[Applause]
hi there well that was quite an
introduction Wonder Woman I’ve always
loved her
so yes I am Nikki Fox and next year I
will touch the Sun I’m obviously
speaking figuratively because it’s a
long way away and I can’t afford the bus
fare and it’s extremely extremely hot so
we’re going to be sending a probe I
basically have my perfect job I I dreamt
of working for NASA so I really want to
just spend a few minutes and tell you
how I actually got from a girl that
dreamt of looked up the Stars and dreamt
of working for NASA to actually doing it
so I grew up in so actually you’re just
gonna see a quick shot of our spacecraft
because she’s awfully pretty and she’s
totally under construction right now a
bit bit like me
I think but so so there she is going up
to touch the Sun so I grew up in a small
market town in England about 40 miles
north of London my first experience of
the Sun was finding out it was a star
which I thought was really really
amazing just like all those other stars
it was actually a star and that we
rotated around it and the moon rotated
around that and my dad used to inspire
me with just he loved everything about
space he loved the mercury the Apollo
programs he followed all of that he
inspired me totally to to follow my
dreams of being a scientist so I
actually think I was was privileged that
I went to an all-girls school and I know
that sounds really strange to you but
because I went to an all-girls school I
never had any stereotypes that girls did
one thing and boys did science and math
and engineering that never occurred to
me because all my friends were girls and
so we all just did whatever we wanted to
do and so I knew I wanted to be a
scientist but I wasn’t quite sure
exactly what kind of scientist I wanted
to be so being a scientist I did it by
process of elimination I went to a
biology classes
and every time we had to dissect
anything I would pass out I don’t like
the sight of blood so biology and
apparently medicine were out for me
I then mood I thought what about
chemistry I like mixing things together
but my best friend
I think med actually may have had
suicidal tendencies because she would
regularly blow up you know when it would
say heat gently and she’d wake it up and
put it in it would blow up and she would
she would leave open the fume cupboard
and gas us all and spill concentrated
acid and then she announced I’m going to
go and major in chemistry and I thought
good god there’s one there may be
another one so it was far far far too
dangerous so I stuck with my idea of
doing nice safe physics
I loved maths and obviously I loved
astronomy and more than anything I
really liked the idea that you have a
theory and you test it and you come up
with an answer and often you come up
with more questions and so I absolutely
loved doing physics so I went to to
Imperial College in London and I took a
degree in physics at the end of that
degree I thought well there aren’t very
many jobs for people with physics so
maybe I’ll go and do a master’s in
engineering so I went to the University
of Surrey and I did telecommunications
and satellite engineering and I can
honestly say I owe my entire career to
the fact that I asked asked all the
wrong questions
I got continually told by all of the
professors you think like a scientist
you’re not an engineer
because no offence to engineers in the
room thank you you’ll be very glad if
you see how much I break things that I’m
not an engineer but I would ask the
wrong questions I can’t I didn’t care
about how something worked I wanted to
know why it worked and it very quickly
became apparent to me that I was no
engineer so I went back to Imperial and
I did a PhD in space plasma physics I
come to the end of that and I’m thinking
okay job and as you can imagine yes my
parents are very proud as you can
imagine job since so easy to apply for
jobs in space physics because there are
none and so I’m standing at a conference
and the most amazing
miraculous thing happened to me a senior
scientist walked up to me while I’m
giving my poster presentation and said
could I interest you in a job with NASA
so I kind of played it cool oh yeah I
mean I could probably do that fit that
in my schedule whilst inside ago yes so
you know for me that was huge and
amazing now I think maybe for Americans
that might not be so amazing because you
grew up with NASA and you you know it’s
it’s somewhere to work for me from a
country who hasn’t walked on the moon
who hasn’t sent probes to all those
different planets it was huge and
amazing so I left and I left England and
I came to NASA and I’ve never looked
back I have an incredibly incredibly
privileged life however I still feel I’m
under construction as the theme of the
day I am a single mom I have two
wonderful elementary school children who
who love me very much and like me to be
here and I travel a lot so I’m forever
juggling my travel schedule with
playdates swimming a child that was
throwing up this morning and you know
practicing for a TED talk traveling to a
conference in Germany and I continually
have to balance this my favorite place
to go visit however is our clean room at
the Applied Physics lab where we are
building Solar Probe so let me not bore
you with my life anymore let me tell you
about the star of the show the Sun and
indeed our amazing probe that we are
sending there so a lot of these speakers
are talking about inspiration I really
