[wind blowing, static radio and chimes]
[wind blowing, electronic sounds, faint radio chatter]
[wind blowing, electronic sounds]
[radio static, faint radio chatter]
[wind blowing, wolf howling]
[faint Morse code style beeping]
LARRY SODERBLOM: It is really true
that you can only explore the solar system
for the first time once.
Ah...Voyager did that.
[whale sounds]
TOM KRIMIGIS: How could one be so lucky?
It's a dream and it came true.
[Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F (Golden Record)]
BRAD SMITH: Fifty years from now
Voyager will be the science project
of the 20th century.
The mission.
The big mission.
[Melancholy Blues (Louis Armstrong)]
CANDY HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: It opened our eyes to worlds,
to real worlds.
[aircraft/rocket noises]
[faint plucked guitar string]
FRANK DRAKE: This may in the long run be
the only evidence that we ever existed.
[faint plucked guitar string]
CAROLYN PORCO: Voyager to me was Homeric,
it was years of passing across the solar system
from one planet to the other
and then it was a week or two
of frenzied activity and discovery and conquest
and then it was, well, back in the boats,
oars in the water and then on to the next conquest.
[faint white noise]
["Wishing on a Star," Rose Royce]
♪ I'm wishing on a star ♪
♪ to follow where you are ♪
♪ I'm wishing on a dream ♪
SUZANNE DODD: It is the little engine that could.
Nobody really knows how it does it,
but everybody's rooting for it.
♪ ...and I wish on all the rainbows that I've seen ♪
TOM SPILKER: Every second, it goes to another place
where we have never been before.
♪ ...who really dream, and I'm wishing on tomorrow ♪
DAVE LINICK: Voyager takes the cake.
It's the most audacious mission.
Who'd have thought
that we'd actually be able to do that in 1977?
♪ I'm wishing on a star... ♪
[music finishes with final line]
[soft piano]
NARRATOR: In 1977, a team of scientists and engineers
launched a mission of staggering ambition.
Voyager.
The initial idea was a grand tour of the outermost planets--
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
What were their atmospheres like?
Their moons?
At the time, our knowledge of these worlds was scant.
[mechanical noises and piano music plays]
ED STONE: We knew a little because you can observe
from the Earth with telescopes.
DON GURNETT: We knew for example at Jupiter
that there were moons:
Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto going around.
[soft piano continues]
STONE: We knew that there were winds on Jupiter;
we knew about the great red spot on Jupiter;
we knew that there was trapped radiation,
so we knew there was a magnetic field.
[soft piano]
CHARLEY KOHLHASE: It was big.
No, let's see, what did we know?
We knew they were all gas giants,
mostly made up of hydrogen and helium
and some methane on the outer planets.
[soft piano continues]
TOM KRIMIGIS: For Saturn, we knew about the rings
and we knew about the major satellites,
but hardly anything more than that,
and it was all very fuzzy.
[soft piano continues and rattling noise comes in]
HEIDI HAMMEL: I had been staring at these planets
through some of the best telescopes on Earth,
and yet all I could see was fuzzy blobs.
[soft piano continues, chain rattling, squeaking, clanking]
FRAN BAGENAL: Astronomers had worked pretty hard
to know what the physical make-up was,
there were some basic characteristics,
but their real nature, what they were really made of
and what the means, moons, were like,
we had none of that, just little glimpses.
[soft piano continues, now accompanied by light guitar]
[sea and bird sounds]
HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: Human beings are a curious bunch.
We want to know what's around the corner.
We have to go past that next bend in the road,
so it's some sort of innate drive, I think,
that we have, as a species.
[light guitar & glockenspiel music plays in the background]
STONE: One of the key things that made this mission possible
was gravity assist.
That is when you fly by Jupiter, you turn the corner
and you take a little bit
of Jupiter's orbital speed with you.
Like a slingshot,
so you better make sure Saturn's in the right place.
NARRATOR: The positions of the outer planets
presented an opportunity.
A rare alignment meant the time
needed to cross the solar system
could be slashed.
[light guitar & glockenspiel music continues in the background]
SODERBLOM: It would go Jupiter boom, Saturn boom,
Uranus boom, Neptune boom.
HAMMEL: The planets had to be lined up in just the right way
to allow one spacecraft to do that.
SODERBLOM: And that aligning up only occurs rarely.
HAMMEL: That only happens once like once every hundred,
more than a hundred years.
JIM BELL: ...175 years, something like that.
KOHLHASE: Once every 176 years.
BELL: The previous time it happened,
exploration was wooden sailing ships.
[guitar music continues] [ocean]
KRIMIGIS: It was named "The Outer Planets Grand Tour,"
and the cost of the mission was estimated to be
in excess of a billion dollars.
The NASA administrator went to the President,
and he said the last time the planets
were lined up like that,
President Jefferson was sitting at your desk, and he blew it.
So, Mr. Nixon laughed and said all right, just do two.
So, only two planets.
[electric guitar music begins]
NARRATOR: Jupiter and Saturn were officially a go.
It would be a less grand-- but still ambitious--tour.
Yet the Voyager team
wasn't ready to give up on going farther.
As they assembled the spacecraft in a giant hangar,
some of them kept a secret goal alive.
[sounds of light turning on]
KRIMIGIS: We knew right from the get-go
that we were going to try as hard as we could
to extend the mission to go to Uranus and Neptune.
KOHLHASE: We designed that in from the beginning.
We knew that we were endowing Voyager with the option
if the chance was there to use it.
[percussion kicks in as music continues]
JOHN CASANI: We didn't want to build anything into the design
that would have prevented us from going further.
So, it was a mission within a mission, yeah.
[heartbeat, bottle falls, water splashes]
BELL: A group of scientists and visionaries realized
that these spacecraft would leave the solar system.
They figured don't let this opportunity pass,
you're going to throw a bottle into the ocean.
Put a message in it.
[high pitched string music begins]
NARRATOR: What would we want to tell intelligent aliens
about our planet?
What would we want to tell them about us?
The driving force behind the message
was the astronomer Carl Sagan.
WATERS: Would you expect someone to find this record out there?
Is there something out there?
CARL SAGAN: Well, nobody knows.
One of the great unsolved questions
is whether we're alone or whether...
JON LOMBERG: Carl Sagan has become probably
the best-known scientist of the late 20th century.
He was a working scientist, he played a key role
in many of the NASA missions to the planets,
including the Voyager one.
He was one of the scientists on the Voyager imaging team,
but he also was the astronomer who as much as any one person
made the study of extraterrestrial life credible.
CARL SAGAN: A comment by Thomas Carlyle,
a somewhat crusty old fellow
who upon thinking about the stars said,
"A sad spectacle.
If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly.
If they be not inhabited... what a waste of space."
[laughter]
CASANI: Carl Sagan was a good friend of mine,
and I called him up and said,
"Hey, would you be willing to undertake
to come up with something
for us to put on the Voyager spacecraft?"
He says, "Yes, sure."
And he told me he could do it for 25,000 bucks,
so I authorized him to go ahead and do it,
and I sort of was hands-off at that point.
BELL: The Golden Record followed in the footsteps
of a project called the Pioneer plaque.
CASANI: The Pioneer spacecraft had some line drawings
of a male and female form,
and some people went absolutely bonkers.
I don't know if you've seen it,
but it's the most innocent thing you can imagine,
and it caused a lot of commotion.
But I thought that was great.
LOMBERG: At first Carl thought they'd simply do another plaque,
maybe with some more information,
but Frank Drake--
a brilliant theoretical physicist
but also a very hands-on kind of guy,
he came up with the idea
that for the same amount of weight and space,
you could send a phonograph record.
[harp music]
DRAKE: The people who actually did the science part of Voyager
are always jealous and mad
because the Golden Record gets more attention
than all the wonderful things they did
exploring the outer planets of the solar system
except Pluto and all that.
But the main attention goes to the Golden Record.
Because of the aura that surrounds anything to do
with extraterrestrial intelligent life,
any kind of effort to contact extraterrestrial life
is more fascinating than knowing the chemical makeup
of a mineral on Mars or something.
[laughs]
LOMBERG: The record is an old-style LP recording.
The only difference is it's on metal,
and that's so it will last a long time.
TIMOTHY FERRIS: And it was recorded at half-speed
so that gave us two hours of total time.
An hour and a half of it was devoted to music
and the other half hour contains
all of the other data on the record:
the natural sounds of Earth, the spoken greetings
and the encoded photographs of Earth.
LOMBERG: One of the first questions a lot of people ask
is, well, they'll never figure out how to play it.
And in fact, we included
a cartridge and stylus in the package with the record,
and the drawing on the cover of the record shows the method
by which the stylus is to be placed on the record.
