Space Probes: The Outer Planets | Free Documentary Space

[00:00:03]In the 1970s, [music] we sent them to the outer planets, thinking they might last [music] 5 years.

[00:00:10]40 years later, two little machines called Voyager with hearts of gold are still going strong.

[00:00:18]>> I have to say, you know, Voyager is sort of the love of my life.

[00:00:23]>> And they're still phoning home with new answers to our cosmic questions.

[00:00:29]These are the stories of a lonely blue marble sending its intrepid little machines to places no human can yet go to the far ends of the solar system and beyond.

[00:00:49]In 1964, as the world was riveted by the race to the moon, a graduate student named Gary Flagro noticed something that would ultimately take us far beyond the moon.

[00:01:02]The planets of the outer solar system were spinning towards [music] a rare alignment that would make it possible in theory to hurl something off of Earth and have it slingshot [music] past all the outer planets of the solar system.

[00:01:16]Best of all, the craft could be sent close enough to each planet to get whipped by gravity to higher and higher speeds using almost no fuel.

[00:01:27]It was called the Grand Tour and it wouldn't happen again for quite a while.

[00:01:32]>> The Grand Tour was a opportunity that [music] happens once every 176 years when Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are all lined up so a spacecraft can fly by all four in its journey.

[00:01:44]It was a chance NASA couldn't pass up, >> but it was much too expensive for everything that was trying to be done by NASA at the [music] time. Uh, and they scaled it back to just a 4-year mission to Jupiter and Saturn.

[00:01:57]>> Unofficially, they never gave up on the idea of a full grand tour [music] to Uranus and Neptune. They just kept their heads down and [music] tried to engineer the living daylights out of the Voyagers just in case.

[00:02:14]Voyagers 1 and two [music] are identical spacecraft made up of 65,000 separate parts.

[00:02:22]Each is equipped with instruments to [music] conduct 10 different experiments, including television cameras, infrared and UV sensors, magnetometers, [music] and particle sensors.

[00:02:38]Each could radio information directly to Earth or record data for sending later on an eighttrack tape. How 70s is that?

[00:02:52]Each craft weighed about the same as a two-seater smart car. One that would have to be accelerated to 25,000 mph to escape the Earth's gravity.

[00:03:04]So weeks apart in late summer 1977, Titan Centaur rockets prepared to tear away from Cape Canaveral with their little charges aboard.

[00:03:17]Voyager 2 left first, but Voyager 1 was sent on a more direct route, meaning it would reach the outer planets weeks ahead of its twin.

[00:03:31]Star Wars had taken the world by storm and two dropouts in a garage had invented a personal computer named Apple.

[00:03:46]The Voyagers had [music] mothers who would be in charge of their dayto-day care and feeding. Actually, the minutely detailed lines of code telling them exactly what to do. among them, Linda Spilker.

[00:03:59]>> I felt [music] very maternal toward Voyager, and I know if anything would go wrong with Voyager, we'd all worry until we got that signal back and the the sign that everything is okay and we're ready to go on >> and later Susie Dodd.

[00:04:14]>> It was super exciting. This is my first job out of college and during the time of the encounters uh all the scientists came Carl Sean was here and they would all come to JPL and look at the data as it was coming down.

[00:04:29]>> The Voyager's first encounters with Jupiter would take place during the spring and summer of 1979.

[00:04:38]Jupiter is a [music] very dangerous place.

[00:04:43]The radiation was pinging the clock that controlled the camera and putting it out of sync with the clock that controlled the exposure.

[00:04:52]The engineers at JPL managed [music] to come up with a workound, and everyone held their breaths as Jupiter got larger and larger in the images.

[00:05:05]The Great Red Spot discovered 300 years earlier turned out to be not one storm but hundreds swirling within and around a giant [music] multicolored vortex more than three Earths across.

[00:05:20]As we [music] started 30 days out from Jupiter began to make a movie of the very complex storm systems in Jupiter's atmosphere. And the great red spot is just the largest hurricane-like object.

[00:05:30]And there literally dozens of these storms in this giant planet. And that was our first [music] taste of the discovery that was waiting for us.

[00:05:42]As Voyager 1 swung through the system at 35,000 mph, JPL went wild at the quality of the images.

[00:05:51]But if Jupiter had amazed them, the real shock would come from the giant planet's moons.

[00:05:58]Io is Jupiter's innermost moon. A close look at the images revealed the driest object in the solar system.

[00:06:07]But nobody was prepared for what showed up next.

[00:06:12]And it took a graduate student who was looking in the details of the images and saw this big arc and she said, "Hey, come and look at this." And people said, "Oh my god, volcano."

