 Alright, so, Kata is the American Natural History Museum's astrophysicisation guide. Is that the correct way to... yep. He's sitting in New York for the morning right now and will now demonstrate how he visualised New Horizons in Canada with Pluto last year, I think. And then, after he's gone through that, and perhaps one other, Alex will talk through how this works and what's happening, how much of it's happening open source. Kata, take it away. Well, great. Thank you, Ed. And hello, Singapore. I wish I was there. I'm actually at my mom's house on Cape Cod in Massachusetts just south of Boston. So, we're going to start off here looking at the spacecraft. The idea with this software is to spacecraft scale to about the size of a baby grand piano. If we come in close to the science instruments, Alice and Ralph. If any of you know the American television shows, the honeymoon years, Alice was skinny and Ralph was a little more fat. And so, Alice is a skinny ultraviolet spectrometer and Ralph is the infrared and visible wavelength scanner. So, they take multiple wavelengths. The images we will be seeing are from the Lori camera. And this is a telescope. It's sort of like a, oh, about a, I think, a 25 or 30 centimeter telescope, essentially, that takes about one-third of a degree. So, smaller than the full moon picture. And then over, further on the left, we have two particle and field instruments to measure the sort of plasma environment, both of the solar wind and the particles, energetic particles from the Pepsi instruments. And if we just quickly come around back, thanks, Alex. We're looking now at the radio isotope thermoelectric generator, and that's somewhat in black. Alex, could you circle it with your pointer? Thank you. It may be a little tough to see, but that's plutonium. Plutonium is hot, space is cold, so you run a thermocouple, which is your battery. And this brings us around to where we can see Pluto in the distance. The line going through the spacecraft is the trajectory line. So the views of the cameras, we can see in the background, we see something that looks like a fly swatter, and that is over Pluto. And that's the ultraviolet experiment view. And then a smaller view is the camera that we're concerned with. We see a target. It looks like a target. Alex, could we focus on Pluto? Great. We're now going to move in closer to Pluto and Charon. So these are the orbits of the various moons about Pluto. And if we come in close, we can see Pluto and the orbit of its large moon, Charon, which is half the size of Pluto. Pluto is actually smaller than the Earth's moon. And we can see that Pluto has, in fact, an orbit as well around the balance point called the Barry Center in between the two. We see shadows that we visualized here in light gray extending from Pluto and Charon. So those shadows extend straight back from the sun. And Alex, if we could pull back just a little farther. Thank you. We can see the other four moons, which are Styx, Nyx, Hydra, and Kerberos. Now Styx, Kerberos and Hydra are on one side and Nyx is on this other side. So Nyx and Hydra were first seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. And so we knew of those additional moons. And then later Styx and Kerberos were found. They were worried that there might be ring debris. And so they were worried if there was a ring, the spacecraft might hit some debris. The trajectory actually come very close to the largest moon's orbit, Charon. And Charon is on the other side of Pluto. And so the idea was that Charon would have dynamically swept clean that area if there was ring debris. And so that's the idea of the mission was that the trajectory would go past the orbit of Charon with Charon not there. And then it would go through the shadows of Pluto and Charon actually when it flies through. So we see the trajectory line with, of course, that has to do with time. And so we see nodes along the trajectory in yellow for every hour and in every 15 minutes, a little gray node. And so we're sort of visualizing time a little bit with that. And the background of the stars is also accurate. So as Alex pulls us back here, we see the Milky Way behind. That's correct insofar as the trajectory with respect to Pluto. So I think what we'd like to do, let's come in closer if we could. Alex, time is running. And so we see the image of Pluto. I guess we're coming up on that first shot. Alex, should we clear the texture of Pluto? So here this is sort of our best map as we were on approach. And we can see, we can see as time evolves here, we can see how the instrument is now coming over and we've set time. So we're going to see the one of the first full frame images there. There we see the image. Alex, could we move a little closer, please? So we see the image projected onto Pluto, onto the target. The aim in this visualization is somewhat an engineering visualization to show how the observations are made. So what we're doing is actually projecting the image that was gathered onto Pluto. And so that we can see in this full frame, which was really the morning of encounter day. But actually, I'm sorry, the evening before encounter. So this is July 13 in about the time that we may be able to see in the upper left corner shows that it's about hour 20 in the evening on a day before closest encounter. But this is when they were close enough that the telescopic view was able to cover all of Pluto as a sort of full view. And so we can see the heart. And the heart is very distinct here. And Alex is outlining it. One side is a little more broken. That's kind of a broken heart. One side that we now call Sputnik Planum. The names have been given by the New Horizons team. And so that we can talk about these