Real Images of Saturn - What Did We Find?

[00:00:00]In 1969, the first man landed on the moon.

[00:00:04]To this day, man's space travel is not yet ready to look towards Mars or even other planets.

[00:00:10]But progress and technology, coupled with an indomitable thirst for knowledge, make it possible to explore the infinite vastness of the universe.

[00:00:19]Many years ago, probes were built and sent out to collect data and information about our solar system. In the search for knowledge and possible life outside the Earth, projects were created and the impossible made possible.

[00:00:32]Through measuring instruments and high-resolution cameras, astonishing knowledge about Saturn was collected during a 20-year mission.

[00:00:40]Saturn is not only the sixth planet in our solar system, but also the second largest [music] after its direct neighbor, Jupiter. With an approximate distance of 1.4 billion kilometers from the Sun to Saturn, the planet takes about 29 years and 166 [music] days to complete one orbit.

[00:00:58]The minimum distance to Earth is about 1.2 billion kilometers. The equatorial diameter is about 120,500 times the diameter of the Earth. The weight of Saturn is 95 Earth masses, which means the planet weighs the [music] same as 95 Earths.

[00:01:17]Because of its size, Saturn was discovered thousands of years ago and even before the telescope was invented.

[00:01:24]Its most famous feature is probably its rings, which gave Saturn the name ringed planet. The rings consist mainly of asteroids and water ice.

[00:01:33]The planet was named after the Roman god of harvest and its astronomical symbol represents the sickle of the god Saturn.

[00:01:41]Because its surface consists of over 95% hydrogen, Saturn is considered a gas planet.

[00:01:47]This property leads to a relatively low density. An Earth-like planet of this size would be many times heavier. Under the hydrogen layer, the metal layer begins with a thickness of about 14,000 km. Further inside, it is followed by a layer of ice 8,000 km wide.

[00:02:06]This high-pressure ice doesn't evaporate only because the upper layers exert such pressure on the ice layer.

[00:02:12]Temperatures of up to 13,000° C prevail here.

[00:02:17]What is the composition of the planet's atmosphere? Could we ever live on a gas planet?

[00:02:22]Hydrogen accounts for the majority of the composition, about 97%.

[00:02:27]The remaining 3% consists mainly of helium, methane, ammonia, and steam.

[00:02:33]The average temperature on the surface is 140° C.

[00:02:37]The The question of whether humans will ever settle on Saturn has therefore been answered.

[00:02:43]Saturn is simply not Earth-like enough for man, even after terraforming, to ever settle there.

[00:02:49]On Mars, this is much more likely.

[00:02:53]The interior of the ring planet consists of metallic iron and silicate materials.

[00:02:58]To date, 82 moons have been discovered in the orbit of the gas giant.

[00:03:03]No other planet in our solar system has more satellites than Saturn.

[00:03:08]The largest and also best-known moon is Titan, with a diameter of about 5,150 km.

[00:03:16]Titan is also the only moon in our solar system that has an atmosphere that consists mainly of nitrogen.

[00:03:22]On the surface, there are so-called methane seas, which consist of liquid hydrocarbon.

[00:03:28]Thus, Titan is also the only celestial body, apart from the Earth, on which accumulated liquid can be found.

[00:03:35]The Cassini and Huygens space probes.

[00:03:38]Maybe you remember?

[00:03:40]In October 1997, a Titan 4B rocket with [music] two probes on board was launched on Cape Canaveral.

[00:03:47]The two space probes, Cassini and Huygens, were specially built to study Saturn and its numerous moons.

[00:03:54]Cassini was an orbiter whose mission is to study the orbit of the planet.

[00:03:58]Huygens, on the other hand, was designed to land on Titan and study the satellite on its surface.

[00:04:03]After almost 7 years, the probes entered the orbit of the gas giant.

[00:04:09]As they traveled Saturn's rings, high-resolution photos were taken for the first time at close range.

[00:04:15]Images of the moon Phoebe could also be taken and showed deep craters.

[00:04:20]These could have been formed 4.5 billion years ago when the solar system was formed.

[00:04:25]During the flight through the rings, two unknown, relatively small moons were also discovered, which were provisionally named S/2004S1 and S/2004S2.

[00:04:38]On the Titan.

[00:04:40]On December 25th, 2004, Huygens was separated from Cassini by a blast and was able to start its landing approach to Titan.

[00:04:48]Barely 2 weeks later, the time had come, and after difficult turbulence, [music] Huygens landed on Saturn's largest satellite.

[00:04:55]The probe was able to transmit data from Titan's surface for just 72 minutes, but the information that could be obtained from this alone was extremely revealing.

[00:05:05]From an altitude of about 40 km, the probe was able to take pictures of [music] an incredible world.

[00:05:12]At first glance, the surface of the moon does not look too different from that of the Earth.