feel that space then space travel space
research has inspired people more than
almost any other industry it has been
responsible for all of the breakthroughs
all our technology breakthroughs that
you have for example this particular
mission is actually 60 years in the
making it was first proposed in 1958
that’s 11 years before Neil Armstrong
walked on the moon
a group of very very very
smart people got together sat in a room
that we call them the Simpson committee
and they came up with a charter or those
that look if you like a wish list of
what are the most amazing things that we
would want to do in space and what do we
need a national agency like NASA to do
what can’t we do with a single simple
organization and so they came up with 12
missions
one of those is Solar Probe there have
been many many incarnations of this
amazing mission we needed to get our
technology to where we are today to be
able to do this mission but let me tell
you a little bit OUP’s about why this
I’m this is very trigger happiness let’s
see if we’ll go now no I want you to see
that Sun that’s what I wanted to see
okay let’s see if we can get it to move
yes okay this is why I’m not an engineer
folks so there you see the Sun here
she’s very very active very beautiful
you’re looking at the Sun here in
ultraviolet if you look at the Sun in it
just as you your naked eye visible it’s
pretty boring it’s kind of a little
spotty surface on there but when you
look at it in ultraviolet it’s really
amazing there are incredible mysteries
that are hidden with within our Sun the
first one is the surface of the Sun is
about 6000 degrees as you move away from
the Sun into that hazy atmosphere that
we call the corona it gets up to about
two million degrees that shouldn’t
happen
it’s like water flowing uphill it
shouldn’t happen how on earth can you
move away from the source and it gets
hotter and physicists have puzzled this
and at least five theories come out
every year but not one of them will
actually hold up to the real life the
other thing that happens in the corona
so around the region where it’s suddenly
heated it gets accelerated really really
fast so fast that it can actually break
away from the sun’s hold and move away
from the Sun we call it the solar wind
and it actually baits all of our planets
so here’s our two mysteries why is the
corona hotter and why does it suddenly
accelerate and move away
and so the only way we can actually
study this is to send a probe right up
into the Sun we’ve done an awful lot
with amazing views of the Sun these
videos that you see all the time all of
these fantastic observations they’re
great I can tell a lot by just looking
at you but I can tell an awful lot more
if I come and visit you in your house so
we’re gonna go up and we’re gonna go up
and really visit the Sun really up close
so we’re actually building the
spacecraft now my role is I’m the
project scientist for the mission it’s
extremely privileged role and it means I
have to make sure that we can actually
return the science that all these people
who’ve been inspired by this mission
really want to do here you see our
wonderful team of engineers look how
excited and busy they are don’t they
yeah this is not sped up this is how
fast they work and they are building the
spacecraft as we speak in in the
cleanroom just down the road at the
Applied Physics lab we will build it
we’ll put all the all the stuff together
we build it we test it because if you
can’t go up and fix it once it’s
launched so we really have to make sure
that everything’s working
I mentioned the technology so the reason
it’s taken 60 years for us to be able to
do this mission is we’ve just never been
able to do it before we couldn’t send a
spacecraft that close to the Sun and
survive one of the big things that you
will see or when we show one of the
other videos is there’s a big heat
shield on the front of that spacecraft
the technology alone in that heat shield
is mind-blowing and very inspiring it
was a partnership for engineers and
scientists at APL working with folks up
here at the whiting School JHU whiting
school to come up with this incredible
foam it’s a car it’s simply carbon it’s
a carbon carbon composite with a foam in
the middle and that is going to protect
the spacecraft from the two-and-a-half
thousand degrees on one side of the
spacecraft the instruments will be about
as warm as you are right now the rest of
the spacecraft will be at room
temperature that kind of technology leap
by the way I know most of you are not
old enough to remember
19:58 neither am i but if you watch some
old movies from 1958 you will see that
the telephone is actually attached to
the wall and it’s got those weird rotary
things that when I show pictures of my
kids they say what is that mummy that’s
how we used to make phone calls now I
use my watch to make a phone call or I
have this tiny little iPhone that I use
that’s the kind of leap that we’ve had
to make in technology to be able to fly
it that’s why it’s taken us 60 years to
get to this point so if we we want to go
up very close to the Sun as I said we
want to get into that coronal region now
several of you will be lucky enough in
August this year there is a total solar
eclipse that will be visible from the US
it’s the first one in a hundred years to
be visible from the US so if you can go
see it it’s amazing and it’s inspiring
and I can only imagine what it must have