[00:06:35]>> It had eight active volcanoes when Gorge flew by. It has 10 times [music] more volcanic activity than the Earth, even though it's just a small moon and lakes of hot [music] lava on its surface.

[00:06:47]>> Let's not forget that before the Voyager encounter with Jupiter and its moons, the only example of volcanoes we knew about was Earth.

[00:06:57]>> How was it possible that this moon so far from the sun in the deep cold was erupting hot lava? Scientists had just started theorizing that the incredible push and pull of Jupiter's gravity would squish [music] and stretch the moons, heating them up. And boy, did they.

[00:07:19]The [music] team didn't think they would run across other discoveries that were that outrageous in the Jovian system.

[00:07:25]But Voyager's [music] images at Jupiter's second closest big moon, Europa, were a shock as well.

[00:07:32]It was smooth as a bowling ball, but scratched. It [music] looked like the surface consisted of millions of little plates. Sort of what you would see when an ice pack is breaking up [music] during the spring.

[00:07:46]Could they possibly be skating over an ocean?

[00:07:55]You have all the ingredients that we now know constitute the elements of life.

[00:08:01]You have water, you got apparently organic material, and you've got a source of energy, which is the heat generated [music] by the gravitational pool from Europa and Jupiter and Io that that continuously charms this underground under ice.

[00:08:25]>> And the other moons followed suit.

[00:08:28]Europa, Ganymede, and possibly even Kalisto appear to have vast oceans of liquid water under relatively thin shells of ice where scientists had expected dark, dead, cratered moons like our own. They found mysteriously dynamic worlds and discovered that it didn't have three rings, it had thousands.

[00:08:57]Some with spokes, some that twisted and braided in ways that stumped the scientists.

[00:09:05]The shimmering rings were made up of tiny grains of water ice and were unbelievably thin.

[00:09:14]For comparison, [music] if Saturn were shrunk down to the size of a basketball, then the thickness of the rings would be about 1250th the width of a human hair.

[00:09:28]We didn't know what the rings would look like. We thought we'd see bland sheets of material separated by gaps. But instead, we found incredible, wonderful, detailed structure. And I remember in those days, you didn't have a computer screen where you could call up a a picture of the rings, and instead you had to get the data and plot it out on this long roll of paper. And I remember taking those rolls and unrolling it in the hall and just walking slowly looking down thinking, I'm walking through the rings of Saturn. And what a wonderful feeling.

[00:10:04]Having finished its official mission, Voyager 1 was slung up and out of the plane of the solar system.

[00:10:11]This cleared the way for what everyone had been secretly hoping. that Voyager 2 could complete the Grand Tour and visit more planets after Saturn, but only by sending it careening dangerously close to Saturn's surface to make a hard left toward Uranus.

[00:10:42]Voyager 2 emerged from behind the planet, directly on course and accelerating like mad. Thanks to the gravity boost from the close flyby.

[00:10:55]5 years after the Saturn flyby, they were ready for Uranus.

[00:11:00]Voyager 2 would fly through the bullseye of its system like an arrow [music] at 51,000 mph.

[00:11:08]passing close to the innermost moon.

[00:11:11]Tiny Miranda.

[00:11:19]The Uranus flyby [music] and images completely surpassed what JPL had hoped for.

[00:11:25]Voyager 2 was now 5 years beyond her original mission all those years ago.

[00:11:30]The engineers secret plans to keep the probe going through the Grand Tour were paying off.

[00:11:37]And now Voyager 2 was headed towards its last planet, Neptune.

[00:11:44]It arrived [music] just 62 m off its target just above Neptune after traveling [music] 4.4 billion miles.

[00:11:56]The movies of The Approach are eerie.

[00:12:03]And when small white clouds came into view, it confirmed another giant Earth-sized storm system.

[00:12:12]With that last flyby, Voyager 2 was hurled slightly south of the plane of the solar system on its own search for interstellar [music] space.

[00:12:22]>> For the team at JPL, it was a bittersweet time.

[00:12:26]You were all excited. The press was here, was in the news all the time. It was very thrilling. And then >> the press kind of left and the news died down. And you still had the spacecraft, but [music] you're kind of sad. It was now off going out into the cold, dark [music] space on its own alone.

[00:12:48]Now [music] more than 10 billion miles away, they're waving a long goodbye to our solar system.

[00:12:57]Yeah, one day it's going to be [music] a very sad day, but one day we will expect to hear from the spacecraft and we won't hear from it anymore.