different features. But Sputnik Planum, you can already see it looks like an impact basin. It's somewhat circular. And so it's a topographical low. We're coming in for another picture. But we may want, just in the interest of time, we want to run. We'd like to run a little faster so that we'll go into the next morning. Several pictures are going to be taken here. And but if we go, we're now racing forward in time. Alex is moving ahead in time. Multiple pictures are being taken. There are also pictures being taken of Sharon. But today we'll just really concentrate on the image sequence at Pluto. What we're doing is reading NASA's observational geometry system. So we see where the spacecraft is along the trajectory, where the instruments are aiming, and then the resulting images actually projected onto Pluto. On the day of the encounter on July 14th, we were live with this actually running, being operated by the developer student, Michael Marcinkowski, from Mission Control. And we were linked up with about a dozen sites around the world, including Singapore Science Center there. They were watching in a passive mode, but we also had active participants on the Google Hangout about eight participants around the world. And so here we see the spacecraft sliding along the trajectory, observations coming up at Nix. That observation that just turned on and you saw it turn off was a Ralph instrument. This is the Alice instrument. Once again, it kind of looks like a fly swatter. So it's making observations. And as we come in, if we focus back down on Pluto, we should begin to see that we're getting so close to Pluto. Pluto's getting bigger and bigger in our field of view that now they have to take multiple images of Pluto to get the coverage. So this is 8 o'clock UTC on July 14th. We're getting close to where we're going to see multiple images here. And so now as we get closer, we can see that filling the camera's view, we're getting a larger Pluto, so we're getting more and more detail. So in this mosaic, which I believe is about a four by four mosaic, that we can see how the images improve. Now, the images that are made available for us are taken from the Science Operations Center's website. And the images have a high bit range natively, but they publish them in JPEG format. And so the images have different tonalities. And in a way, we weren't trying to smooth everything out. Of course, NASA has published a very nice map. But in this way, the different tonalities actually emphasize the different images. So it allows us to see a better and better Pluto. If we come in close, Alex, we can see one rather distinct crater. It's a small crater. Well, you see many craters, but there's a crater just up at the top of the view that has a floor of ices that we can see. And so we're seeing these ices. We knew even before we got to Pluto that it was covered with methane ice and also nitrogen ice. And so the nitrogen, they believe now, is forming kind of a slush and that the covering of sputnik planum is a methane ice with the consistency that Alan Stern, the principal investigator for the mission, calls almost like a consistency of toothpaste. And so we can see this very interesting geology. We also know that because of the sort of hydrocarbons in the mix that over time under the ultraviolet light at the sun, thulins are created and they are sort of the building blocks of amino acids and life. So it's an interesting set of concoctions of organic chemistry. But they tend to be darker so that we see this mix of dark and light features. So we can race ahead in time, Alex, to around 10 o'clock UTC. Multiple observations covering both Charon and Pluto, as well as some of the smaller moons occasionally, the instruments going out and looking at that. So as we come up now, we're at a 10-10 UTC. This is where we're close enough to where they took what's called the stereomosaic. So as we're moving through, we can maybe, yeah, okay. There we go. And so we're seeing new images, even higher resolution. And this takes a 4 by 3 image mosaic, which now has enough resolution to basically be the basis for later observations that will look at the same area, but they're going to look a little bit later. And so as New Horizons slides past Pluto, it will get a little bit different perspective, even though the next images will be even higher resolution. So by having multiple coverage from two different angles, that if there were any mountains to be seen on Pluto, as we're clearly seeing here, that they can then get height information. So height maps are going to be built up. It was not clear as we approach Pluto whether there would be any mountainous forms because the ices, especially methane ices, very weak. The mountains we see can only be frozen water or ice mountains. And we can already see in close that at the edge of Sputnik Planum, there's a jumble of mountains. And those mountains have been now measured because of this technique of using stereo to get the heights of the jumble of mountains that we see down below us there. That it looks as though those are floating icebergs in the nitrogen sea. And they're about 5,000 meters tall. So 5 kilometers tall. We can already see the lighting emphasizes the mountains and the craters and also fractures on the surface. Alex's cursor right now is pointing to a crater, named for Venetia Bernie, who was the young lady, 11 years old when she named Pluto, when Pluto was discovered. And she died in 2009. But that crater holds her name also. Sputnik Planum in the heart is also known regionally as Tombaugh Regio for Clyde Tombaugh who had discovered Pluto at the Lowell Observatory 1930. So I think we can move ahead in time a little bit. Oh, I see Alex has