BELL: Maybe what's written on it
will seem like kindergarten scribbles to them,
but they should be able to figure it out
if they've got some smart minds or whatever's in their heads,
if they even have heads.
[spraying sounds]
KOHLHASE: What I find interesting
is to protect it from the dust
and tiny particles of the journey,
they put a cover over it,
and on the cover was engraved the location of Earth,
our solar system,
in terms of its direction from different pulsars.
CASANI: A lot of people said, well, why would you do that?
I said what do you mean?
They say, well, why would you announce where you are,
you know, because there are aliens out there,
that probably raid planets and use them for food
or eat the people or make them slaves.
You know, if they find it,
their technology is probably more advanced than ours,
they'll come here and destroy us,
so why would you do something like that.
Why would these people expose themselves
to our voracious appetite?
They must be very altruistic, you know?
[whale sounds]
[radio signals scrambling and faint radio chatter]
NARRATOR: In 1972, preparation for the mission got underway.
Other great journeys of discovery--
by Magellan, Columbus, Da Gama--
all involved more than one ship.
And so would Voyager.
Two spacecraft would be built-- two chances for success.
[birds and wildlife noises]
BELL: One of the things I just admire most
about the engineers who built Voyager
is that they're always thinking
about the most improbable things happening.
You know, you want to take those people
on a camping trip with you because they will think of...
well, you've got to bring...
what if these bugs come out, what if the tent gets flooded,
what if you run out of gas,
what if you can't start the fire, you know.
They're the what if people,
and when you're sending something out into space
you can't go do a service call, you can't bring it back,
so your what if list had better be like that long
or you're not going to be able to survive.
[machines spinning and grinding]
FRANK LOCATELL: These projects begin
with a conceptualization period.
How do we arrange the spacecraft,
how do we take the communications system,
this large 12-foot diameter fixed antenna,
and arrange it relative to the propulsion system?
The spacecraft took on the dimension of being a child,
and our design teams, you know, were like kind of parents.
This was actually a nurturing process.
Bringing that child, if you will, into reality.
CASANI: All spacecraft are made basically of the same things:
silicon and aluminum, that's about it.
You know, that's probably 95% of it.
Silicon and aluminum is cheap
until you start making stuff out if it, you know.
[beeping machines and low bass drum beats]
RICH TERRILE: 1972 was when you had the technology freeze,
remember we launched in 1977,
so you freeze technology several years earlier,
and at the time the biggest computers in the world
were comparable to the kinds of things
we have in our pockets today,
and I'm not talking about a cell phone.
I'm actually talking about a key fob.
CASANI: What's wrong with 70s technology?
I mean, you're looking at me, I'm a 30s technology, right?
I don't apologize for the limitations
that we were working with at the time.
We milked the technology for what we could get from it.
ED STONE: Voyager is about 800 kilograms.
Its main antenna is 12 feet in diameter,
which was the largest we could launch.
BELL: There's this body,
this ten-sided can called the bus,
and that's got all the electronics and the computers.
And that's got these arms and these appendages that stick out.
It has these feet that connected it to the rocket
and then a really long arm
with a magnetic field sensor on it over here
and another arm over there with this plutonium power supply
to give it its electricity.
You can't keep that too close to the spacecraft
because it will radiate the spacecraft.
And another arm with this device
that had the cameras and other instruments on it
that could point around, kind of like the eyes,
and the big antenna was the ears.
STONE: We had eleven scientific instruments
peeking out to see what's out there.
BELL: When everything is fully extended
to its greatest dimensions,
it's comparable in size to sort of a small school bus.
A strange-looking being for our planet,
but perfectly happy in space.
[Beethoven's 5th]
[music continues]
[Tchenhoukoumen percussion, Senegal]
NARRATOR: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
was one of twenty-seven pieces of music
chosen for the Golden Record.
FERRIS: I became the producer of only one record in my career,
and only two copies of it were made,
and they were both hurled off the earth,
so I don't know if that's a credential or not.
[needle sliding off record]
[Izlel je Delyo Hajdutin (Golden Record)]
The launch window for Voyager was set.
and they sure as hell weren't going to wait for the record.
[Fairie Round--David Munrow]
LOMBERG: We had six weeks to do it,
that's what always draws the biggest gasp,
that you had to figure out a way to explain the world to aliens,
and by the way it has to be finished in six weeks.
[Melancholy Blues-- Louis Armstrong]
FERRIS: We had two goals in making the Voyager record:
we wanted the music to represent
many different cultures around the world
and not just the culture of the society
that had built and launched the spacecraft.
[Ugam--Azerbaijan bagpipes]
The other criterion was we wanted it to be a good record.
[Mozart--Queen of the Night-- Eda Moser]
LOMBERG: It's a very idiosyncratic message.
It doesn't seem like something made by a committee.
It's too quirky.
[Mozart--Queen of the Night-- Eda Moser]
[Cranes in Their Nest-- Japan (Shakuhachi)]
FERRIS: If you listen to the Voyager record,
it would be remarkable if you didn't hear some pieces of music
that were quite unlike anything you had heard before.
The Japanese shakuhachi piece
or the sixteen-year-old pygmy girl singing
what's called an initiation song,
a kind of puberty song,
in the Ituri forest of Africa is just unbelievably beautiful.
[Pygmy girl initiation song]
There was a certain amount
of hunting up rare records here and there.
I remember the back of an Indian appliance store in New York
where they had some Indian records,
and there was one copy of a raga
that we ended up putting on the record.
[Jaat Kahan Ho--India-- Surshri]
[piano note]
[cello]
[cymbal crash]
FERRIS: I would love to have had a Bob Dylan piece.
But really there's only room
for at most one contemporary rock piece.
[electric guitar]
But you know you're up against Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode,
which Bob Dylan himself would admit is an awfully good single.
STEVE MARTIN: It may be just four simple words,
but it is the first positive proof
that other intelligent beings inhabit the universe.
LARAINE NEWMAN: What are the four words, Cocuwa?
MARTIN: Send more Chuck Berry.
[laughter and applause]
FERRIS: The world is full of fantastic music,
and it goes without saying there's a lot more great music
that's not on the Voyager record than there is on it.
Which is a good thing, too,
I mean, if you imagine living on a planet
that was so pathetic
that it only had 90 minutes of decent music.
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1977,
final preparations for two launches began in Florida.
BELL: When it was launched,
it was of course all folded up, it was like origami.
LOCATELL: Here was this almost unexpected encapsulation.
I mean, we knew that we were going to be encapsulated,
but the emotional effect on that was kind of surprising,
I noticed that in just looking around me.
I realized that this was the last time
any of us were going to see the spacecraft with eyes.
And, um, that's a f...
that's a fairly moving experience.
[picture flash sounds]
NARRATOR: Journalists converged on Cape Canaveral
to cover a once in a lifetime mission.
FERRIS: When the reporters came to the launch,
they all wanted to know more about the record.
Most of the press release drawings
show the other side of the spacecraft
so you can't see the record.
There was always a lot of ambiguity in NASA about this.
There's no question that the Voyager record is useless
from a scientific standpoint,
and the officials reluctantly arranged a press conference.
[polka music plays]
FERRIS: The press conference was a joke really.
It was held in a hotel room
separated by one of those accordion folding barriers
from what was literally, as memory serves me,
a Polish wedding reception.
We did the whole press conference
with the oompah sound of a wedding reception next door.
But I think the public seemed to get it.
[polka music plays]
MAN ON LOUDSPEAKER: Environmental control, ready.
MAN: Roger.
KOHLHASE: We actually launched Voyager 2 first,
and this gave the media, uh, drove them nuts.
We launched Voyager 1 later,
but it was launched on a faster trajectory,
so it overtook Voyager 2 in December of 1977.
From that point on, Voyager 1
always got to the planet before Voyager 2,
and the press was happy, they understood it.
SPEAKER OVER TANNOY: We have just had a report
from John Casani, the Voyager project manager,
that we'll be able to count down at 10:25.
[gentle guitar music]
NARRATOR: After five years of planning,
the assembly of the spacecraft's 65,000 parts
and untold mathematical calculations,
it all came down to this.
[gentle guitar music]
SPEAKER: Five, four, three, two, one.
We have ignition and we have lift-off.
LOCATELL: You see those solids ignite,
and you are really not prepared for what's about to occur.
[gentle guitar music]
The sound waves then catch up and then this forceful shaking,
the body is actually moved in resonance with this energy,
shaking it, right.
[audio of rocket taking off]
LOMBERG: We were sitting in bleachers,
and they keep you pretty far from the launch vehicle
because they can explode, and it's basically, it's a big bomb.