[00:05:17]Also, river courses show a strong similarity with rivers of the Earth.

[00:05:21]Added to this are the weather conditions, which also have similarities with our blue planet.

[00:05:26]During the landing approach, Huygens was surrounded by fog for almost the entire time, but it was transparent enough to allow photographs.

[00:05:34]The wind on Titan [music] had speeds of up to 450 km/h.

[00:05:40]With Huygens, it was possible for the first time to prove the existence of complex organic compounds.

[00:05:46]These are both gaseous and solid environments, especially valuable for science in the discovery of argon.

[00:05:53]This element indicates that geological changes have taken place and may still be taking place.

[00:06:00]Discoveries of new moons.

[00:06:04]In 2005, Cassini discovered another moon in the orbit of Saturn, Daphnis.

[00:06:10]In the same year, Cassini flew past the moon Hyperion for the first time and was able to take unique pictures of the satellite.

[00:06:18]Although it's not unusual for moons to be deformed in this way, given the size of this moon, it was unique.

[00:06:24]Hyperion is believed to be a fragment of a larger celestial body.

[00:06:29]This may have been caused by a meteorite impact.

[00:06:32]The crater Helios, with a depth of 10 km and a diameter of 120 km, indicates this.

[00:06:40]Pictures of the satellite Tethys, named after a titan of Greek mythology, are strongly reminiscent of the moon and our Earth.

[00:06:48]Both the round shape and the craters on the surface have much in common with the Earth's satellite.

[00:06:54]Our moon, however, has a diameter three times as large.

[00:06:58]In 2006, however, an as yet unknown ring of Saturn was discovered.

[00:07:04]The Equinox mission.

[00:07:06]On June 30th, 2008, the primary mission was completed with full success and the Equinox mission was launched. During this mission, the thickness of Saturn's rings was investigated.

[00:07:19]Saturn's brightest moon.

[00:07:22]The Solstice mission followed on October 10th, 2010.

[00:07:26]On the moon Enceladus, the first conditions for life were found in the form of a salt lake.

[00:07:31]Enceladus is mostly covered by water ice, but underneath, there is a warm ocean.

[00:07:38]The spectacular images also show bright blue stripes that look like giant rivers.

[00:07:43]These stripes are cracks in the ice through which water is ejected into space.

[00:07:49]The end of the mission.

[00:07:51]On September 15th, 2017, the fuel reserves ran out.

[00:07:56]Last data and pictures were sent to Earth.

[00:07:59]Then, the probe burned up upon entering Saturn's atmosphere.

[00:08:04]Real photos [music] of Saturn.

[00:08:08]With the Cassini probe, it was possible for the first time to take high-resolution photos of the incredible beauty of the planet.

[00:08:15]At a distance of 2.7 million kilometers, the camera captured the planet and its rings.

[00:08:21]A closer picture of the rings was taken in August 2009.

[00:08:25]The belts of Saturn looked as though they were painted. A seemingly divine order in the chaos of rocks and water ice.

[00:08:33]The North Pole.

[00:08:35]The photos of the gas planet show how clearly the North Pole stands out from the rest of the planet's surface.

[00:08:41]As if it were drawn and manually constructed, you can see the hexagonal shape of the pole clearly on the pictures.

[00:08:49]Storms on the planet.

[00:08:51]Thanks to Cassini, we witnessed an enormous tornado at the South Pole of the gas planet.

[00:08:57]Photos show the dark eye of the storm.

[00:09:00]Such a tornado could not be recorded on any other planet in our solar system so far.

[00:09:06]Lightning on Saturn could also be photographed.

[00:09:09]In 2011, a gigantic storm was discovered on the ringed planet. The storm was not only enormous in size, the lightning was brighter and 10,000 times stronger than the lightning on Earth.

[00:09:20]Cassini's equipment was more than just overtaxed. The intensity and frequency of the lightning was too much for the probe.

[00:09:27]The diameter of the storm was estimated at 100,000 kilometers.

[00:09:34]The day the Earth smiled.

[00:09:38]Another unique and incredible recording was made in 2013.

[00:09:42]In the shadow of Saturn, Cassini used a wide-angle camera to take a photo showing not only the Earth, but also Mars and Venus.

[00:09:51]In case you are wondering, the little blue dot is the Earth.

[00:09:55]In another photo, you can even see the Earth's moon.

[00:09:59]Saturn and Cassini.