been like before people knew what was
happening how frightening it would be
when suddenly the Sun went out in the
middle of the day everything went quiet
all the animals went quiet and you don’t
know it’s going to come back out again
so it’s it’s an amazing thing
so the corona is extremely active it
throws off billions of tons of material
that are traveling at millions of miles
an hour the place that Solar Probe is
going is deep into this region where all
this I like to say where magic happens
where all this stuff that we don’t
understand is actually happening so when
when we get these very big events that
come off the Sun you will see sunspots
you see big events that come from them
called coronal mass ejections they throw
this there’s a lot of material that
comes to our planet and actually impacts
it and some of the beautiful things you
can see if you go outside the city we
have had them visible from from
Baltimore but you will see the northern
and southern lights they are
tremendously inspiring in fact standing
underneath an Aurora in Sweden when I
was a young graduate student inspired me
to continue to do what we then called
Solar terrestrial physics I also met my
than standing underneath Andres I’m kind
of fond of Aurora but that not only not
only are are they beautiful but they can
wreak havoc for us down on the planet
when you see in a war it’s basically
like a long current flowing through a
wire in the sky over your head that’s
fine except currents have a habit of
wanting to close so if they if the
ground is not conducting they will look
for something very easy to flow through
like mmm a power grid we’ve already
provided the wires for them and they
will go through this power grid and they
can cause anything from minor blackouts
brownouts to as we saw back in 1989 a
complete catastrophic failure of an
entire power grid so we do need to know
about these things that are coming
towards us so we can better prepare and
better understand and so I will leave
you with a shot of our beautiful
spacecraft seeing very clearly there the
fantastic heat shield at the front I
mentioned at the very beginning that
when the Simpson committee met they
proposed 12 missions Solar Probe is the
only one that has not yet flown not
because people aren’t interested in it
not because there hasn’t been tremendous
support but because we just haven’t been
able to do it now but in those 60 years
thousands and thousands and thousands of
people have worked to make this dream
come true technology advances people’s
dreams people’s hopes all right with
this mission and so I’m very happy to
say that finally next year July 31st
2018 from Cape Canaveral we will launch
her thank you very much
you
hi there well that was quite an
introduction Wonder Woman I’ve always
loved her
so yes I am Nikki Fox and next year I
will touch the Sun I’m obviously
speaking figuratively because it’s a
long way away and I can’t afford the bus
fare and it’s extremely extremely hot so
we’re going to be sending a probe I
basically have my perfect job I I dreamt
of working for NASA so I really want to
just spend a few minutes and tell you
how I actually got from a girl that
dreamt of looked up the Stars and dreamt
of working for NASA to actually doing it
so I grew up in so actually you’re just
gonna see a quick shot of our spacecraft
because she’s awfully pretty and she’s
totally under construction right now a
bit bit like me
I think but so so there she is going up
to touch the Sun so I grew up in a small
market town in England about 40 miles
north of London my first experience of
the Sun was finding out it was a star
which I thought was really really
amazing just like all those other stars
it was actually a star and that we
rotated around it and the moon rotated
around that and my dad used to inspire
me with just he loved everything about
space he loved the mercury the Apollo
programs he followed all of that he
inspired me totally to to follow my
dreams of being a scientist so I
actually think I was was privileged that
I went to an all-girls school and I know
that sounds really strange to you but
because I went to an all-girls school I
never had any stereotypes that girls did
one thing and boys did science and math
and engineering that never occurred to
me because all my friends were girls and
so we all just did whatever we wanted to
do and so I knew I wanted to be a
scientist but I wasn’t quite sure
exactly what kind of scientist I wanted
to be so being a scientist I did it by
process of elimination I went to a
biology classes
and every time we had to dissect
anything I would pass out I don’t like
the sight of blood so biology and
apparently medicine were out for me
I then mood I thought what about
chemistry I like mixing things together
but my best friend
I think med actually may have had
suicidal tendencies because she would
regularly blow up you know when it would
say heat gently and she’d wake it up and
put it in it would blow up and she would
she would leave open the fume cupboard
and gas us all and spill concentrated
acid and then she announced I’m going to
go and major in chemistry and I thought
good god there’s one there may be
another one so it was far far far too
dangerous so I stuck with my idea of
doing nice safe physics
I loved maths and obviously I loved
astronomy and more than anything I
really liked the idea that you have a
theory and you test it and you come up
with an answer and often you come up
