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Speaker 1: Protect your photos, music and documents and access to them

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Speaker 1: anywhere with Mosey by e m C the most trusted

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Speaker 1: name and cloud backup and now save ten percent with

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Speaker 1: promo code. Brain Stuff at mosey dot com gets started

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Speaker 1: today at m o z y dot com. Welcome to

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Speaker 1: brain Stuff from how Stuff works dot com where smart happens. Hi,

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Speaker 1: Am marciall Brain with today's question. Meteors burn up when

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Speaker 1: they hit the atmosphere. Why doesn't the space shuttle burn up?

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Speaker 1: When a small meteor enters the Earth's atmosphere, it goes

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Speaker 1: from traveling through a vacuum to traveling through air. Traveling

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Speaker 1: through a vacuum is effortless, it takes no energy at all,

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Speaker 1: but traveling through air is a completely different story. A

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Speaker 1: meteor moving through the vacuum space typically travels at speeds

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Speaker 1: reaching tens of thousands of miles per hour. When the

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Speaker 1: meteor hits our atmosphere, the air in front of it

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Speaker 1: compressed is incredibly quickly. When a gas is compressed, its

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Speaker 1: temperature rises. This causes the meteor to heat up so

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Speaker 1: much that it glows. The air burns the meteor until

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Speaker 1: there is nothing left. Re Entry temperatures can reach as

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Speaker 1: high as three thousand degrees fahrenheit. Obviously, it would not

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Speaker 1: be good for a spacecraft to burn up when it

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Speaker 1: re enters the atmosphere. Two technologies are used to allow

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Speaker 1: spacecraft to re enter. One is called a blade of

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Speaker 1: technology and the other is called insulating tile technology. In

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Speaker 1: a blade of technology, the surface of the heat shield

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Speaker 1: melts and vaporizes. In the process, the vapor carries away

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Speaker 1: a heat. This is the technology that protected the Apollo spacecraft.

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Speaker 1: The space shuttles are protected by special silica tiles. Silica

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Speaker 1: or s I O two is an incredible insulator. It's

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Speaker 1: possible to hold a space shuttle tile by the edge

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Speaker 1: and then heat up the center of the tile with

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Speaker 1: a blowtorch. The tile insulates so well that no heat

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Speaker 1: makes it to the outer edges. These tiles insulate so

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Speaker 1: well on the space shuttle that they keep the heat

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Speaker 1: of reentry from ever reaching the body of the spacecraft.

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Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics. Because

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Speaker 1: it how stuff works, dot Com, your photos, music and

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Speaker 1: documents are irreplaceable. Protect them with mosey by e m C,

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Speaker 1: brain stuff at mosey dot com, m o z y

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Speaker 1: dot com