[00:10:02]Saturn with its unique ring system has long been considered the outermost planet in the solar [music] system. From Earth, it is just barely visible with simple telescopes. In the Middle Ages, astronomers recognized the fine dust discs. Nevertheless, they did not know for a long time what this strange phenomenon meant. In 1610, Galileo Galilei was the first to recognize the rings, but he interpreted them [music] wrongly as handles, like for a mug. 45 years later, the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens was the first to recognize ring-shaped objects. Finally, in 1675, the Italian Giovanni Domenico Cassini was able to detect a whole series of rings [music] and concluded that they might be discs of very fine dust. No wonder then [music] that NASA scientists in the 20th century named the first dual probe to explore Saturn exclusively after the two pioneers of Saturn research. The Cassini-Huygens probe was launched from Cape Canaveral Cosmodrome on October 15th, 1997 and reached [music] Saturn's orbit after about 7 years. Soon after technology and the camera were ready to use, Cassini surprised people on Earth with its first snapshot. Saturn, photographed here from the night side, and a small part of its impressive ring system appear powerfully above a tiny bright dot. The small blue dot is our Earth as it looks from Saturn. From the first razor-sharp images, it was clear that the Cassini-Huygens mission would far surpass all previous images of Saturn and finally provide answers [music] to important questions. As early as the 1970s, scientists were impressed by the images the Voyager [music] probes and the Pioneer 11 mission radioed to Earth from Saturn. But those probes only snapped Saturn in flyby and of course, they were nowhere near the technical capabilities available for the Cassini mission in the late 1990s.

[00:12:03]The ring system.

[00:12:05]The primary goal of the Cassini mission was to explore Saturn's unique rings in more detail. Scientists on Earth hoped, among other things, to understand more about the formation processes of planets. Today, astronomers already know that stars and planets begin as simple clouds of dust and gas. For reasons unknown so far, these are set in motion and incredible forces form round bodies like planets and stars over millions of years. But here the researchers experienced a surprise right at the beginning of the Cassini mission because Saturn's ring system does not seem to arise from the early days of the solar system. On the contrary, [music] the probe's measurement data showed that the rings are comparatively young. They might be only 100 million years old while the solar system was formed about 4.5 billion years ago. On board the probe was an ultra-fine measurement system that could detect particle sizes [music] in the micrometer range within Saturn's rings using the wavelength of light coming from the Sun. The measurements confirmed that the rings are composed of dust, but larger particles, chunks of ice, and lumps of rock up to the size of a house also occur. Cassini was also the first spacecraft to determine that Saturn's ring system consists of hundreds of individual [music] rings and not, as previously assumed, about four large rings. In total, the ring system is 174,000 mi wide, but only about 1,600 ft thick.

[00:13:34]How the dust, rock, and countless moons came under Saturn's spell remains an open question. Researchers only recently announced that Saturn's rings remain an astronomical and physical mystery to this day, despite the successes of the Cassini mission. Thanks to the latest space telescopes and improved observational capabilities, astronomers have now been able to identify even the finest rings around Jupiter and Uranus.

[00:14:00]But these are so paper thin that they are barely visible to the naked eye.

[00:14:04]Saturn's rings, on the other hand, are gigantic and easily visible compared to the delicate dust discs of the other gas giants. In particular, the rings with larger components could have resulted from the collision of Saturn's moons or smaller comets near Saturn. At the same time, researchers suspect that new moons have formed within the rings. When Cassini captured this nighttime image of Saturn with the ring system and solar radiation in the background, astronomers [music] on Earth again held their breath. The outer glow, a ring of almost blue color, and the size of the ring left scientists speechless. Never before had a human seen this outer ring of Saturn, and as a result, the Cassini spacecraft was even able to provide a very good answer as to how this bluish halo around Saturn is formed.

[00:14:54]Saturn's moons.

[00:14:56]To learn more about the rings, their formation and nature, Cassini next had to tackle Saturn's moons. Never before had a probe provided such good photos of Saturn's moons. Saturn has more than 60 true moons and countless other smaller and sometimes very misshapen formations around it. The largest Saturn moon by far is Titan, at 3,200 mi in diameter.

[00:15:20]Titan is about 50% larger than the [music] Earth's moon. Other known moons of Saturn are the Yin-Yang moon, Iapetus, and the second largest Saturn moon, Rhea. As Cassini approached the icy moon Enceladus, astronomers got another surprise. [music] Thanks to the ultra-fine spectrometers aboard the Cassini probes, the moons could not only be photographed, but also analyzed for the first time. Under Enceladus' icy surface, the researchers found evidence of more than 100 hot springs. These springs ensure that the moon, which measures about [music] 310 miles in diameter, constantly emits a mist of tiny ice particles into the surrounding area, thus forming Saturn's fascinating blue outermost E ring. It was astonishing that a comparatively small moon with a few hot springs should form what is probably the brightest blue feature in the solar system.

[00:16:16]The Huygens mission.

[00:16:18]On January 14th, 2005, the Cassini spacecraft separated from the Huygens lander. The probe's destination was the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. A few years earlier, the Hubble Space Telescope had found evidence of water, lakes, and oceans on Saturn's largest moon. This made Titan one of the hot candidates for extraterrestrial life.

