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As a kid, I was fascinated with all things air and space.

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I would watch Nova on PBS.

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Our school would show Bill Nye the Science Guy.

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When I was in elementary school, my next door neighbor,

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he gave me a book for my birthday.

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It was an astronomy book,

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and I poured over that thing for hours on end,

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and it was a combination of all these things

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that inspired me to pursue space exploration

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as my own personal dream, and part of that dream was,

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I always wanted to just fly around the solar system

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and visit different planets and visit moons and spacecraft.

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Well, a number of years later, I graduated from UCLA

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and I found myself at NASA,

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working for the jet propulsion laboratory,

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and there our team was challenged

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to create a 3D visualization of the solar system,

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and today I want to show you what we've done so far.

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Now, the kicker is, everything I'm about to do here

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you can do at home, because we built this

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for the public for you guys to use.

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So what you're looking at right now is the Earth.

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You can see the United States and California

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and San Diego, and you can use the mouse

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or the keyboard to spin things around.

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Now, this isn't new. Anyone who's used Google Earth

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has seen this before, but one thing we like to say

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in our group is, we do the opposite of Google Earth.

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Google Earth goes from this view down to your backyard.

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We go from this view out to the stars.

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So the Earth is cool, but what we really want to show

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are the spacecraft,

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so I'm going to bring the interface back up,

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and now you're looking at a number of satellites

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orbiting the Earth.

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These are a number of our science space Earth orbiters.

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We haven't included military satellites and weather satellites

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and communication satellites and reconnaissance satellites.

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If we did, it would be a complete mess,

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because there's a lot of stuff out there.

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And the cool thing is, we actually created 3D models

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for a number of these spacecraft, so if you want to visit

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any of these, all you need to do is double-click on them.

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So I'm going to find the International Space Station,

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double-click, and it will take us all the way down to the ISS.

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And now you're riding along with the ISS

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where it is right now.

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And the other cool thing is, not only can we

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move the camera around, we can also control time,

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so I can slide this jog dial here

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to shuttle time forward, and now

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we can see what a sunset on the ISS would look like,

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and they get one every 90 minutes. (Laughter)

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All right, so what about the rest of it?

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Well, I can click on this home button over here,

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and that will take us up to the inner solar system,

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and now we're looking at the rest of the solar system.

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You can see, there's Saturn, there's Jupiter,

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and while we're here, I want to point out something.

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It's actually pretty busy.

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Here we have the Mars Science Laboratory

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on its way to Mars, just launched last weekend.

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Here we have Juno on its cruise to Jupiter, there.

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We have Dawn orbiting Vesta,

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and we have over here New Horizons

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on a straight shot to Pluto.

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And I mention this because

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there's this strange public perception that

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NASA's dead, that the space shuttles stopped flying

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and all of the sudden there's no more spacecraft out there.

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Well, a lot of what NASA does is robotic exploration,

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and we have a lot of spacecraft out there.

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Granted, we're not sending humans up at the moment,

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well at least with our own launch vehicles,

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but NASA is far from dead,

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and one of the reasons why we write a program like this

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is so that people realize that there's so many other things

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that we're doing.

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Anyway, while we're here, again,

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if you want to visit anything,

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all you need to do is double-click.

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So I'm just going to double-click on Vesta,

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and here we have Dawn orbiting Vesta,

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and this is happening right now.

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I'm going to double-click on Uranus, and we can see

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Uranus rotating on its side along with its moons.

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You can see how it's tilted at about 89 degrees.

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And just being able to visit different places

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and go through different times,

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we have data from 1950 to 2050.

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Granted, we don't have everything in between,

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because some of the data is hard to get.

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Just being able to visit places in different times,

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you can explore this for hours,

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literally hours on end,

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but I want to show you one thing in particular,

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so I'm going to open up the destination tab,

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spacecraft outer planet missions, Voyager 1,

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and I'm going to bring up the Titan flyby.

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So now we've gone back in time.

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We're now riding along with Voyager 1.

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The date here is November 11, 1980.

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Now, there's a funny thing going on here.

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It doesn't look like anything's going on.

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It looks like I've paused the program.

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It's actually running at real rate right now,

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one second per second, and in fact,

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Voyager 1 here is flying by Titan at

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I think it's 38,000 miles per hour.

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It only looks like nothing's moving because, well,

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Saturn here is 700,000 miles away,

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and Titan here is 4,000 to 5,000 miles away.

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It's just the vastness of space makes it look like nothing's happening.

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But to make it more interesting,

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I'm going to speed up time, and we can watch

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as Voyager 1 flies by Titan,

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which is a hazy moon of Saturn.

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It actually has a very thick atmosphere.

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And I'm going to recenter the camera on Saturn, here.

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I'm going to pull out, and I want to show you

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Voyager 1 as it flies by Saturn.

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There's a point to be made here.

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With a 3D visualization like this,

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we can not only just say Voyager 1 flew by Saturn.

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There's a whole story to tell here.

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And even better, because it's an interactive application,

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you can tell the story for yourself.

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If you want to pause it, you can pause it.

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If you want to keep going, if you want to change

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the camera angle, you can do that,

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and because of that, I can show you

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that Voyager 1 doesn't just fly by Saturn.

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It actually flies underneath Saturn.

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Now, what happens is, as it flies underneath Saturn,

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Saturn grabs it gravitationally and flings it up

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and out of the solar system,

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so if I just keep letting this go,

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you can see Voyager 1 fly up like that.

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And, in fact, I'm going to go back to the solar system.

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I'm going to go back to today, now,

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and I want to show you where Voyager 1 is.

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Right there, above, way above the solar system,

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way beyond our solar system.

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And here's the thing. Now you know how it got there.

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Now you know why, and to me,

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that's the point of this program.

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You can manipulate it yourself.

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You can fly around yourself and you can learn for yourself.

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You know, the theme today is "The World In Your Grasp."

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Well, we're trying to give you

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the solar system in your grasp — (Laughter) —

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and we hope once it's there,

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you'll be able to learn for yourself

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what we've done out there, and what we're about to do.

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And my personal dream is for kids to take this

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and explore and see the wonders out there

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and be inspired, as I was as a kid,

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to pursue STEM education

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and to pursue a dream in space exploration.

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Thank you. (Applause)