LINDA SPILKER: So there's a little bit
of holding your breath and wanting to make sure you see it
get that first little motion off the pad starting into space.
[atmospheric guitar music]
DRAKE: We were all thinking this thought:
There it goes, it's going to be out there to represent us
for the next five billion years.
[audio of crowd cheering and clapping]
LOCATELL: There were outbursts of joy.
We were on our way!
CASANI: And then we launched it,
and then other things went crazy.
[piano music] [radio noises]
The spacecraft began to do things
that we had no expectation that it would have done.
STONE: Voyager was not in control of itself,
it's just riding this big rocket,
and that was shaking it in such a way
that it thought it was failing,
and so it started switching off various boxes,
changing to the back-up this, to the back-up that.
Trying to figure out why all this stuff was happening.
CASANI: As the launch vehicle leaves the launchpad,
it has to roll through a certain angle
to get to the right direction for departure,
and the rate that it rolls at is a much higher rate
than the spacecraft would ever normally experience flying,
and so the gyro hits the stops.
HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: Us poor people on Earth,
we're like what is it doing?
CASANI: For a couple of days it was a real nail-biter.
People were asking us, have you lost the spacecraft
and we would say we don't know for sure
because we didn't know for sure.
LINICK: And the headline read "Mutiny in Space."
The Voyager spacecraft had decided
it just didn't want to follow the instructions
that its human controllers were giving it
and it was going to do what it wanted to do.
BELL: So early in the mission it's like, oh, man,
is this mission going to be plagued with problems?
Is there some fundamental flaw in the design?
LOCATELL: That was a cliff hanger.
That was the end of the mission.
It could have been the end of the mission.
HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: Fortunately, the person
who had written that code
was able to say this is OK, it's doing this, it tried that,
it's doing this, it tried that and calm everyone else down.
[bird sounds]
The limits were set simply too tight.
It needed to be able to wiggle more and vibrate more.
[bird sounds]
NARRATOR: Finally stabilized, Voyager 2 was bound for Jupiter.
The launch of Voyager 1 was coming up fast,
so the team scrambled
to fine-tune the spacecraft's software
to head off another mutiny.
With the launch window closing soon,
Voyager 1 finally took off.
But rocket science is famously complicated.
SPEAKER: Centaur 6, Titan Centaur 6
has lifted off at 8:56 from here
at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station...
KOHLHASE: We're thinking everything's OK,
and then we begin to hear that something wasn't right.
CASANI: I looked over at him
and he looked like he was a little worried, you know.
And I said what's the matter, Charley?
And he says I don't know,
I don't think we're going to make it, you know.
There was a leak in the propellant line,
and we were losing propellant overboard,
so while it was burning,
propellant was escaping from the launch vehicle
and second stage never got to deliver its full thrust
because it ran out of fuel.
STONE: And so, the upper stage which was a Centaur--
liquid hydrogen and oxygen stage--
had to make up for that.
CASANI: And the Centaur is the stage
that's doing the guidance,
so the Centaur knows
that it's not reaching the required velocity,
and when it separates from the second stage
it knows it has to burn longer to add more velocity.
KOHLHASE: The Centaur had to use
1,200 pounds of extra propellant.
Now we're all thinking
is it going to have enough left in the tanks
or is it going to run out of fuel?
Fortunately, it had three and a half seconds of thrusting left
before it had run to fuel depletion.
Three and a half seconds,
so Voyager 1 just barely made it.
CASANI: It wouldn't have gotten enough velocity
to get to Jupiter, you know,
so instead of getting to Jupiter, you know,
we'd have gotten almost to Jupiter
and then we'd come back toward the sun,
which would not have been good. [laughs]
[music: Gallagher & Lyle "Breakaway"]
♪ I watch the distant lights go down the runway ♪
♪ Disappear into the evening sky ♪
♪ Oh, you know I'm with you on your journey ♪
♪ Never could say goodbye ♪
LOCATELL: And then of course, you know, there's the thought
that it's out of our hands.
Now the major reason for this mission was about to unfold,
that is the science.
But our role as keepers, as progenitors, as...
our role had been finished.
[music: Gallagher & Lyle "Breakaway"]
♪ Though I won't stop you, I don't want you to ♪
♪ Break away ♪
♪ Fly across your ocean ♪
♪ Break away ♪
♪ Time has come for you ♪
♪ Break away ♪
♪ Fly across your ocean ♪
♪ Break away ♪
♪ Time has come ♪
[radio signals and white noise]
NARRATOR: Thanks to the dedicated work
of hundreds of the world's best scientists and engineers,
the twin Voyagers had at last embarked on their odyssey
across the solar system.
The first leg was almost 400 million miles to Jupiter.
SODERBLOM: You can never really imagine--
you can try, but you can never really imagine
what mother nature will actually have in store
when you get there.
[music: classical music]
LAWRENCE KRAUSS: It's worth realizing that a human life ago,
less than 100 years ago, 87 years ago,
the universe consisted of one, of one galaxy,
our Milky Way galaxy,
in a static eternal universe with eternal empty space.
We didn't know about the other hundred billion galaxies
a single human lifetime ago.
[classical string melody]
NARRATOR: In January 1979,
Voyager 1 was coming up on its first planetary encounter,
and Voyager 2 was four months behind.
[classical string melody]
SODERBLOM: It seems like time really flew.
SMITH: I don't think we really fully understood
before the first Jupiter encounter
just how intense it was going to be.
No, we didn't.
We found out. [laughs]
STONE: You start working on a mission in 1972,
you launch in 1977, all of that there's no science,
it's all getting ready.
And then March '79: the flood.
[piano music]
TERRILE: The encounters, they creep up on you.
LINICK: When we were approaching, every picture
was the greatest picture ever taken of Jupiter.
HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: In the beginning,
it would be just a little dot
getting bigger on the screen every day,
and as we would get closer and closer
the images became more dramatic.
BELL: Incredibly strange and beautiful,
and now by Voyager revealed in all of its splendor.
TERRILE: That acceleration as you're approaching encounters
is really something that becomes very, very exciting.
We called it drinking out of a fire hose, you know,
you're trying to take a little sip,
and this torrent of data is coming out.
JOURNALIST: Would someone care to speculate
what you would say to Galileo Galilei
if he walked into the room today?
SMITH: How...how, how are you able to live so long?
[laughter]
STONE: I think Galileo...
STONE: Jupiter is more than ten times the diameter of Earth,
it's huge, and it's mainly hydrogen and helium;
there are no solid surface on these planets.
These planets are liquid, gas and liquid deep inside.
ANDREW INGERSOLL: The gas is compressed
the farther down you go,
and it gets very hot indeed
and you would melt, vaporize, in fact,
if you tried to fly through Jupiter.
INGERSOLL: Let me first modify your statement,
not that it was wrong ...
INGERSOLL: The atmospheric scientists got long-range views
because we weren't looking at tiny moons,
we were looking at the big planet,
and so we could see things going on
before the other groups could see things,
and we were always the first to start shouting.
SMITH: Even to this day we don't fly color detectors.
You get a much higher-resolution image in black and white,
and so when we want to make color,
we take them through different filters
and then on the ground you put it together
and make a color image out of it.
[low dramatic electronic rhythm music]
INGERSOLL: You go to Jupiter
and you have a storm that's been around for more than 300 years,
that's the Great Red Spot.
You could fit two or three Earths inside it.
When Voyager started getting close-up images,
we realized that it was very active,
and that deepened the mystery
of how these big storms could even exist
with all this turbulence going on.
SMITH: It was swallowing up clouds and spitting out others.
We knew that it was a vortex, but to see it in action...
NARRATOR: Another feature of Jupiter's dynamic environment
posed a great danger to Voyager.
Powerful radiation might destroy the spacecraft's electronics.
BELL: Every day you're wondering
did we build the spacecraft well enough?
Did we anticipate all the possible things
that could go wrong?
[low dramatic electronic rhythm music]
BELL: You're approaching this monster magnetic field,
this monster radiation environment on purpose,
because you need to get close because you want to see
all the little moons and the clouds and the storms
and you want to slingshot on to Saturn,
but you just don't know if you're going to survive.
Thing gets fried, you lose the mission.
Still out there physically intact probably,
but unable to communicate with it, the mission's over.
LOCATELL: Two months before shipping to the Cape for launch,
the scientists were predicting
that the magnetic fields around Jupiter
were intense enough that they would accelerate particles.
Whoa! We were hearing initially 40,000 volts,
that would be the end of our spacecraft.
Cabling on these appendages were conductors
that would take these destroying pulses
and just feed them right into our systems and kill us,
so we needed to ground everything.
