Name: 【TED】Erika Hamden: What it takes to launch a telescope (What it takes to launch a telescope | Erika Hamden)
Uploaded: 2019-06-27T17:10:37.000Z
Duration: 7 min 19 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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I build telescopes because, number one, they are awesome.

I believe if you want to discover a new thing about the universe,

each gave us new ways to see the universe

to get the Hubble Space Telescope from an idea into orbit.

I know how hard that choice is because I live it.

The reality of my job is that I fail almost all the time and still keep going,

the faint intergalactic-medium red-shifted emission balloon,

And don't worry, it is not going to explode at the end of this story.

I've been working on FIREBall for more than 10 years

and now lead the team of incredible people who built it.

FIREBall is designed to observe some of the faintest structures known:

They are even bigger than whatever you're thinking of.

huge clouds of hydrogen that we think flow into and out of galaxies.

because what I really want is to take our view of the universe

to one where we can see and measure every atom that exists.

But observing at least some of those atoms

is crucial to our understanding of why galaxies look the way they do.

how that hydrogen gas gets into a galaxy and creates a star.

working not on the telescope but on the light sensor,

This new sensor was being developed by a team that I joined

And our goal was to prove that this sensor would work really well

I destroyed several very, very, very expensive sensors

before realizing that the machine I was using

created a plasma that shorted out anything electrical that we put in it.

We used a different machine, there were other challenges,

And our sensors are now 10 times better than the previous state of the art

and are getting put into all kinds of new telescopes.

Our sensors will give us a new way to see the universe and our place in it.

And FIREBall is weird as far as telescopes go,

because it's not in space, and it's not on the ground.

Instead, it hangs on a cable from a giant balloon

This is partly because the edge of space is much cheaper than actual space.

So building it, of course, more failures:

calibration failures, we ran tests again and again and again and again;

failures when you literally least expect them:

we had an adorable but super angry baby falcon that landed

Although to be fair, this was the greatest day

due to six weeks of continuous rain in the New Mexico desert.

Our spirits dampened, we showed up again,

I have put so much of myself -- my whole life -- into this project,

and I, like, still can't believe that that happened.

And I have this picture that's taken right around sunset on that day

Subtitles ListPlay Video

【TED】Erika Hamden: What it takes to launch a telescope (What it takes to launch a telescope | Erika Hamden)

crucial

inevitable

adorable

realize