[00:16:41]Huygens was the first probe to land on another planet's moon. Titan wraps itself in a dense layer of clouds.

[00:16:47]Huygens flew through [music] the clouds and revealed a brownish-yellow rocky world with mountains and [music] valleys, but traces of life were unfortunately not visible in the images.

[00:17:00]Saturn's North Pole.

[00:17:02]Cassini, meanwhile, continued its orbit around Saturn and next set its sights on the gas giant itself. Saturn, like all other gas planets, probably has no solid surface, but possibly [music] a core of rock. We don't know exactly, however, because no one has ever been able to look inside the gas planets. All we can see are the outer layers of the atmosphere or gigantic storms of gas clouds. Saturn looks like an almost eerily quiet [music] world in most of the images, but this impression is deceptive. In the upper layers, storms rage at speeds of hundreds of miles per hour. Saturn's atmosphere consists mainly of the elements hydrogen, helium, >> [music] >> methane, and ammonia. The second largest planet in the solar system has a north and a south pole and rotates around its own axis so fast that its poles are compressed and flattened. The extreme forces at work on or in the gaseous planet are another mystery that scientists on Earth would like to solve.

[00:18:00]It is still not clear how these gigantic accumulations of gas and dust are held together and why they form optically almost perfect spherical shapes. As on Jupiter's surface, there are also storms of gas clouds on Saturn, which have been raging for several thousand years. By far the most beautiful and unique of these storms is located exactly above Saturn's North Pole. Cassini was able to provide detailed photos and measurement data of the processes inside this storm for the first time. This vortex of clouds and gases was first discovered in the 1980s by the Voyager space probes.

[00:18:40]Fascinatingly, at some distance from the circular center of the storm, a perfect hexagon forms. In total, this hexagon has a diameter of over 15,000 miles. The perfect geometric shape most likely originates from magnetic forces of Saturn. This storm had another surprise in store. [music] Normally, the dense atmosphere of hydrogen and helium hardly allows a closer look inside Saturn, but in the center of the hexagonal storm, a hole occasionally forms. And what the researchers could see there raised [music] many new questions. In fact, this hole, about 120 miles wide, shows evidence that beneath the thick layers of clouds and gases is a brilliant [music] blue sky. By the way, there is also an external storm raging at Saturn's South Pole, and there is a so-called eye to it, but no hexagonal shape.

[00:19:33]Cassini's brilliant [music] end.

[00:19:36]For 13 years, Cassini orbited Saturn, providing images, surveying Saturn's surface, photographing Saturn's moons, and bringing Huygens to its crash site above Titan. By September 2017, Cassini was slowly running out of fuel. It was also clear that the spacecraft was getting closer and closer to Saturn as it orbited. Its impending destruction in Saturn's gravitational field was no surprise, but NASA did not want [music] to leave it to Saturn to arbitrarily crush the hero Cassini. The scientists had come up with a special ending for the probe. Starting on September 11th, the final phase was initiated. In its last days, Cassini photographed Saturn's moon Daphnis, which causes strange ripples in the rings. Then Cassini took one last look at the icy moon Enceladus before Saturn, illuminated by the sun, moved in front of the lens. The spacecraft's final look was aimed directly at the area over which it was to crash. From this point on, the probe's cameras [music] were turned off.

[00:20:41]The remaining fuel was to be used to arm Cassini for its final mission. On Earth, scientists activated a program [music] to stabilize the probe. Cassini was to provide measurement data for as long as possible as it plunged into Saturn's atmosphere. No one on Earth could know how long Cassini could withstand the extreme pressure and how far [music] the probe would penetrate Saturn's interior.

[00:21:05]For hours, the researchers continued to receive data from the ionosphere, measurement data from dust particles in the atmosphere, and Saturn's magnetic fields. Then suddenly, it was silent.

[00:21:18]Cassini had burned up as it entered Saturn's denser [music] atmosphere. On Earth, a 20-year mission ended in those hours. Cassini collected 635 bits of data during this time. So far, this has resulted in 4,000 scientific papers and discoveries about Saturn. And to this day, NASA has not yet evaluated all the discoveries and measurement data.

[00:21:41]Meanwhile, a new Saturn mission is already planned. The icy moon, Enceladus, is to be examined in detail starting in 2040. German engineers are currently building a gigantic drill for this purpose. With its help, geologists and astronomers [music] hope to unravel the mystery of the water occurrences on Enceladus. And who knows? Perhaps traces of organic life will be found [music] in the depths of the moon. We hope you enjoyed this trip to the gas giant Saturn and its moons. Finally, tell us how you like the images from the Cassini mission. Do you have an explanation for the formation of Saturn's rings? And what do you think about the storm over the North Pole and the assumption that Saturn has a bright blue sky beneath its hellish outer layers? We welcome your opinions and discussions on the topic in the comments. [music]