We didn't have time
to go through the normal design reviews,
so in order to get this protection done quickly enough,
an ad hoc team was formed
and we did some things that were out of the ordinary,
very out of the ordinary.
I can remember asking one of the technicians
to go out and buy aluminum foil.
It was the only material that was available to us.
Normally our procurement of spacecraft hardware supplies,
materials, are a much more sophisticated process.
We're actually cutting continuous strips
and then cleaning them with wipes and alcohol
and then finally wrapping these on all of our exterior cabling,
but yeah, same material that's in your Christmas turkey.
I don't think we created any shortage per se.
It may have been a local shortage
in the local grocery store for a few days
until they reordered right.
Your turkey wrapping is protecting Voyager,
and now fast forward, you know,
did we know whether we had done enough?
[radiation sounds Voyager recorded at Jupiter]
NARRATOR: Voyager survived the onslaught
and went on to record signals that led to a discovery.
DON GURNETT: If you had the right kind of antennas
on your ears, you could go out and hear what we record.
I'm going to call them radio sounds
because we have to detect them with antennas.
Amazingly we heard all kinds of sounds.
[whistling frequency sounds]
Whistlers.
These things that go [whistling sound], like that.
Yeah, whistlers mean lightning.
There are lightning flashes at Jupiter
that would go halfway
from the east coast of the United States
to the west coast.
That was the first detection of lightning
on a planet other than Earth.
NARRATOR: The two Voyagers were poised
to study Jupiter's little known moons.
[background music: fast strings with slow piano chords]
[high pitched radio noises]
Having picked up 36,000 miles an hour
from Jupiter's gravity assist,
the spacecraft were now traveling fast.
[background music: fast strings with slow piano chords]
SODERBLOM: When you're on a flyby mission,
there ain't no second chance.
KOHLHASE: We were getting pictures,
they were getting better and better,
and you could begin to see detail
as these moons got bigger.
You know the dread you have is that you don't want to see
a lot of worlds that look like Earth's moon.
Let's face it, it's dull.
SODERBLOM: I think everyone figured they would be
just battered ice-balls, you know,
kind of like the highlands of the moon,
nothing but impact craters.
And when we saw Callisto,
basically it's totally hammered, right,
it's saturated with impact craters.
Ganymede shows a lot of interesting grooves and ridges,
but it's pretty blasted with impact craters.
NARRATOR: Every crater lasts for eons
because no forces were present to resculpt the surface.
The first two moons were dormant worlds.
SODERBLOM: And then as we went into the inner two...
KOHLHASE: You could not see craters on either one of them.
Well, this was encouraging,
because now we think maybe this mission
is going to find a lot of diversity.
BELL: Discovering this billiard ball smooth icy crust
of Europa with cracks in it
and what looked like plates of ice
that might be moving relative to each other,
the best explanation for that
is that there's a thick ocean of liquid water, salty water
underneath that icy crust.
More ocean water than on the entire Earth,
probably two or three times.
It's the largest ocean in the solar system
in a moon going around Jupiter.
SPILKER: And then of course, you know,
kind of the showstopper for Voyager, we get to Io.
TERRILE: Io, of course, Io was the star of the show
and we didn't learn that until after the encounter.
[soft piano music]
INGERSOLL: Everyone had gone home,
and Linda Morabito, an engineer whose job
was to find out the positioning and the orbit of the spacecraft,
noticed some bumps on images of Io.
LINDA MORABITO: I was on the mission
as a mission navigator,
and our job involved just looking back
over the shoulder of the spacecraft
to say, OK, one more picture of the realm of Jupiter,
so it wasn't high-priority work.
SMITH: It was an optical navigation image,
and Linda saw this strange thing on the limb.
MORABITO: An enormous object emerged, enormous.
And the first thing I said to myself: What is that?
And I'm like it looks like another satellite
in the picture emerging from behind Io.
An object that size, at that range, at that distance,
would have been seen from Earth, it was sufficiently large.
I felt with certainty, it's the only thing I knew,
that I was seeing something that had never been seen before.
This was an umbrella-shaped plume
rising 250 kilometers above the surface of Io
with volcanic activity.
[soft piano music]
I found the very first evidence of active volcanism
on a world beyond the Earth.
[soft piano music]
STONE: It was so hard to believe that a little moon
could have 10 times the volcanic activity of Earth,
which was the only known active volcanoes
in the solar system were here on Earth.
And then there's Io.
Suddenly we had realized
this was a different journey we were on.
NARRATOR: Io's volcanoes can shoot lava
over 200 miles into space.
These eruptions are powered by Jupiter's gravity,
which endlessly compresses and releases the moon.
SODERBLOM: I wanted to say one other thing,
we've been saying that perhaps there's some funny way
in which Jupiter gobbles up all the things that are coming in
and doesn't let Io be hit by any.
Well, we aimed a spacecraft and went very close,
and had we missed we would have made the first impact crater.
[laughter]
SODERBLOM: The flyby is basically a week-long affair
that's 24 hours a day.
It's intense.
ANNOUNCER: There will be a Voyager report
in 30 seconds.
[electric guitar music]
BELL: Instant science,
because there's going to be a press conference that night.
This picture comes down,
and you've got three hours to figure out what's going on
and then tell the world about it.
Oh, no pressure there, right?
[heavy guitar music]
TERRILE: The confines of being a piece of biology
got in the way of that.
I mean, you got hungry, you got tired, you know,
you had to go to the bathroom,
I mean, you're going to miss something,
you don't want to miss anything
because every 48 seconds a new image would come down.
[heavy guitar music]
INGERSOLL: No one got any sleep during one of these flybys
when the spacecraft would go zooming past.
The photo labs were working day and night,
and people were sleeping in their cars.
[heavy guitar music]
HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: It was just way too exciting to...to sleep.
[heavy guitar music]
[heavy guitar music ends and fades out]
NARRATOR: During its Jupiter encounter,
Voyager revealed a feature of the giant planet
never seen before.
Jupiter had something in common
with its flashier neighbor, Saturn.
HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: The engineer in charge of the camera came in,
and he was like, Candy, what have you done?
What is the matter with our camera?
And I looked at it and went, ah, it's Jupiter's ring.
It went from being you've broken the camera
to, "This is the first picture ever of Jupiter's ring."
[atmospheric piano music]
TERRILE: Jupiter was a game-changer.
Jupiter reset all the registers.
Now we're really up for something.
And to know that this was just
the very, very beginning of this journey.
If we're blown away by Jupiter,
just wait until we get to Saturn.
[electronic version of atmospheric motif]
NARRATOR: The journey to Saturn would take over a year
and bring Voyager and its message
one tiny step closer to other stars
where, just possibly,
intelligent aliens might discover it.
[atmospheric music on strings]
[atmospheric rhythmic music]
The Golden Record contained the call of a humpback whale
and greetings in 55 human languages.
Most were recorded at Cornell University,
where Carl Sagan was professor of astronomy.
[atmospheric rhythmic music]
NICK SAGAN: My father was Carl Sagan,
and my mother is Linda Salzman Sagan,
and she's a writer and an artist
and she designed the iconic Pioneer plaque,
she actually drew it,
and she's the one who got all the greetings
for the Voyager Golden Record.
I like to think of her, that she kind of put together
a kind of a choir of voices of greetings to the stars.
[recordings of voices with rock music plays]
JANET STERNBERG: The greetings to the universe
are almost like proto-tweets, the first tweets,
keep it short, keep it simple,
and there was a limit to what they could put on the record.
It's like kind of a tasting menu.
It's enough to get the aliens
to understand that, um, we're diverse.
NICK SAGAN: My parents wanted a child
to have a voice of one of the voices,
and they just came to me one day
and said, Nick, if you'd like to leave a message to aliens
if they happen to exist,
what would you like to say to them?
[tape rewinding]
SAGAN AS A CHILD: Hello from the children of planet Earth.
NICK SAGAN: "Oh, hello from the children of planet Earth,"
that's what I would say to aliens.
They loved that, and so it's like great, let's record you.
It's a bit of a blur.
Like the only thing that I know that I remember from that time
is those knobs and the little recording level
that goes into the red if you speak too much,
this 70s, kind of, um...
so I remember that,
and I remember watching the needle move as I spoke
and seeing where it got, oh, that got close to the red
but actually didn't go into the red,
OK, that's probably good.
And that was that.
And then I, you know, drank my apple juice
and went back to my books.
It was really not till considerably later
that the kind of enormity of what that meant actually hit me.
[greetings in various languages]
KOHLHASE: Well, that brings up the whole question:
Is there anybody out there?
Listen, there are, give or take,
200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
There are about 200 billion galaxies in the universe,
or at least in the universe we know about.
