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music

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I built my first AM radio with my dad

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full-on, really sodering and building.

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I built, you know, missile rockets, and we launched those.

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And we had telescopes.

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And he was the first to show me Mars.

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And I slowly got into the space program that way.

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I knew in high school that I wanted to be an astronomer.

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You can discover and find out what's going on.

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 Depending on what you are studying. For me, it's Titan's atmosphere. Name's Carrie Ander and I'm a space scientist

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at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and I'm a team member on

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Cassini CIRS. CIRS is called the composit infrared spectrometer, and it's one of the

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tweleve instruments on board the Cassini spacecraft, which is orbiting Satern.

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What CIRS does is it goes beyond the human visible

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spectrum part, that we see with our eyes, into the thermal infrared, what I'll call it.

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So imagine sitting in front of fire, and you 

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are not looking at it, but you're feeling the fire, the heat from the fire.

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CIRS sees that heat and records it. And then we can tell what

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is going on: there's this molecule, this molecule, this type of maybe particulate, a cloud.

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to try to figure out "Ok, what could that be?" And that's what we're

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doing to to find out the types of clouds that we see

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with CIRS. But if you just kind of look at Titan from a big picture point of view, first of all

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it's a moon, and it orbits Satern. It's Satern's largest moon.

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And it's the second largest moon in our solar system, next to Jupiter's Ganymede.

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But what's really intriguing about Titan is that it is the only moon in our solar system 

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with a thick, substantial planet-like atmosphere

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On Earth, in our troposphere, you know, when you look up and you see clouds

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those are all made of liquid water, ice

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crystals or a combination of the two. Well, Titan doesn't have that.

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It has methane instead. So you'd see all this

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methane rain, methane drizzle, methane clouds, all that.

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There's a lot of early Earth scientists out there who want to learn about, you know, life

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"Is there life?" You can go to Titan as one possibility,

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because it can be representative what the early Earth was like before

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we were here. It's a completely different environment than

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Earth, but it has a lot of similarities at the same time. It's a very dynamic 

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world. In studying it, you can do any kind of photochemistry, 

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different chemistry, different physics.

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I was always interested in math and science, but my dad, I think, was a key role.

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I wanted to keep doing it and learning, and I'm here. Dream come true!

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beeping

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