with more questions and so I absolutely
loved doing physics so I went to to
Imperial College in London and I took a
degree in physics at the end of that
degree I thought well there aren’t very
many jobs for people with physics so
maybe I’ll go and do a master’s in
engineering so I went to the University
of Surrey and I did telecommunications
and satellite engineering and I can
honestly say I owe my entire career to
the fact that I asked asked all the
wrong questions
I got continually told by all of the
professors you think like a scientist
you’re not an engineer
because no offence to engineers in the
room thank you you’ll be very glad if
you see how much I break things that I’m
not an engineer but I would ask the
wrong questions I can’t I didn’t care
about how something worked I wanted to
know why it worked and it very quickly
became apparent to me that I was no
engineer so I went back to Imperial and
I did a PhD in space plasma physics I
come to the end of that and I’m thinking
okay job and as you can imagine yes my
parents are very proud as you can
imagine job since so easy to apply for
jobs in space physics because there are
none and so I’m standing at a conference
and the most amazing
miraculous thing happened to me a senior
scientist walked up to me while I’m
giving my poster presentation and said
could I interest you in a job with NASA
so I kind of played it cool oh yeah I
mean I could probably do that fit that
in my schedule whilst inside ago yes so
you know for me that was huge and
amazing now I think maybe for Americans
that might not be so amazing because you
grew up with NASA and you you know it’s
it’s somewhere to work for me from a
country who hasn’t walked on the moon
who hasn’t sent probes to all those
different planets it was huge and
amazing so I left and I left England and
I came to NASA and I’ve never looked
back I have an incredibly incredibly
privileged life however I still feel I’m
under construction as the theme of the
day I am a single mom I have two
wonderful elementary school children who
who love me very much and like me to be
here and I travel a lot so I’m forever
juggling my travel schedule with
playdates swimming a child that was
throwing up this morning and you know
practicing for a TED talk traveling to a
conference in Germany and I continually
have to balance this my favorite place
to go visit however is our clean room at
the Applied Physics lab where we are
building Solar Probe so let me not bore
you with my life anymore let me tell you
about the star of the show the Sun and
indeed our amazing probe that we are
sending there so a lot of these speakers
are talking about inspiration I really
feel that space then space travel space
research has inspired people more than
almost any other industry it has been
responsible for all of the breakthroughs
all our technology breakthroughs that
you have for example this particular
mission is actually 60 years in the
making it was first proposed in 1958
that’s 11 years before Neil Armstrong
walked on the moon
a group of very very very
smart people got together sat in a room
that we call them the Simpson committee
and they came up with a charter or those
that look if you like a wish list of
what are the most amazing things that we
would want to do in space and what do we
need a national agency like NASA to do
what can’t we do with a single simple
organization and so they came up with 12
missions
one of those is Solar Probe there have
been many many incarnations of this
amazing mission we needed to get our
technology to where we are today to be
able to do this mission but let me tell
you a little bit OUP’s about why this
I’m this is very trigger happiness let’s
see if we’ll go now no I want you to see
that Sun that’s what I wanted to see
okay let’s see if we can get it to move
yes okay this is why I’m not an engineer
folks so there you see the Sun here
she’s very very active very beautiful
you’re looking at the Sun here in
ultraviolet if you look at the Sun in it
just as you your naked eye visible it’s
pretty boring it’s kind of a little
spotty surface on there but when you
look at it in ultraviolet it’s really
amazing there are incredible mysteries
that are hidden with within our Sun the
first one is the surface of the Sun is
about 6000 degrees as you move away from
the Sun into that hazy atmosphere that
we call the corona it gets up to about
two million degrees that shouldn’t
happen
it’s like water flowing uphill it
shouldn’t happen how on earth can you
move away from the source and it gets
hotter and physicists have puzzled this
and at least five theories come out
every year but not one of them will
actually hold up to the real life the
other thing that happens in the corona
so around the region where it’s suddenly
heated it gets accelerated really really
fast so fast that it can actually break
away from the sun’s hold and move away
from the Sun we call it the solar wind
and it actually baits all of our planets
so here’s our two mysteries why is the
corona hotter and why does it suddenly
accelerate and move away
and so the only way we can actually
study this is to send a probe right up
into the Sun we’ve done an awful lot
with amazing views of the Sun these
videos that you see all the time all of
these fantastic observations they’re
great I can tell a lot by just looking
at you but I can tell an awful lot more
if I come and visit you in your house so