HAMMEL: It's a pretty small spacecraft,
and it's a pretty big universe.
If you take a piece of sky the size of a soda straw
up there in the Big Dipper
in that tiny piece of what we thought was blank sky,
there's thousands of galaxies.
And each one of those galaxies
is filled with billions of stars.
That's just the soda straw,
and now you imagine the whole sky filled
with thousands upon thousands upon thousands of galaxies,
each of which is billions and billions of stars,
there's a lot of possibility out there.
[atmospheric guitar music]
PORCO: There has to be other civilizations,
the numbers just compel it.
It would be almost statistically impossible
for there not to be other life forms
and other life forms that have evolved
to a state of intelligence.
NARRATOR: But the chance that an intelligent alien
might encounter Voyager also hinges on another factor--
the sheer vastness of space.
SODERBLOM: The bigger you think space is,
the less probable it is you're going to find them
because they're needles in infinite haystacks.
KRAUSS: If you want to realize how empty our galaxy is,
the nearest galaxy to our own is Andromeda,
it's about two million light years away.
It's on a collision course with us right now,
and in five billion years
that galaxy's going to collide with our own.
And you might say, oh, no, oh, no,
but it turns out space is, even in our galaxy,
it's mostly empty space.
When our two galaxies collide,
almost no stars will hit any other star.
CASANI: There's just a lot of room out there, a lot of room.
BAGENAL: Once you start getting into the astronomical scales,
our solar system is pretty tiny,
and so this adventure of Voyager
which seems so remote and distant
for this little spacecraft to go out to the giant planets
is really just exploring the tiniest closest neighborhood
when you start thinking about cosmic scales.
BELL: The distances are almost unfathomable.
These were the fastest spacecraft
that had ever been built and launched and flown,
and they're travelling at ten miles per second.
You wouldn't even see it, right?
And yet, even at those
unfathomable by Earth standard speeds,
it takes decades, decades to get out there
into the outer solar system.
[music playing]
HAMMEL: I'd like to know the answer, are we alone?
I'd like to know the answer to that question.
[music playing]
FERRIS: The big division with extraterrestrial life
is not space, it's time.
[music playing]
KRAUSS: In our galaxy, our sun is relatively young.
The galaxy's about 12 billion years old,
our sun's four and a half billion years old,
there are many stars that are a lot older:
therefore, you could have imagined some civilization
around such a star that might have watched our Earth form
over the last four and a half billion years.
Well, over that last four and a half billion years,
the only evidence of intelligent life
would have been in the last fifty or sixty years
by watching Star Trek or I Love Lucy
or whatever signals we sent out, so even if you knew,
even if someone told you look at that star,
and then look at the third rock from that star,
and that's where you're going to find life.
Even if they knew which object to look for,
there's only a 50-year period over five billion years almost
where you'd be able to find intelligent life.
NICK SAGAN: If we're alone, then we're truly unique,
and how did that happen and why us
and how are we so special
and yet in such a kind of far-flung
kind of humdrum part of the universe?
And if we're not alone, how did we all get here
and can we learn about ourselves by these other groups out there
and what are they like
and are they the creatures of our dreams or our nightmares?
[music playing]
NARRATOR: In the fall of 1980,
Voyager got its first close views of the planet Saturn.
[light piano music plays]
SMITH: We started off with images
that were probably no better
than what you can get from the ground,
and then it keeps getting better and better and better
as you get closer and closer.
What are we going to see when we get really close?
SPILKER: Having seen Saturn in a telescope with the rings
just looking like these little tiny ears on either side,
to now seeing detail and the beauty of Saturn's rings,
you know, looking like,
almost like the grooves on a phonograph record.
BELL: The rings of Saturn, what are they?
Billions of icy particles, some the size of a house.
They're enormous, much wider than many Earths strung together
but less than a kilometer thick.
PORCO: We get there and we find
that it's a blizzard of features throughout the rings,
and it got very complex.
[guitar music]
PORCO: We become junkies who...
This is how you become a planetary flyby junkie,
it's because you've gone through one of them
and you just know it's the greatest feeling
and you want to keep doing it again and again.
SMITH: At some point, perhaps a year or so from now,
it may be possible to put all of this into perspective,
but right at the moment I cannot recall
being in such a state of euphoria
for any previous planetary encounter,
including our two remarkable Voyager encounters at Jupiter.
[electric guitar music]
CARL SAGAN: The largest moon of Saturn,
Titan's the most extraordinary place.
There's a dense methane atmosphere
where a complex organic chemistry has been going on
for perhaps billions of years,
and we are in a moment of extraordinary discovery.
CASANI: We had both spacecraft programmed
to do identical missions at Saturn,
and that was the prime mission and it involved Titan.
BELL: There's a huge amount of scientific interest in Titan
because many people think that early in our own history,
our own planet may have been like that
with very little oxygen, lots of hydrocarbons,
very thick, different, smoggy atmosphere
that was changed dramatically on our planet by life,
so if you want to understand the starting conditions,
go study Titan.
KOHLHASE: If Voyager 1 was successful at Titan,
Voyager 2, which is nine months behind going to Saturn,
would be free to continue to Uranus and to go on to Neptune.
But it depended upon Voyager 1 succeeding at Titan.
TERRILE: Because Voyager 1 had to be in a certain place
in order to pass Titan,
it couldn't go on to Uranus and Neptune.
There was just no way to bend its trajectory
to go anywhere else.
STONE: Voyager 2 would have done exactly that same thing
if Voyager 1 had failed,
we would have gone like this, no more planets.
KOHLHASE: That would have been really tough.
You gonna try for Titan again and give up two other worlds--
Uranus and Neptune?
BELL: So there was a lot of pressure on Voyager 1.
SODERBLOM: Mostly what we looked at
was a giant ball of brown smog
with some sort of electric blue hazes above it.
INGERSOLL: With the Voyager camera,
you couldn't see through the clouds and haze.
[radio chatter]
But the radio signal from the spacecraft
passed through the atmosphere of the moon,
and that gave them a measure of the pressure at the surface
and also the temperature at the surface,
and so we learned a lot about Titan from that radio signal.
NARRATOR: Voyager 1 revealed a world
at nearly 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit
that might have lakes of liquid methane
under its smoggy atmosphere.
STONE: Voyager 1 had succeeded.
And shortly after that, NASA Headquarters agreed
that we should continue with Voyager 2
on its Uranus trajectory.
NARRATOR: Voyager 1, its planetary mission over,
sped away from the plane of the planets.
Voyager 2--in part to get on its trajectory to Uranus--
would have to fly dangerously close to Saturn's rings.
[music playing]
BELL: We're getting pictures and other data back from Voyager 2.
But at some point in time, it had to go behind the planet,
and that blocks us from getting radio signals to the Earth,
and that happened to be in the middle of the night.
It was a period of time, several hours,
that everybody knows we're going to be
out of contact with the spacecraft.
Everybody's expecting to pop champagne corks
and say hey, we made it,
and all the data's on the tape recorder
because it couldn't be transmitted to the Earth,
and instead it pops out of the other side,
and there's all these crazy error signals
coming from the spacecraft.
Something bad has happened.
[machines beeping]
TERRILE: Something happened
right around ring-plane crossing,
and the images that were coming back were blank.
BELL: People thought maybe it crashed
into the rings of Saturn.
Is this it, is it dead?
SPEAKER: OK.
Ladies and gentlemen, we can start the briefing.
[tapping microphone]
SPEAKER: I wanted to make a very brief statement.
We do have a problem on board the Voyager 2 spacecraft.
AL HIBBS: The spacecraft has a problem.
The scan platform operating mechanism
is not operating properly.
SPEAKER: Make sure we understand where we're headed
for the following instruments are mounted on the platform:
the wide-angle camera, the narrow-angle camera,
the infrared instrument, the ultraviolet instrument
and the photopolarimeter.
SODERBLOM: A frozen scan platform
could be a fatal, crippling event.
SMITH: Yeah, that was the darkest, the darkest day
of the whole mission.
SPEAKER: There is circumstantial evidence...
SMITH: I came into the auditorium,
and there was just gloom on everybody's face.
SPEAKER: You're beginning to speculate.
SMITH: I quickly learned what had happened.
The scan platform had frozen.
SMITH: The problem is not with the camera,
it's with the articulated platform
that moves all of the instruments.
Our cameras, as far as we know, are working just fine,
it's just that we're taking lots of pictures of black space.
SMITH: The rest of the Saturn mission
and Uranus and Neptune were dead.
And seeing everything that we were planning just gone,
just suddenly gone.
All of the science that we had hoped to do,
and Uranus and Neptune--
there were no other spacecraft
that were going to be going there.