[00:13:06]And we will send a lot of commands from the ground to try and recover it. But eventually, it won't have enough power for the transmitter and so it'll just stop [music] transmitting data and then it will just be our silent ambassador traveling around [music] the center of the Milky Way galaxy. But it's still on a big adventure. It's just that I won't get to know what that adventure is.

[00:13:31]>> This kind of adventure doesn't happen often in human affairs. And I think Voyager is the the Columbus, if you like, of the space era of discovery.

[00:13:52]She's the coolest. hottest, most complex, and most expensive [music] probe we've ever sent out there into the wild blue yonder.

[00:14:01]Technically, in Federation terms, Cassini is a flagship class NASA issa ASI robotic spacecraft built and controlled by people from 17 nations.

[00:14:17]Before we shot her out to Saturn, all we had had were glimpses of the jewel of our solar system.

[00:14:26]But Cassini would be the first to get to Saturn and stay and stay and stay.

[00:14:33]Slated for a 4-year mission, she just will not give up. And she's still out there 8 years after her expiration [music] date. And the pictures she's sending back keep bringing scientists to tears.

[00:14:47]She's rewritten the textbooks [music] about Saturn, the rings, the moons, Titan. So many things have [music] changed because of Cassini. Program is in and liftoff of the Cassini spacecraft on a billion mile trip to Saturn. Her journey started on October 15th, 1997 as a Titan 4B Centaur rocket tore into the night sky, bearing the precious bus-sized probe and slinging her into a crazy 7-year flight path, which sent [music] her pinwheeling through the inner planets.

[00:15:26]Finally, in 2004, Cassini started sending [music] back her first detailed pictures of Saturn as she made her approach here. [music] We had to do a 96-minute burn to get Cassini [music] safely into orbit. And I remember waiting and waiting. And of course, if an instrument doesn't work quite right, I worry about her. And part of the burn was when she was behind the planet. So we had to wait and wait and wait.

[00:15:58]>> The Doppler has flattened out.

[00:16:00][screaming] >> Finally that signal came out and it was just exactly on the plot and we all applauded and such tremendous relief.

[00:16:11]>> Okay, we have burn complete here. Four years for this moment.

[00:16:22]Now began a decade of orbits, a tango of discovery unlike [music] anything any spacecraft had done before.

[00:16:31]Skimming Saturn's moons and rings and getting her dance partner ready for its closeup.

[00:16:42]Saturn itself was ablaze with storms of unimaginable force.

[00:16:47]The place crackled with giant lightning strikes.

[00:16:54]A gorgeous aurora at the [music] South Pole created by its enormous magneettosphere and invisible explosions of charged gases through that magneettosphere that Cassini made visible.

[00:17:09]The rings were even more dazzling than any had imagined, stretching across hundreds of thousands of miles, yet sometimes only 10 ft thick.

[00:17:21]They're made of particles of pure water ice, some microscopic, some the size of mountains.

[00:17:39]We used to think of rings as these individual particles kind of bumping into each other and sort of floating around in space. And we now know that the bulk of Saturn's main rings, the particles actually stick together and they form these long strands that we call wakes. [music] And that these wakes line up like the rows of a marching band.

[00:18:02]>> [music] >> They have grooves if you like like an oldfashioned record created as wakes [music] of moons which are orbiting.

[00:18:10]Some of them the moons are in the rings.

[00:18:12]Some of those moons are [music] outside the rings and these waves give an interesting texture.

[00:18:20]They break apart [music] and they reform. So there's this beautiful cosmic dance going on inside the rings.

[00:18:29]For the next eight months, [music] Cassini whirled back and forth across an unimaginably beautiful spacecape.

[00:18:52]Then Cassini started arcing toward Titan, Saturn's largest moon and the one that had long held scientists spellbound.

[00:19:03]All these years, Cassini had carried a hitchhiker with her, a little lander called Huygens that was set to become the first probe to land on a moon other than our own.

[00:19:17]Because Titan had an atmosphere and atmospheres have implications.

[00:19:25]>> Titan has a really dense atmosphere, a denser atmosphere than here on Earth, nitrogen like here on Earth. But methane, natural gas, which is being converted into complex organic molecules by sunlight and radiation. And the chemistry [music] that's occurring in Titan's atmosphere today may resemble what Earth [music] was like before life evolved and created the oxygen we all breathe.

[00:19:50]>> On Christmas Eve 2004, Cassini cut the apron strings on the little Huygens's craft, the brainchild of the European Space Agency.

[00:20:03]Three weeks later, scientists around the world held their collective breaths as the little craft dropped toward Titan's surface.