lined us up actually very nicely so that we're now seeing the first of the high resolution strips. And a series of these that were taken rapid fashion, we see one picture after another cruising through and covering over that same terrain as we saw before. And we can now see the multiple coverage here. And right there, Alex, if you zoom in on the terminator there, we see in the mountains here, mountains that are about as tall as the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. And also very up at the top there's a kind of a strange looking mound and that's called Wright Mons, named for the Wright Brothers, who made the first powered airplane in the U.S. And that seems to be a volcano. So it's a very interesting structure. Now if we pull back, we'll be able to see, I think the later imaging campaigns. I'm just going to grab my phone to check the time, how we're doing on time. Okay, I think an interest for this is that maybe we'll see this last image strip here. We'll go for one more. And I think what we'd like to do is switch gears and show you the Rosetta mission. Alex is going one second per second. So this is actual speed because at this point we're so close to Pluto that we're flying so fast that this image strip we're actually seeing in real time. And so here we see the spacecraft. We've enlarged the spacecraft by a bit and that's why we see all the sort of instrument you seem to come out from the center of the instead of out of the individual instruments it's coming out of the sort of geometric center of the model. I think this is great. Alex, if we want to switch gears and take a few seconds we will actually do a reload of open space to show you the Rosetta mission. And so in this case, over the last year the Rosetta mission which is an iron propulsion mission by the European Space Agency. Of course New Horizons was NASA but the Rosetta mission was off to the Comet Nucleus Comet 67P, Churyumov Jerosimenko and a comet that passed perihelion or closest to the sun I believe on August 18th of 2015 when I was in Singapore here we see the trajectory of the spacecraft approaching it's an iron drive but it also has rusters it's a very strange approach it's this triangular approach and so the location at the end of this strange triangular approach is Rosetta and then we see its view frustum in purple looking off to the Comet Nucleus and we purposely made the Comet Nucleus a model developed by Swedish amateur photogrammatist Mathias Malner, he shared this model with us is that we kept it great because we're going to do this image projection technique and so the first image is coming up and there we have the image and we show the full image also with the black boundary of space and we do that black boundary because later on the comet will be outgassing and so we wanted to be able to see the tail beyond it but as images are taken so here we see the object is rotating and then the next picture when that comes in will be flashed onto the Comet Nucleus and so this image projection technique that we perfected for Pluto okay can you hear us Roland? hopefully okay so I'll just keep talking so here we see the image both okay great I'm just getting a message that you can hear me excellent okay so we're going to move along now we want to show several pictures and so we're going to move ahead in time it's constantly taking pictures however when we did this visualization in the spring of last year the only pictures that were made available were on their blog and since then many pictures have been released but at the time the mission was helpful to us in giving us the exact times that these images were taken and a combination of the observational geometry system which NASA calls SPICE and also the European Space Agency uses allows us to know where the spacecraft is and how the object it's observing is rotating and so that we can reconstruct with this image projection in real time in open space this whole scenario and so here we're now seeing the higher resolution images as we get closer and we're directed onto the model so we're seeing the images in three-dimensional context and we wanted to do this to show how engineering the engineering of the mission enables the gathering of the science all of this has to be very carefully planned in fact the triangular approach was done because they weren't sure of the mass of the comet nucleus and so now we see the effect of the they're in close enough to see the gravitational effect and so the triangle becomes an arc and then finally an orbit and so they came in close and doing the tracking of the spacecraft by radio signals back to Earth they could judge the mass so that they could then come in very close to release Philae the little lander that they dropped off which is coming up and as we come in we have better images in a minute here but now we can see they're in the closest approach this is where they dropped Philae so that it would be attracted dropping it essentially down onto the surface and of course it bounced about a kilometer in height and the scale of this comet nucleus is about is about 25 kilometers I believe it's a small object but still if we were to be floating next to it it would seem quite large these high resolution images if we come in close we can actually see sand dunes right there Alex you can point out those little parallel ridges and these are sand dunes actually created by the outgassing on a world that does not have an atmosphere because it's too small to have an atmosphere the ice is in the comet when they warm up from the sun they blow out and so whatever dust has settled there gets pushed around by the jets and so that's what we're seeing here so we're seeing this combination of the imagery when