It was up to Voyager to do it, and all of a sudden it looked
as though Voyager was not going to do it.
It was devastating, it was...
[electronic inquisitive music]
SPEAKER: So, we've analyzed the slew data.
HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: It took a couple of days
while the engineering team went to work diagnosing the problem.
SPEAKER: We are going to command an azimuth slew
and an elevation slew to the Saturn position...
STONE: It turns out the scan platform
has small motors to rotate it,
and we could run it at slow speed--
tick, tick, tick, tick--
fast...medium speed or very fast (makes turning noise).
We were of course wanting to look at lots of places,
so we had the thing looking lots of places,
and the lubrication wasn't adequate and it just jammed.
SMITH: It was frozen sort of like a car
stuck in the, stuck in the snow.
You try to go forward or backward little bit...
lil...and keep working on it and try to get it out,
and that's what we did with the scan platform.
We would try to push it a little bit in one direction
and it would yield a little bit,
and then we'd push it in the other direction,
and it would yield a little bit more,
and then we kept doing that back and forth, back and forth,
and finally that was enough
to get the lubrication into the gears.
SODERBLOM: It was freed up and back came the spacecraft
and back came the imaging system,
and there was Saturn on exit.
SMITH: [laughing] Yeah.
["Us & Them," Pink Floyd]
TERRILE: We were looking at the shadow of Saturn on the rings,
and it was clearly from this wild, crazy angle.
Wow. Holy cow, we're on the other side of Saturn.
["Us & Them," Pink Floyd]
♪ Us and them ♪
♪ And after all we're only ordinary men... ♪
SODERBLOM: We felt like we were there.
Nobody even thought about it.
Voyager was part of us.
We...
♪ Me and you... ♪
PORCO: All of planetary exploration to me
is a story about longing, it's a longing to know ourselves.
It's a longing to understand the significance
of our own existence.
It's a longing to communicate,
to say to the universe we're here, you know, know us.
You know, where are you?
♪ Forward! He cried ♪
♪ from the rear and the front rank died ♪
♪ And the general sat, and the lines... ♪
NARRATOR: In the grooves of the Golden Record
was another gift from us to them.
[guitar music]
DRAKE: The Voyager record has a set of pictures on it.
It depicts our civilization,
but we only had the ability to do about a hundred pictures,
that was as much data as we could send,
so that was kind of hard.
LOMBERG: It was a process of distillation.
You can't describe the Earth
in a hundred pictures.
You can't describe the Earth in a thousand pictures,
but what art is about is taking something that's small
but can represent the whole.
[guitar music]
DRAKE: We thought it was very important
to put some pictures of humans nude on the record
to show just what our anatomy and physiology was really like.
NASA had been seriously criticized
about the Pioneer plaque.
There were actually letters to the editors of newspapers
saying that NASA was sending smut to space.
NARRATOR: For Voyager, NASA decided to play it safe.
Still, they gave the aliens some hints about our bodies.
BELL: Now it's five years of cruising out to Uranus.
STONE: Uranus would be the most remote object yet
visited by a spacecraft,
and it's so remote that it was not even known
until 200 years ago,
and it's a great distance out there,
and if we'd launched directly from Earth
it would have taken thirty years to get there,
so we were very fortunate
that we could swing by Jupiter and Saturn on our way.
SMITH: I've been trying to figure this thing out
for the past 25 years,
and it's very frustrating in a telescope
to look at that tiny little disc,
so the next few days are going to be very exciting.
[piano music]
HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: Once we got beyond Saturn,
essentially the engineers threw out the rulebook
and said how are we going to make this work?
How are we going to take pictures of planets
this far from the sun?
[piano music]
BELL: Voyager was the first
of a class of NASA spacecraft that could be reprogrammed.
They could take what was on the computer
and just wipe it away
and give it a whole new set of software.
They trained the spacecraft to pirouette like a ballet dancer,
basically you want to take a picture of that thing
and it's going past you really fast,
so you spin the whole spacecraft and follow it like this,
and so even though it was darker at Uranus
and really dark at Neptune,
you could leave the shutter open without smearing,
and that was just beautiful.
SODERBLOM: We had all of the rich set of goodies
from Jupiter and from Saturn, but Uranus was...was unknown.
[xylophone music]
NARRATOR: In January 1986,
Voyager 2 closed in on Uranus.
It would be by far
the most remote planetary encounter ever attempted.
[xylophone music]
TERRILE: It was like taking something
that was almost fictional, almost mythological,
and then seeing it as a real object.
BELL: Spacecraft flew through that system like a bull's eye
because Uranus is tilted on its side,
with this beautiful aquamarine blue methane atmosphere,
and all these pictures,
every single one of them is like whoa!
And you could hear people just whoa!
And everybody would be doing something
and somebody would go whoa!
And everybody would turn and look up.
Oh, my gosh, look at that!
There was no Internet,
there was no news stream going out to live CNN.
The only way to experience that sensation
of being one of only a small group of people
who saw a point of light become a world,
the only way to experience it was to be in that room.
STONE: Well, just about two minutes ago,
Voyager 2 passed through its closest approach to Uranus.
[applause]
SMITH: The new ring is right here.
Now, I don't... [laughter]
you're telling me you can't see it.
I can.
JOURNALIST: Dr. Soderblom,
as you whizzed through your explanation,
I couldn't put it all together, could you try that again?
SODERBLOM: Slower?
[laughter]
JOURNALIST: Slower and a few more details.
SODERBLOM: I thought that was pretty slow.
[guitar and strings music]
STONE: Every time we arrived at a new planet
there were always surprises,
even though we had gotten a lot smarter.
For instance, before Voyager, all the magnetic fields
have the magnetic pole near the rotation axis of the planet,
and that was true for Jupiter, it was true for Saturn,
and then we flew by Uranus and the pole was near the equator.
BAGENAL: There's been a lot of speculation
about the magnetosphere of Uranus.
Would there be one, what would it be like?
And the magnetosphere of Uranus
is far more weird and wonderful...
BAGENAL: We found the planet's tipped on its side,
but the magnetic field is then tipped
relative to the spin axis,
so you have this huge contortion in the magnetic field
as the planet spins around, just bizarre.
HAMMEL: At that point in its orbit,
the planet didn't look exciting,
and part of that is Uranus itself,
holding its secrets back.
SMITH: That had to be, I guess, one of the...
well, disappointments in that Uranus
was not more photogenic than it was.
It was actually pretty blah.
HAMMEL: Ah...poor Uranus.
[laughs]
Poor Uranus.
[guitar and piano music]
TERRILE: The big stars of the Uranus encounter
were actually the moons.
[guitar music]
KOHLHASE: If you're going to go to Neptune,
you still have to use Uranus for gravity assist.
The gravity assist aiming point at Uranus
just happened to be pretty close to the orbit of Miranda.
If Uranus has been the last stop,
the scientists might have wanted to go to a larger moon,
which ironically, I don't see how anything could have been
any more interesting than Miranda...
[string music]
It looked like a jumbled-up mess.
[string music]
HAMMEL: This moon looked like it had been ripped to pieces
and then just sort of shoved back together again.
SMITH: Whoa! Come look at this.
SPILKER: Going up to the screen and pointing and saying,
"did you...look at that, look at that."
HAMMEL: No...nobody was ready for Miranda.
SODERBLOM: There were enormous cliffs and gashes,
one of them, you can see the edge of a cliff,
it's got to be ten kilometers tall.
The gravity on Miranda is so weak,
if you jumped off that cliff,
you could read the newspaper on the way down,
but when you hit the bottom
you'd still be going a hundred miles an hour,
so it probably wouldn't...
it would be the last newspaper you read.
NARRATOR: At Uranus, Voyager detected intense radiation belts
and discovered two new rings and ten tiny moons.
BAGENAL: We were just about to present all our results,
we were all about to have
the big final finale press conference and...
came back from breakfast,
and I went to go watch the shuttle being launched...
VO IN ARCHIVE: We have main engines start...
4...3...2...1...and lift-off!
Lift off of the 25th space shuttle mission,
and it has cleared the tower.
BAGENAL: ...and we thought, OK, great,
we'll watch the shuttle launch
and then we'll go to the press conference,
but of course that was Challenger.
VO IN ARCHIVE: Engines throttling up.
Three engine now at 104%.
Challenger, go with throttle up.
Roger, go with throttle up.
[soft piano music]
SPILKER: People were just like astonished.
This gasp of like, oh, my, did you see that,
did it really blow up?
Because we had stopped in our meeting
so everyone could watch it,
and then there was just silence, people were crying.
[soft piano music]
SMITH: Well, what can you say?
You knew right away that a bunch of people were dead.