[00:20:13]You could almost imagine if you're riding along with the probe, you go slam into the atmosphere of [music] Titan. A giant parachute pops up and now the heat shield falls away and your instruments are dangling there. You're basically sort of sensing and smelling and measuring the atmosphere around you and your cameras are looking around to the sides and looking down.

[00:20:35]We just saw more and more haze and fog and haze and haze until finally the probe broke through that haze and we got to see the surface of Titan for the first time.

[00:20:51]>> [music] [music] >> The surface of Titan was strangely familiar and utterly bizarre at the same time.

[00:21:09]The little craft seemed to have landed on the equivalent of a mud flat or shoreline with little ice pebbles scattered around.

[00:21:18]But on the negative 350° surface of Titan, these pebbles were made of methane ice. The nearby lake, a lake of methane.

[00:21:30]And then Cassini went into orbit around Titan and revealed with his radar system that there indeed are lakes of liquid natural gas and other molecules on the surface of Titan. They evaporate just like here on Earth, create clouds of methane which rain back on the surface creating rivers of liquid natural gas and lakes.

[00:21:50]Like water on Earth, that rain had cut channels and gullies in the moon's surface.

[00:21:57]But there were [music] dry formations here, too, including dunes that stretched as far as the eye could see, reaching 100 m high and 3,000 [music] ms, suggesting tectonic forces at work here, similar to those on Earth.

[00:22:15]That methane, [music] that gas that's in your stove, plays the same role on Titan that liquid water plays here on the [music] Earth. You could have methane as a gas and form clouds. You could have methane rain that falls on the surface [music] and that's what created huge seas about the size of the Great Lakes on the Earth. Could there perhaps be some very interesting life in the lakes [music] on Titan?

[00:22:42]After the long anticipated excitement of Titan, Cassini headed for a close look at a tiny moon called Enceladus.

[00:22:50]No one thought this shimmering little ball of ice barely 300 m across could rival Titan scientifically, but they were wrong. Its sparkling surface is riged and cracked and seemingly scraped [music] along its southern pole.

[00:23:07]Here, these strange blue cracks, dubbed tiger stripes, 75 m long and hundreds of feet deep, resemble fault lines on Earth.

[00:23:20]The cracks were about to get stranger and far more thrilling.

[00:23:25]Cassini's thermal sensors [music] picked up heat coming out of the ice ball 200° warmer than the rest of the planet.

[00:23:39]pirouetting to take a look back at the cracks silhouetted against the sun.

[00:23:43]Cassini captured giant jets of water, spewing hundreds of miles out into space from the tiger stripes. They shoot out at 1200 mph, vaporizing and then freezing.

[00:23:59]It was a stunning moment.

[00:24:06]Back on Earth, Cassini's [music] stunned controllers quickly reprogrammed the probe to fly right through the jets, collecting particles.

[00:24:18]And what they found was even more stunning.

[00:24:23]Organic molecules, the basic building blocks of life.

[00:24:31]because the geysers are erupting and they could guide the spacecraft very close. They could actually fly through it and [music] look to see if there's water there and there is water and looking for the chemistry that's there.

[00:24:42]Enceladus is really special. [music] It's giving us free samples and so Cassini has multiple times flown through. You can imagine it's sniffing the gas and getting coated with these icy particles and some of them come in and are sampled and we know their composition.

[00:25:00]To our surprise, we [music] found out that in looking at the particles, the ocean was salty. And it was salty and had a very similar pH to our own ocean here on the Earth.

[00:25:11]>> Here on Earth, wherever there's liquid water, whether it's [music] deep in the ocean and very hot or in rocky places or in ice, there's microbial life. So, it certainly suggests microbial life could have evolved on Enceladus because it has all the properties that the Earth had when life began here.

[00:25:33]It would be years later in 2013 that Cassini flew behind the rings and looked back at Earth, our home planet, a single pixel in the vast solar system.

[00:25:53]And this year, she began a series of adjustments to take on one final spectacular mission, one that NASA, with the help of the public, dubbed the grand finale.

[00:26:08]In late 2016, the spacecraft began a daring set of orbits that took her high above Saturn's north pole, flying just outside its narrow F-ring through the water- richch plume of Enceladus one more time.

[00:26:30]And then we'll hop the rings and dive between [music] the planet and innermost ring 22 times.

[00:26:44]They found that if we fly [music] by Titan in just the right way, we can actually jump from just outside the rings all the way across the rings and [music] dive through a gap in between the innermost ring and the top of the atmosphere. Now, this gap is only 1,000 miles wide, and we're going to spend [music] 22 orbits diving through the gap.