we get in close so I think basically that allows that's a quick tour of what we're doing with open space for mission visualization in this case open space is designed really to take on data that from simulations and observations that's very dynamic in such an environment like this we have a lot of dynamics going on we have the rotation of the object we have the trajectory of the spacecraft we have where the spacecraft is looking resulting images this is an open source project we've just received NASA funding over the next five years to really develop this and we're very excited about this because this allows us to bring this to the world and because it's an open source non-commercial project it allows us to then put this on top of different vendor systems including at the science center and so I'd like to just turn this over for Alex to talk a little bit about the code and so anyway, thank you yes, thank you Carter I'm not exactly sure who's in the audience and where who I should address that to but Roland he said in the beginning about what part of it part of the software is open source and so for that part I can say everything except the spice cones which we got with the permission of the science team we haven't yet to release everything else is on github so you can go on github.com forward slash open space and just get hold of all of the source code and I guess that's the easiest way to get it and also we hope that we can get a lot of contributions from all over the world and perfecting the software so it's always the more people work on it the better of course and like Carter said open source software we're making it available for many more venues than would be possible with commercial software so for example our goal is to include it in different classrooms or smaller venues which might not have the turnover of people that can afford the commercial surface softwares to run it on a regular basis so I don't know if there's the opportunity for any questions but that's what I prefer someone throws us off the stage questions I'll have to type them but questions anyone can hear you no no questions from anyone in the room oh you can hear me yes excellent not even from the machine vision people no there's been a dark room alright I might be a comment oh sorry hang on Mike I was just curious what was the most challenging part so implementation perspective the most challenging part for the projection or for the rendering itself the entire project I think is the question for the entire project I think the biggest trouble is dealing with precision errors and floating point numbers if you want to represent the whole universe floating point numbers are not really cutting it so you have to start dealing with smarter with how you deal with how you set up your scene draft and how you traverse those things we have sort of a working progress solution but we have currently one analysis working on them so for example at the moment what we can do is you can still see the screen right yes yes yes so if we start zooming out and we go way outside of the solar system as Carter said the stars are all in their relative correct positions so if we start zooming out we can see that what we are actually is really environment but that's about the limit of the floating point position that we can currently handle and I think from a pure technical point of view that's the most difficult part what's up what's the place that's dynamic range what's the smallest to largest dimensions that it represents at the moment it's we have P the models are actually the lowest one then we increase them by a factor of thousands so it's in single digit parameter and then out to I'm not sure what the stars are a couple of hundred light years maybe you also want to scale it down in universe right yeah that's the ultimate goal yes but for that we need a smarter way to deal with the floating point and that's that's going to come up I wanted to just give a shout out to a big part of open space development a number of students have been working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center with a space weather modeling facility there that monitors the sun to actually for the very important prediction of where coronal mass ejection so solar flares are headed toward our billions of dollars of assets which are out across the solar system so many satellites now so looking at doing volumetric rendering interactively from the sun and the work to look at the process, astrophysical process of space weather can be applied to other astrophysical simulations perfecting those techniques which are really right at the edge of data visualization research with which Linshipping University in Sweden where Alex is getting his PhD is one of the pioneers in that field that now with the funding from open space we're also partnered with New York University and the University of Utah in the US with the scientific computing and imaging institute and so at this point this really is an international collaboration and our two new students from Linshipping that just arrived in New York can be working on glow browsing systems similar to Google Earth so we can zoom in on Earth, Moon, Mars and now Mercury so we have very good map so that we can continue this visualization adding in the scale graph technique to give us scaling across the universe we're also hoping to perfect that in this first year of the NASA funding funding us for the next five years alright well thank you I'm actually excited about it some other people will let us know but it's really cool thank you very much for joining us at this completely unsocial ally much appreciated we look forward to your next having an excuse to be in Singapore thank you very much