VO IN ARCHIVE: Flight Throttle. Go ahead.
RSO reports vehicle exploded.
Copy.
DODD: And then of course they showed replays and replays
and replays over and over and over again.
MAN IN ARCHIVE: We have no downlink.
OK, everybody, just stay off the telephones.
Make sure you maintain all your data,
start pulling it together.
SPILKER: The Challenger accident happened
as we were receding from Uranus.
I have this vivid memory of picture after picture
of the crescent Uranus coming back
and the replay of the Challenger explosion,
and it was just devastating.
RONALD REAGAN: Today is a day for mourning and remembering.
Nancy and I are pained to the core
over the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger.
We know we share this pain
with all of the people of our country.
This is truly a national loss.
I know it's hard to understand,
but sometimes painful things like this happen.
It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery.
It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons.
The future doesn't belong to the faint hearted,
it belongs to the brave.
[sad string music plays]
DODD: During these closest approach time periods,
we would have hundreds of reporters come to JPL,
and when the Challenger exploded, everybody just left.
[nearly silent save for ring of unattended microphone]
[piano music]
KRAUSS: Those cosmic questions we hope to learn
by sending our machines out,
the very same questions that you and I and every child
has asked themselves.
Where do we come from, are we alone,
what's the universe made of, how will it end?
All of these basic questions
are the questions that drive science.
[piano music]
[traffic]
[machines beeping]
STONE: Finally at Neptune, Voyager has begun
the last of a decade's worth of encounters
with the outer planets.
BELL: It was another three and a half years
to get out to Neptune.
They had to reprogram the spacecraft again,
give it, teach it some new tricks,
to work in this even darker environment,
even colder environment.
BAGENAL: If we take the Earth
being one astronomical unit from the sun, or AU for short.
Neptune is 30 times that distance.
STONE: When we launched Voyager,
there was no capability to get any images back from 30 AU.
That capability happened all after launch.
It involved taking two 34-meter antennas
and adding them to a 70-meter antenna.
VLA RADIO CONTROL: Copy, we're ready to run that observation.
STONE: It meant using the entire Very Large Array in New Mexico,
27 antennas to collect the very weak signal
that we could get back from 30 AU.
BELL: The flybys past Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus
had sped up the spacecraft too, so it's going even faster,
so enormous amounts of pressure, and one shot.
[light keyboard music]
NARRATOR: In the summer of 1989,
Voyager 2 finally came up on the ice giant Neptune.
Thanks to slingshots at Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus,
the trip was almost 20 years shorter than a direct approach,
one without gravity assist.
[music playing]
HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: There it was just sitting
out on the edge of our solar system
waiting for somebody to come out and appreciate its beauty.
Just waiting for the day
that humans would get out there, and go wow!
HAMMEL: I had been taking pictures of Neptune
from the ground where we couldn't see very much.
You know, in my head imagining what it might look like
and seeing that turned into reality, it's a rush.
BAGENAL: Looking at this blue, bright blue orb,
it was evocative of the Earth,
which was bizarre for the last planet that we were flying by.
HAMMEL: I was a meticulous log taker
and I would make little notations in these logs
and I would draw little pictures,
and you could see what's this little dark spot,
bright clouds, I'm like wow!
Wow! Exclamation point!
And I'd draw pictures and arrows.
The most surprising thing was a giant dark spot.
Nobody had any idea that would be there.
It's huge. It's like a hole in the planet.
So we called it The Great Dark Spot
because we're not very original when it comes to names.
[electric guitar music]
INGERSOLL: We had to basically make a forecast
of the storms on Neptune
in order to point the cameras during the last day,
and at the same time there was a hurricane
off the east coast of the US,
and the weather forecasters
were trying to forecast that hurricane,
but they were trying to forecast it twelve hours in advance
and they were having a lot of trouble
because the storm kept changing position.
And we were just calmly plotting points on graph paper
and then said, OK, two weeks from now,
this storm is going to be right here and it usually was.
[electric guitar music]
BAGENAL: At Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus,
the goal was to do a flyby
that would take the spacecraft on to the next planet.
When it came to Neptune
we knew that that was the last planet
that we were going to fly by,
and so we could take a different trajectory.
This allowed us to get a really spectacular view of the rings
and then look back on the system
in a way that was quite beautiful.
TERRILE: Think about imaging the rings of Neptune.
They have reflectivity which is twice as dark as soot,
and the light that's falling on them
is a thousand times fainter than on Earth.
So you have one one-thousandth the light
and you're trying to image something
which is twice as dark as soot against a jet-black background.
SMITH: More than one ring can be seen even in the raw images,
the so-called ring arcs,
and it seemed reasonable that this was indeed the lost arc
that our imaging team raiders were looking for.
CROWD: Oh dear!
SMITH: Now you're going to turn on me, right?
[laughter]
KOHLHASE: We knew at Neptune we wanted a close flyby of Triton,
which was a huge world around Neptune.
SODERBLOM: If you looked at them on the way in,
they weren't lined up.
One's up here; one's down here.
And so, what are you going to do?
Well, there was a way--
fly over the north pole, very close to Neptune
to bend the spacecraft so it would go down.
BELL: But the meant getting to within just a few thousand miles
of the cloud tops skimming the surface.
And they had to hit that, you know, exactly right.
SODERBLOM: There was a lot of concern
that we didn't know enough about Neptune's atmosphere
to really be sure that the spacecraft would not tumble.
BELL: Just a slight error in the calculations
and instead of skimming across the cloud tops,
you're skimming into the clouds and the spacecraft burns up.
Slight error the other way, you go a little too far,
you don't bend enough, maybe you run right into Triton
and crash, and that's the end of the mission.
You don't have enough time,
you have to make your last best guess,
hit the send button.
[atmospheric suspenseful music]
It would have been just fascinating
to be hanging on to that spacecraft, right?
Skimming over these beautiful blue cloud tops of Neptune
and then as you come over the pole of Neptune
seeing that big moon Triton rise up...
[atmospheric suspenseful music]
TERRILE: After several billion miles of journey
to get us to within a few kilometers
of where we needed to be,
it's just absolutely remarkable.
You know, threading an incredible needle.
SODERBLOM: Southern hemisphere of Triton
is entirely covered with nitrogen ice,
and as we flew past, we were able to look down
at markings on the surface of the polar cap.
We were putting together a mosaic of Triton's globe,
but we couldn't get things to line up quite right.
Some of the dark streaks, two in particular would not line up.
BELL: He's like just scratching his head,
like I have no idea what's going on here.
This guy's one of the world's experts
on anything having to do with planets and moons,
and he can't figure this out.
SODERBLOM: I said, well, let's put it in a stereo viewer,
red and blue glasses.
And the images fused into a three-dimensional model
and up popped these geysers.
[atmospheric suspenseful music]
SODERBLOM: And I said holy moly, and so we knew what we had.
[music playing]
BAGENAL: These plumes.
Black geysers spewing out this stuff.
HAMMEL: The plumes extending out of the surface
for like kilometers.
TERRILE: We were seeing eruptions on a world
which should have been just a frozen cinder.
The last place we would have expected
to see further dynamics, further eruptions
was at a moon this remote in the solar system.
SODERBLOM: Just because an idea's crazy,
it's not necessarily wrong.
CROWD: [laughter]
NARRATOR: Geysers. Volcanoes on Io.
Hints of a giant ocean of liquid water
under Europa's icy crust.
Each of these features is evidence of a source of energy.
And that's a prerequisite for life as we know it.
SPILKER: We knew this was the last planet
Voyager would explore
before it headed on for the rest of its journey,
and so I think the times together as a team,
the times to look at the pictures, talk,
meet together, became more precious.
HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: I was passing by the secretary's desk
and she said, oh, Candy,
there's a reporter that wants to talk to you.
And he said, the countdown clock
just went from minus,
counting down, to counting up.
Voyager's now leaving Neptune.
And he said how does that make you feel?
And in that moment, I dissolved into tears.
[piano music]
BELL: After the spacecraft went past,
it turned around and looked back,
and there's this beautiful crescent Neptune and Triton,
and people realized that's the end
of the planetary part of Voyager.
That's the last port of call,
the last thing we'll see in our solar system is now behind us.
[piano music]
SMITH: We could have enhanced the color a bit
to make a somewhat prettier picture,
but out of respect to the Voyager spacecraft
we decided to show it to you just as it is.
[applause]
[piano music]
SMITH: The way I looked at it
was gee, we did something really great.
Very, very successful mission.
SODERBLOM: A little weepy.
I mean it's...there was a lot of energy put into this mission.
SPEAKER: We have ignition and we have lift-off.
[piano music]
SODERBLOM: Years of intense effort.