[00:27:12]Then, in a bittersweet finale in 2017, Cassini's NASA controllers will send the craft plunging into the maelstrom of the gas planet itself, [music] guaranteeing that it will be incinerated and vaporized.

[00:27:28]They could have parked it in an orbit around the planet nearly indefinitely, but that would have involved an unacceptable risk.

[00:27:37]The probe could eventually get snagged in the gravity well of Titan or Enceladus, where extraterrestrial [music] life may be getting a foothold.

[00:27:48]It's possible that despite all this time in space and the [music] extreme conditions she has faced, little Cassini could have hearty Earth microbes clinging to her.

[00:28:00]She'll be [music] torn apart a giant fireball in Saturn's atmosphere.

[00:28:06]And if you think about it, [music] as she disintegrates and melts, her molecules will become part of [music] Saturn. And so be a very wonderful ending for this spacecraft. She studied [music] Saturn and her end is going to be with Saturn. It'll be a very sad moment. She isn't just, [music] you know, bits of metal and wires and things. She's really the hopes and dreams of all of the scientists and engineers and all of the people who put her together. And so when I go and look at the night [music] sky after the mission ends and I see Saturn, I'll see Cassini because she'll [music] be there.

[00:28:49]>> And the Atlas 5 with Juno [music] on a trek to Jupiter. 5 years after launching from Cape Canaveral, the Juno spacecraft is rocketing at speeds of 165,000 mph towards Jupiter.

[00:29:06]To reach its [music] destination, a complex engine burn is necessary to slow down and be caught by Jupiter's massive gravitational pole.

[00:29:25]>> [music] >> Juno, welcome to Jupiter.

[00:29:31]>> The hardest thing NASA's ever done.

[00:29:35][applause and cheering] >> Jupiter lies 500 million miles from Earth. But unlike our world, this gas giant remains virtually unchanged since the solar system formed.

[00:29:51]It's an archaeological treasure trove, the key to unlocking some of our most enduring questions.

[00:30:00]How did the Earth get formed? Where did the elements come from [music] that made up life itself? That's one of the things Juno is seeking to answer.

[00:30:10]It's huge.

[00:30:12]Everything in the entire solar system, all the planets, all the asteroids, all the comets would fit inside of Jupiter.

[00:30:22]Previous NASA missions have given us some understanding of its moons, small dust [music] rings, and atmosphere.

[00:30:30]But we've not been able to see past the Van Goike [music] swirls of dense red, brown, yellow, and white clouds that paint the planet.

[00:30:40]at least [music] not yet.

[00:30:45]>> And we have some instruments on Juno that are brand new that we've never sent anywhere. Um, the things that see through the atmosphere.

[00:30:54]>> Eight cuttingedge [music] instruments make up Juno's impressive science payload. Three in particular will pierce the [music] veil of clouds shrouding Jupiter.

[00:31:04]The most important of these instruments may perhaps be the microwave radiometer.

[00:31:10]Able to measure six distinct ranges of thermal radiation, it will be able to peer over 300 [music] m beneath Jupiter's clouds to create a three-dimensional model of Jupiter's atmospheric environment.

[00:31:27]But the story would be incomplete without a deeper understanding of what lies at the heart of Jupiter beyond the swirling clouds.

[00:31:35]Current modeling [music] estimates that the cloud cover is roughly 30 m thick.

[00:31:42]Down here, Juno might detect a layer where skies rain, not water, but liquid hydrogen.

[00:31:51]descend even deeper and the big squeeze continues creating an even stranger substance.

[00:31:59]>> We're about a third of the way in.

[00:32:01]You're getting to a pressure that's something like 2 million times the pressure here on the Earth. And that's a key number because that's about where hydrogen gas becomes a metal, liquid metallic hydrogen.

[00:32:15]>> Here, Juno may discover a vast metal ocean.

[00:32:21]perhaps the largest ocean in the solar system.

[00:32:27]Juno's radiometers will also play another vital role, unlocking Jupiter's chemistry.

[00:32:35]>> The global water content of [music] Jupiter is one of the most important numbers we can measure with the Juno spacecraft.

[00:32:42]>> Scientists know Jupiter contains water, but exactly how much remains a mystery.

[00:32:48]By finding an answer, Juno hopes to solve a great scientific puzzle.

[00:32:54]How much water ice was involved in forming the planets?

[00:33:00]Jupiter's a time capsule. It preserves the original [music] ingredients from which all the planets formed.

[00:33:10]If Juno discovers Jupiter is relatively wet, then water ice must have played an important role in planetary formation and could [music] explain Earth's oceans.

