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(ominous music)
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- [Rosaly] Venus is
really a hellish place.
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- [Geoff] The surface
temperature is 450 degrees.
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None of our electronics will work.
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- [Tony] You try to put something
on the surface of Venus,
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and it's destroyed in a few minutes.
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(ominous music intensifies)
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- Venus has the densest atmosphere
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of all the solid bodies
in the solar system.
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Venus' surface temperature is
hotter even than Mercury's,
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and Mercury's closer to the sun.
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It's because of this atmosphere
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that really keeps the heat in.
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- The surface of Venus
is a ferocious place.
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It is 90 times the atmospheric
pressure of the Earth.
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That's like the pressure of
one kilometer under the ocean.
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But a temperature of 450 celsius,
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that's like the temperature of your oven
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when you're running the self-clean cycle.
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(thunder rumbling)
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- The surface of Venus is
hot enough to melt lead,
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so it is about as miserable looking
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and miserable feeling a place
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as you could imagine experiencing
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if you could stand on the surface.
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- You would feel very sluggish.
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You would not move very quickly,
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and if a gust of wind came
it would be very powerful.
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It could knock you over.
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It would also be very dim
because it only receives
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about 3% of the incident sunlight
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that it receives at the
top of the atmosphere,
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because the atmosphere is so thick,
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a bit reddish, we believe,
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from the Venera probes and the Vega probes
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that went to the surface
and took pictures of it.
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- How do you make a power system
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for the surface of Venus?
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That turns out to be hard.
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Not only is it hot, but it's cloudy.
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There's not much solar energy.
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- Venus does have some
solar power on the surface,
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although it's a fraction
of what is available
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here on Earth is actually
available on the surface of Venus
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due to the thick cloud layers,
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due to also the red shifting of the light,
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and that solar panels
don't work as efficiently.
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The other big challenge
with using solar on Venus
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is that Venus has a very
long night, about 60 days.
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You would have to go 60 Earth
days, that is, without power.
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Therefore, one of the places
we're looking to get energy
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is from the wind.
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Venus has a very thick atmosphere.
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Collect that with a wind turbine
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and then directly transfer that
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to the wheels to drive you
at low speed, high torque.
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- Could we perhaps make
a rover that has a sail,
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so the sail propels it across the surface?
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The Venus land sailer concept that we have
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is a mission design we
made called the Zephyr
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that sails on the surface of Venus
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instead of running on a motor.
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We can make the sail
out of a silica-woven,
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fiberglass-like sheet,
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and we think that we can make
high-temperature materials
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that can operate on the surface.
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The worst problem we have here
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is that none of our electronics will work.
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The longest-lived probe
for the surface of Venus
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has been just a little over two hours,
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and that's the time it takes
for the heat to soak in
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and begin to destroy the electronics.
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So we don't use conventional silicon.
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We use a new semiconductor
called silicon carbide
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that can operate at these temperatures.
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- Well, vacuum tube and vacuum tube-based
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electronic approaches
actually work really well
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at high temperatures, unlike
modern systems on a chip.
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The problem with that,
though, is the high pressure
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makes it challenging
to maintain that vacuum
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for an extended duration.
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And how you do a rover that's
much simpler and more basic
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than what your current rovers are for Mars
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because of the limitations
of those electronics,
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we sort of took a look back and thought
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what would it look like if
we were designing a rover
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but designing it back in the 40s or 50s?
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What if we just throw all the
electronics off the spread,
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just make the whole thing mechanical?
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Make it all "Strandbeests" like
Theo Jansen's "Strandbeests"
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or all steampunk, or even go back
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to the Antikythera mechanism,
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which is a mechanical computer
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that the Greeks developed
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in about 200 B.C. or so,
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what would you end up getting?
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How do we do not just the
rover drive system mechanically
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but let's make all our
measurements mechanical as well,
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like sort of an old clock
spring-style thermostat?
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So this is a clock that is fully made
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out of stainless steel.
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It's been baked out at 460 degrees Celsius
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and has been operated in an oven.
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If we build everything
out of off-the-shelf
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300 series stainless steel,
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the coefficient of thermal expansion
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would be close enough that
even when you're going
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to extreme temperatures like Venus,
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the entire assembly would just expand
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and contract together, and
you wouldn't get jamming.
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And by using graphalloy bushings
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at each of the bearing surfaces,
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we could actually get it to run
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at Venus conditions.
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(metal ticking)
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(gentle music)
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- So far, the electronics
that we can make on Venus
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are not as sophisticated
as the electronics
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you can make on Earth.
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We can make very simple calculators
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but we can't make whole computers.
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So right now, when we talk about systems
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that can land on Venus, we have
the sensors on the surface,
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we have the radio on the surface,
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but most of the processing power,
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most of the computers, most of the things
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that run the mission
would be high overhead.
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We could either put them
perhaps in an airplane
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that's flying 50 kilometers above
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or maybe in a satellite,
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and it controls the probe on the surface,
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almost like you would be controlling
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a radio-controlled car.
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We could send a probe to Venus
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that would be an airplane,
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not just a balloon floating passively
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in the atmosphere of Venus,
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but we want to make a
solar-powered airplane.
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And a solar-powered airplane
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in principle could fly forever,
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as long as we can fly
faster than that wind
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so we can stay in the sunlight.
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(propellers flapping in wind)
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- If we could get an aircraft to Venus,
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it will fly, especially if it's
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semi-buoyant so that when
it gets to the night side
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it can just glide and not
sink down to the surface.
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And when the time comes it
may sink down to the surface
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and we might get a profile all
the way down to the planet.
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Some folks at Northrop Grumman
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have designed a concept which
is a semi-buoyant airplane.
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It's called a Venus Atmospheric
Maneuverable Platform.
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And that could survive for a few months.
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It's solar powered, it's filled
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with a light gas, either hydrogen, helium.
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You can have solar panels
on the top and the bottom
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because when you're in
the middle of the clouds
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there's so much light scattering that
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it doesn't matter where you collect
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the solar energy from
because it's very diffused.
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- Oh off in the clouds of Venus
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is actually a great place to be.
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If you're at about 50 kilometers
or so above the surface
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your temperature and your pressure
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are very similar to what
it is here on Earth.
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In fact, it's probably
the most Earth-like place
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in the solar system.
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However, there is sulfuric-acid rain
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that you have to deal with,
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but with the proper coatings,
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you can deal with that.
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Personally, I love the idea
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of a human-crewed mission
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to a cloud-city on Venus
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and love the idea that you
would just need to wear
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some type of suit that would provide you
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with oxygen to breathe as well as also
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a protection from the chemical air,
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but you wouldn't necessarily
need a pressure suit as well.
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That being said, humans
tend to not like the idea
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of not being able to be on firm ground,
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and the idea that you
have to stay floating
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above the clouds, above
this furnace, essentially,
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in some ways is a hard sell.
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The other key challenge
that we have with Venus
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is how to return to orbit
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and basically get back off the planet,
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as you don't have a large
launch infrastructure
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that you could use so you have
to look at another approach
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for getting back out of Venus orbit.
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(majestic orchestral music)
14263
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