we’re gonna go up and we’re gonna go up
and really visit the Sun really up close
so we’re actually building the
spacecraft now my role is I’m the
project scientist for the mission it’s
extremely privileged role and it means I
have to make sure that we can actually
return the science that all these people
who’ve been inspired by this mission
really want to do here you see our
wonderful team of engineers look how
excited and busy they are don’t they
yeah this is not sped up this is how
fast they work and they are building the
spacecraft as we speak in in the
cleanroom just down the road at the
Applied Physics lab we will build it
we’ll put all the all the stuff together
we build it we test it because if you
can’t go up and fix it once it’s
launched so we really have to make sure
that everything’s working
I mentioned the technology so the reason
it’s taken 60 years for us to be able to
do this mission is we’ve just never been
able to do it before we couldn’t send a
spacecraft that close to the Sun and
survive one of the big things that you
will see or when we show one of the
other videos is there’s a big heat
shield on the front of that spacecraft
the technology alone in that heat shield
is mind-blowing and very inspiring it
was a partnership for engineers and
scientists at APL working with folks up
here at the whiting School JHU whiting
school to come up with this incredible
foam it’s a car it’s simply carbon it’s
a carbon carbon composite with a foam in
the middle and that is going to protect
the spacecraft from the two-and-a-half
thousand degrees on one side of the
spacecraft the instruments will be about
as warm as you are right now the rest of
the spacecraft will be at room
temperature that kind of technology leap
by the way I know most of you are not
old enough to remember
19:58 neither am i but if you watch some
old movies from 1958 you will see that
the telephone is actually attached to
the wall and it’s got those weird rotary
things that when I show pictures of my
kids they say what is that mummy that’s
how we used to make phone calls now I
use my watch to make a phone call or I
have this tiny little iPhone that I use
that’s the kind of leap that we’ve had
to make in technology to be able to fly
it that’s why it’s taken us 60 years to
get to this point so if we we want to go
up very close to the Sun as I said we
want to get into that coronal region now
several of you will be lucky enough in
August this year there is a total solar
eclipse that will be visible from the US
it’s the first one in a hundred years to
be visible from the US so if you can go
see it it’s amazing and it’s inspiring
and I can only imagine what it must have
been like before people knew what was
happening how frightening it would be
when suddenly the Sun went out in the
middle of the day everything went quiet
all the animals went quiet and you don’t
know it’s going to come back out again
so it’s it’s an amazing thing
so the corona is extremely active it
throws off billions of tons of material
that are traveling at millions of miles
an hour the place that Solar Probe is
going is deep into this region where all
this I like to say where magic happens
where all this stuff that we don’t
understand is actually happening so when
when we get these very big events that
come off the Sun you will see sunspots
you see big events that come from them
called coronal mass ejections they throw
this there’s a lot of material that
comes to our planet and actually impacts
it and some of the beautiful things you
can see if you go outside the city we
have had them visible from from
Baltimore but you will see the northern
and southern lights they are
tremendously inspiring in fact standing
underneath an Aurora in Sweden when I
was a young graduate student inspired me
to continue to do what we then called
Solar terrestrial physics I also met my
than standing underneath Andres I’m kind
of fond of Aurora but that not only not
only are are they beautiful but they can
wreak havoc for us down on the planet
when you see in a war it’s basically
like a long current flowing through a
wire in the sky over your head that’s
fine except currents have a habit of
wanting to close so if they if the
ground is not conducting they will look
for something very easy to flow through
like mmm a power grid we’ve already
provided the wires for them and they
will go through this power grid and they
can cause anything from minor blackouts
brownouts to as we saw back in 1989 a
complete catastrophic failure of an
entire power grid so we do need to know
about these things that are coming
towards us so we can better prepare and
better understand and so I will leave
you with a shot of our beautiful
spacecraft seeing very clearly there the
fantastic heat shield at the front I
mentioned at the very beginning that
when the Simpson committee met they
proposed 12 missions Solar Probe is the
only one that has not yet flown not
because people aren’t interested in it
not because there hasn’t been tremendous
support but because we just haven’t been
able to do it now but in those 60 years
thousands and thousands and thousands of
people have worked to make this dream
come true technology advances people’s
dreams people’s hopes all right with
this mission and so I’m very happy to
say that finally next year July 31st
2018 from Cape Canaveral we will launch
her thank you very much
you
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