[00:33:24]But if Jupiter is [music] relatively dry, scientists will need another theory to explain how the Earth became a water world teameming with life.

[00:33:38]So far, Juno's first three flybys have provided a wealth of scientific data and images [music] that will help formulate new models about the planet.

[00:33:48]The new perspectives have left team members [music] scratching their heads as they discovered that the North Pole is bluer than the rest of [music] the planet and home to a large number of storms, including one measuring 4,300 m across.

[00:34:06]That's over half the size of Earth.

[00:34:11]And new [music] infrared views of the poles have revealed warm and hot spots, the likes of which have never before been seen in previous explorations.

[00:34:23]Jupiter's most well-known feature, the Great Red Spot, is the largest observed storm in our solar system. Thought to be at least 150 years old, if not over three centuries, it could swallow our Earth, leaving room to spare.

[00:34:41]Although it appears [music] to be shrinking, a recent Hubble measurement found the moving storm to stretch over 10,000 m across.

[00:34:50]Inside, winds blow at speeds thought to be over 400 mph.

[00:34:55]By comparison, Earth's fastest wind speed was recorded at 253 mph when Cyclone Olivia blew past the coast of Australia.

[00:35:13]The scientific [music] data that could one day illuminate the mysterious Great Red Spot may land [music] right here at the deep space network where Earth [music] commands are transmitted to the spacecraft and scientific data and engineering telemetry are beamed back down.

[00:35:32]Only three stations across Earth are [music] able to communicate with Juno.

[00:35:38]It takes about 90 minutes for [music] the roundtrip signal to cross the 500 million miles separating Juno and the deep space [music] network.

[00:35:48]The signals are very very low, a thousandth or more of the signal strength you would have on the mobile phone. That's why dishes are so big because it's like a big ear. It needs to use that to capture the signals. So the signals come back and what we do is we take them [music] and we deconvolve them. digitize them, we turn them into ones and zeros and basically that is then sent back by network back to Pasadena JPL where the [music] scientists then look at them and turn those uh ones and zeros into images or into real data.

[00:36:20]>> In some ways, Jupiter [music] is the most dangerous place in the solar system to fly a spacecraft.

[00:36:26]>> This image reveals what Juno's up against. Intense belts of radiation swarming with high energy electrons seen here in red.

[00:36:37]>> These electrons just [music] eat electronics. They just will kill the spacecraft.

[00:36:44]So Juno has a radiation vault where all the sensitive electronics are shielded behind walls of titanium.

[00:36:52]If you were sitting outside this vault on our spacecraft, by the end of the mission, you would have gotten the equivalent of about a 100 million dental X-rays, which would be like sitting in a dentist chair getting an X-ray [music] once a second, every second for a bit over 3 years. But inside this vault, you'd only be getting the equivalent of about a day and a half or so. Not too bad.

[00:37:15]>> The Juno team has done everything possible to keep their spacecraft safe.

[00:37:20]It's almost overwhelming and and dreamlike to be part of this team and realize that we're going to rewrite the textbooks on how not only Jupiter formed, but how the whole solar system came to be and how we got here.

[00:37:42]It used to be considered the end of our solar system.

[00:37:46]A tiny little Pluto, no more than a speck [music] in our best telescopes.

[00:37:52]Quite possibly a dead world in the deep freeze of deep space.

[00:38:00]We have ignition and liftoff of NASA's New Horizon spacecraft on a decadel long voyage to visit the planet Pluto. Then came New Horizons, a plucky pianoized space probe hurled off the Earth to cross 3 billion miles in nearly 10 years.

[00:38:22]New Horizons was headed to our ninth planet, the traditional last one.

[00:38:29]It was time to bag Pluto.

[00:38:45]>> [music] >> just 8 months into the journey, she took a hit. Not a space hit, but a blast of indignity from back home.

[00:38:54]those uh who are in favor of resolution 6A which introduces this new category of transmutian objects with Pluto as a prototype.

[00:39:05]>> Her destination Pluto >> got demoted to dwarf planet at a meeting of the international [music] astronomical >> staining.

[00:39:16]It turned out that Pluto [music] was just one of many chunks of ice and rock way out there in a region called the Kyper Belt beyond the traditional solar systems edge.

[00:39:28]Pluto wasn't even the largest dwarf planet.

[00:39:32]The announcement created an uproar to say the least.

[00:39:37]>> Votes don't work very well in science because for many [music] people I think it convinced them that science is arbitrary. those opposed.

[00:39:46]>> It should never have done it. I think it set science back. It may have been the worst pedagogical moment for science in recent memory in past decades.

