans actually turn out to vote in the United States.

The candidate with the majority of the votes doesn't automatically win.

The U.

S uses a system called the Electoral College, which gives each state a certain amount of electoral votes.

Theory Mount of electoral votes the state gets is determined by how many representatives they have in Congress.

If a candidate gets the most votes in a state, they get the electoral votes for that state, except in Nebraska and Maine, where they are awarded based on a statewide and district results.

You need 270 out of 538 electoral votes to become president.

Some states have historically voted Republican in our called red states.

Others have historically voted Democratic in our called blue states.

Some states are swing states, which means voters have swung between Democrats and Republicans, depending on the election year in a normal year, If the election is a landslide, the results could get called shortly after polling stations closed in the evening.

Thank you, but if it's close, candidates won't give their victory or concession speeches until the wee hours of the morning.

If it's super close, candidates can request a recount in certain states.

In 2000, George Bush won the state of Florida by just about 1700 votes.

After a recount, it was only 327 and ultimately the Supreme Court had to weigh in to certify the results.

Because of covert 19.

Mail in voting is expected to increase, and states are facing challenges like shortages of poll workers.

It may take some states days or weeks to finalize their results.

After all of that, the winner is sworn in the following January, and almost immediately people start preparing for the next election.

12th trivia which of these NASA missions was launched in 1977 Skylab, Galileo, Voyager or Viking, two unmanned spacecraft were launched as part of the Voyager missions in 1977 on.

Both of them are still out there, farther away from the Earth than Pluto's, still gathering info about the universe more than 40 years after they launched the cost of the mission.

When converted to today's dollars is roughly two billion, and it's not just sending data back.

The two spacecraft are also carrying info about Earth.

Gold plated copper discs with instructions for how to play them are also on board Voyager.

In case they're picked up by anything that wants to know about human life.

Researchers say that's very unlikely.

They compare the disks to a tiny message in a bottle thrown into the greatest expanse of oceans.

But they include greetings in 55 languages, music natural and man made sounds.

They also have pictures snapshots of human life in the 19 seventies, including this one from the 1972 Olympics, a depiction of human sport through a foot race.

And when CNN anchor Don Riddell caught up with the athletes in the shot he found that some of them had no idea their images were floating in deep space.

The voyage continues.

We could not have claimed to know what was in our own solar system until Voyager conducted its tour.

It's Homeric Odyssey.

Across the outer solar system, people often describe it as one of mankind's greatest journeys.

It is certainly the farthest and longest forager was originally conceived as a tour of all the giant planets, because all the giant planets were aligned in 1977 and you could go from one to the other, and that alignment was very rare.

That alignment happens once every 176 years.

Uh, it ended up that Congress only approved the mission to Jupiter and Saturn.

But the engineers and the scientists were very ingenious, and they designed and built the instruments to endure the flights to Uranus and Neptune just on the off chance that the mission would be approved for that long.

And that's what happened.

And it's remarkable to remember what we did not know about our own solar system.

We knew nothing about the structure and Saturn's rings.

We knew very little about its atmosphere.

Neptune is 30 times farther away from the sun than the Earth is, and even in the most powerful telescopes at the time was just a small dot of blue.

It's famous picture the pale blue dot of Earth right before it departed and went on its way outside beyond the planets.

Now we are truly an interstellar species.

It is for all these reasons that I think it's fair to say that Voyager is Thea Pollo, 11 of the planetary programming.

A Flying V ain't just a historic guitar.

It's also a model aircraft and a possible glimpse of what's to come.

Dutch engineers recently gave this design a test flight passengers, fuel and cargo would all fit inside the wings, and the Flying V would theoretically save fuel over the modern tried and true jet design.

But it still needs work.

It's prone to Dutch role, which is described as being like ice skating and can lead to rough landings.

And, of course, the engineers want all the landings to be happy ones down to the letter, the letter V so they won't let this V as it is.

That could be a mistake.

Their vehement about getting this right, because if it comes to V, it could ve another victory for aviation.

All right, search the Arkansas is where today's show lands.

It's where you'll find sir see High School for a chance to get your school mentioned on CNN.

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Please subscribe and leave a comment on the most recent program at youtube dot com slash CNN.

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I'm Carla Zeus.