[00:39:57]Now came 8 years of mostly napping with dutiful weekly calls home to reassure anxious earthlings.

[00:40:10]As New Horizons was finally closing in on Pluto, those Earthlings realized they had frightening new reasons to be anxious, Pluto's moons began to multiply beyond its giant companion, Cheron, and [music] two other known satellites.

[00:40:28]The discoveries of tiny Keraros and sticks meant that [music] New Horizons could have been headed into a minefield.

[00:40:36]Such small moons don't even have enough gravity to [music] make space debris stick to them. So there could be a lot of little junk in orbit around Pluto.

[00:40:48]>> Here's this grain of rice. In fact, you know, if I maybe Okay, I just broke off most of it. Can you still see that tiny little piece there? [music] This is still bigger than what it would take to destroy the spacecraft.

[00:41:00]It's going to be enough to end the mission.

[00:41:05]And at [music] 10 times the speed of the fastest bullet, there'd be no time to maneuver around even things they could see.

[00:41:12]>> Well, we're moving really, really fast, [music] and we can't just dodge things.

[00:41:19]So, we kind of have to take our [music] best shot.

[00:41:22]>> After days of observations and computer modeling, they came up with what they felt confident was a safe path through the Plutonian system.

[00:41:33]Everyone heaved a sigh of relief.

[00:41:36]>> Too soon.

[00:41:38]Their real worries were just beginning.

[00:41:42]>> New Horizons stopped speaking to them.

[00:41:46]Could she have hit some space [music] debris after all?

[00:41:50]Was the mission a complete loss?

[00:41:55]Here we had flown [music] more than 3,000 days to reach our target at the far frontier of the solar system. Just as we were uploading the final instructions for [music] the spacecraft to carry out the flyby, we lost contact.

[00:42:10]That had never happened before in the entire flight, and it really should never happen to any spacecraft in [music] any mission.

[00:42:19]The engineering team gathered at APL and quickly realized that if the probe was on the right trajectory and experiencing a computer glitch instead of a catastrophic failure, she'd reboot and check in in about 90 minutes.

[00:42:35]>> FC on Pluto 1, we have carrier lock waiting on time.

[00:42:39]>> Okay, [music] >> right on time. New Horizons phoned home.

[00:42:48]But she was in backup mode on a very slow connection. Apparently, they had asked too much of the primary computers while uploading the flyby instructions.

[00:42:59]They faced a near [music] impossible task, weeks worth of work to cram into days. This flyby [music] was going to be the definition of a nailbiter.

[00:43:11]>> We reestablished [music] contact and then we had an enormous job in front of us. the job of first getting the spacecraft back off of emergency low bit rate communications to where it could speak to us at high speed. Remember that's a 9h [music] hour roundtrip light time. So just sending those commands took a third of a day. But the clock is ticking. [music] There's only 3 days until the flyby begins.

[00:43:35]6 months of work down [music] the drain.

[00:43:39]We had to replace all of the flight plans, all of the guidance files, [music] all the navigation files, all the pointing files, and many more and get them [music] all in place in 3 days.

[00:43:52]>> So much for anybody's Fourth of July celebrations.

[00:43:56]Everyone just dropped everything and headed into the applied physics lab.

[00:44:01]The engineering [music] and the operations team literally came in on July 4th, the last day, you know, they could be with their families before the flyby. People showed up in all states of dress. They came from picnics. They came from July 4th parties. And they never left for 3 days. Just like in the Tom Hanks movie Apollo 13, [music] they were sleeping on desks. People were sleeping under desks. People were sleeping in chairs, living on 3 4 hours a night [music] because they knew what was at stake. One spacecraft barely 10 days [music] out from Pluto with a oneshot encounter.

[00:44:38]It took 2 days to coax the main computer back online and reload her with hundreds of thousands of commands necessary [music] to get her through the flyby.

[00:44:49]>> And they did it all and they did it flawlessly.

[00:44:53]and they are the unsung heroes of the Pluto encounter. They made it work.

[00:45:01]With just days to spare, New Horizon seemed completely healthy and ready for her historic encounter.

[00:45:12]Defeat is not an option. [music] The 7-day flyby began on July 14th.

[00:45:20]On her own at the edge of the solar system, New Horizons conducted hundreds of observations on six targets, Pluto and her five moons.

[00:45:32]Her last image before closest approach held the scientists and the world in awe.

[00:45:40]Tiny Pluto was a magically [music] diverse world with a big big heart.

[00:45:49]At closest approach, she passed a mere 7700 m above Pluto's surface, moving so quickly [music] that she swept across the whole surface, heart included, in 3 minutes. [music] But it would be more than 4 [music] hours until the team would know if the mission had been completely successful and that their spacecraft was healthy and hanging on to her motherload of groundbreaking science >> on the deep space network [music] >> in lock on symbols.

[00:46:23]>> So that's the first step >> getting data.

[00:46:27]>> Okay, copy that. We are in lock with telemetry with the spacecraft.

[00:46:32][cheering] [applause] >> [music] [applause] >> Go ahead, CNH.

[00:46:41]>> Uh, CNH reports nominal status. Our SSR pointers are where we expect them to be, which means we've recorded the expected amount of data.

[00:46:50]>> Copy that. Looks like we have a good data record. [applause] >> We have a healthy spacecraft.

[00:47:01]We've recorded data of the Pluto system and we're outbound for Pluto.

[00:47:08][applause] [cheering] >> On flyby day, the team got its first highresolution glimpse at the geology of Pluto surface.

[00:47:21]>> And I remember looking at that and thinking, "What a stunning world. Look at this. There are polar [music] caps and canyons and dense crater fields and vast glacier fields and [music] mountain ranges, some with snow caps, some made of one material, some [music] made of another. many types of evidence for tectonic activity on the surface and [music] just taking in the totality of it and the thinking. Who knew there was so much in this little package that Pluto would be so nuanced [music] and so complex and that its history was bound to be so difficult to unravel.

[00:47:59]And it really set me back because I'd [music] waited to see that image for over 20 years and I'd expected it would be good.

[00:48:08]But I have to say, I don't think anybody on our [music] science team, certainly not myself, expected it to be that good.

[00:48:15]>> It is simply amazing that [music] we can send ones and zeros across almost 3 billion miles and we're there at the right time [music] to capture that information. I mean, this is science at work. I mean, it's just fantastic.

[00:48:31]But with communication speeds equal to roughly [music] that of slow 1990s dialup internet. It's taken nearly 16 months for the data to reach its anxious parents back home. And the results from the steady flow of geological images have been extraordinary.

[00:48:50]Glaciers of water ice floating on a denser nitrogen ice.

[00:48:56]Mountains as large as the Rockies with methane snow caps.

[00:49:02]giant ice volcanoes that were recently active and ancient [music] cratered areas 4 billion years old right next to the very young geologically active parts.

[00:49:16]And before the Pluto flyby, it was widely expected that small planets should cool off during those billions of years [music] and their geologic engine would run out. We would only find ancient terrains on the surface.

[00:49:30]Instead, we found terrains [music] on Pluto that have been created throughout the 4 billion years. Vast terrains, millions of square kilm of terrain [music] that have been created in the recent geological past. It's just amazing.

[00:49:45]>> Of course, the most amazing and seriously active feature is [music] Pluto's big bright heart called Tombbo Reio, named after Pluto's discoverer, [music] Clyde Tombbo.

[00:49:59]The mysterious left lobe of that heart, dubbed Sputnik [music] Planicia, is a giant ice field hundreds of miles across, ringed by 15,000 [music] ft mountains.

[00:50:12]Scientists think it's a huge impact basin that filled with nitrogen, snow, [music] and ice falling out of the atmosphere over time.

[00:50:22][music] And that ice field seems to be boiling in incredibly slow motion.

[00:50:30]What this means is there has to [music] be a heat source driving that convection, renewing the surface constantly.

[00:50:49]giving off [music] heat as it freezes and that raises the possibility of life at the far edge of the solar system.

[00:50:59]If there's a potential for astrobiology at Pluto, it's probably deep in the interior where there's very good but still [music] circumstantial evidence that Pluto's water ice crust far below the [music] surface actually liquefies to become a perched ocean of liquid water and a warmer zone quite deep in Pluto's interior.

[00:51:24]Pluto is now far in New Horizon's rear view mirror.

[00:51:29]along with its beautiful baby blue atmosphere.

[00:51:32]And the fully functioning craft is headed into that Kyper Belt with new marching orders.

[00:51:39]She's been retargeted toward a whisper close flyby of a Kyper belt object in 2019.

[00:51:52]New Horizons is about to introduce us to a whole new realm of undiscovered worlds in our galactic neighborhood. and her parents couldn't be prouder.

[00:52:01]>> And it's also true that for our generation, which is the [music] second generation of planetary scientists, really the whole solar system had been mopped up by our parents' generation.

[00:52:10][music] They've done it all from Mercury to Neptune. And this is kind of the last train to Clarksville. So, it was very special. It's a dream come true to get to work on something as unique as the first mission to the last planet.