It was the end of a sentimental journey.
[piano music]
KOHLHASE: We did it.
We pulled it off, and that's important.
It is.
[music: "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry]
♪ Deep down in Lousiana close to New Orleans ♪
♪ Way back up in the woods among the evergreens ♪
♪ There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood ♪
♪ Where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode ♪
HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: We had a big party at JPL,
Chuck Berry was there,
so that was a good send-off for Voyager.
CHUCK BERRY: ♪ Go, go ♪
♪ Go, Johnny, go, go ♪
♪ Johnny B. Goode ♪
[music ends]
DODD: Rockstar moment and sail on Voyager.
CARL SAGAN: And I'm going to go get some sleep
or maybe I'll do a little more dancing...
Thank you very much, Lou?
[clapping]
BELL: Meanwhile Voyager 1
is still kind of cruising out there,
getting farther and farther out,
and a number of folks on the team,
including Carl Sagan,
had this idea that before we have to shut the cameras down,
let's turn around, look back towards the sun
and let's take a picture of our solar system
unlike any that had ever been taken before.
And there was actually opposition to it.
PORCO: They just didn't want to do it.
They couldn't get their heads around
what would be the point of taking a picture
of the Earth and Jupiter and so on
because they're just going to be little points of light.
So Carl being Carl
actually went all the way to the NASA administrator
and got him to direct the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
to take this series of pictures.
SMITH: Absolutely zero science in it.
Absolutely none.
NARRATOR: From a unique vantage point,
nearly four billion miles away,
Voyager 1's cameras turned homeward
to take family snapshots.
It was Valentine's Day, 1990.
[music playing]
HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: When we did our portrait
of each of the planets,
I was the first person to look at the pictures
and I knew every blemish,
and so I could pretty quickly go blemish, blemish, blemish,
and I thought, well, where's the Earth?
Where? How could we...you know?
And then I realized there was a lot of...
there were a lot of streaks of light in that image,
and I realized finally
that the Earth was sitting in one of those rays of light.
You know, I just sat there for a while
just kind of realizing wow, that's the Earth, you know,
that's Voyager looking back at the Earth,
and then once I had sort of recovered,
I started calling people.
I called Brad.
Brad, we got it, called Carl, Carl, we got it.
Called my dad.
[laughs]
STONE: And so this is a different kind of milestone
than the scientific milestones we've had.
One that is really symbolic...
PORCO: I'm an imaging scientist, so I first realized,
oh, this didn't turn out
the way we thought it was going to turn out,
and my first impulse is to take my hand
and wipe away the dust, because there was some dust on it.
Well, one of the pieces of dust that I wanted to wipe away
was the Earth.
But it didn't matter because in the hands of Carl,
he turned it into an allegory on the human condition.
CARL SAGAN: And the next slide.
The Earth in a sunbeam.
And in this color picture
you can see that it is in fact less than a pixel,
and this is where we live, on a blue dot.
On that blue dot,
that's where everyone you know and everyone you ever heard of
and every human being who ever lived
lived out their lives.
I think this perspective underscores our responsibility
to preserve and cherish that blue dot,
the only home we have.
["Eclipse" by Pink Floyd begins to play]
♪ All that you touch ♪
♪ And all that you see ♪
♪ All that you taste ♪
♪ All you feel ♪
♪ And all that you love ♪
♪ All that you hate ♪
♪ All you distrust ♪
♪ All you save ♪
♪ And all you create ♪
♪ And all you destroy ♪
♪ And all that you do ♪
♪ And all that you say ♪
♪ And all that you eat ♪
♪ And everyone you meet ♪
♪ And all that you slight ♪
♪ And everyone you fight ♪
♪ And all that is now ♪
♪ And all that is gone ♪
♪ And all that's to come ♪
♪ and everything under the sun is in tune ♪
♪ but the sun is eclipsed by the moon ♪
NARRATOR: The two Voyagers still communicate with Earth
nearly every day.
It takes huge antennas to detect their faint signals,
now less than one trillionth of a watt.
The spacecraft continue to be tracked
as they begin the final part of their mission,
to travel beyond the edge of our solar system,
into interstellar space.
It's in this never travelled region between the stars
that Voyager and its Golden Record
will have a chance of being discovered.
KRIMIGIS: At the time we were designing Voyager,
interstellar space, where the boundary was,
was totally unknown.
We had our eyes on the interstellar mission.
Are we going to boost the spacecraft
to get out of our solar system and into the galaxy?
It was a shot in the dark because nobody knew how far.
Uncharted waters.
[inquisitive uplifting music]
BELL: The magnetic field of the sun can only extend so far,
it's a bubble around our star, all the stars have bubbles,
we can see the bubbles around other stars out there,
so we know that they have bubbles.
Where does our bubble end?
NARRATOR: Somewhere beyond Neptune
is the edge of the bubble around our sun.
At the heliopause two forces balance--
the outward pressure of the solar wind
and the pressure of interstellar space.
But how far out it was, no one was sure.
DON GURNETT: We kept going
and years went by and years went by
and we don't detect the interstellar medium.
[music continues]
BELL: Throughout the 1990s,
still didn't find the edge of the bubble.
Throughout the 2000s,
still didn't find the edge of the bubble,
and then finally in 2012 Voyager 1,
which is going the fastest, which is the farthest,
started to see these funny things happen
to the squiggly lines.
This crazy spike.
And everybody goes, oh, is that it?
And then it goes back to normal.
And then it was just literally one magical day in...
it was in August of 2012 that everything changed
and it was like pfff just... popped out of the bubble.
Voyager 1 has left our solar system.
It's the first thing built by humans
that has left our solar system
and now it's in interstellar space.
[violin music]
VO IN ARCHIVE: NASA says that Voyager 1
has become the first man-made object
to reach interstellar space,
the cold dark region between stars.
OBAMA IN ARCHIVE: And we've slipped the outermost grasp
of our solar system with Voyager 1,
the first human-made object
to venture into interstellar space.
STONE: It's a wonderful achievement, actually.
When you think of it, it's historic,
it's our first step out of our bubble
which has been around all the planets
and around the Earth essentially forever,
and now finally some little thing that we have built
has left that bubble and is in the space between the stars.
PORCO: It was like humanity
had just become an interstellar species.
It was like knocking on eternity's door.
STERNBERG: When the Voyagers' power sources go dead
and when the spacecraft can no longer send back
any useful information,
that's really the point at which the Golden Record
becomes the primary function of those missions,
that when everything else is turned off,
those records are still floating somewhere in interstellar space,
completing the last part of the mission.
[splashing noise]
LOCATELL: The chance that advanced intelligence beyond us
would detect oh, hey, there is a radiating body
coming into our area,
let's go out and find out what this bottle in the ocean,
what message it might have.
Now is that a grand mystery?
Whoa!
NICK SAGAN: I love the optimism of it,
I love the idea that these are things
that are meaningful to us,
maybe you'll find them meaningful, too,
hypothetical alien, and yeah, it just touches my heart.
FERRIS: One thing we know about a metal record
with these grooves engraved on it
is that information is good for at least one billion years.
The inside of the record,
which was more protected from cosmic rays,
two billion years or more.
BELL: There's no wind, water, rain, weathering,
there's no planets or comets that they're going to run into,
and over thousands, millions, billions of years
they're predicted to remain pretty intact.
NICK SAGAN: Because there's no proof that there's anything
that Voyager's ever going to encounter,
ultimately, it's a story about us.
LOMBERG: Voyager is rarely out of my thoughts.
Always some little part of me
is wondering where is Voyager tonight.
Whenever I look up at the night stars,
I look in the direction that each of them is going.
SODERBLOM: There is never going to be another mission like it.
It was the first and last of its own kind.
KRAUSS: Maybe someday, another being might find Voyager
and at least know of our existence.
It's highly unlikely, but it's not impossible.
And that small possibility surely gives us hope.
LOCATELL: Is the universe any different than it was then?
No.
But are we different?
Absolutely!
The thrill of the discoveries, reaching the heliopause,
completing the Grand Tour,
I mean man, our child has just made it.
[guitar/xylophone music]
HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: We're the generation
that sent something out into space
that's not only going to outlive us,
it's going to outlive our star.
Four billion years from now when our sun turns into a red giant,
Voyager is still going to be trucking
out there through the stars,
and the songs of our time are going to be out there.
Chuck Berry is still out there...
We'll still be out there.
[contemporary guitar interpretation
of "Johnny B. Goode" plays over credits]
[music continues]
[crickets chirping]
NARRATOR: For as long as humanity
has gazed up at the sky,
we've wondered:
What's out there?
Are there any other worlds like ours?
[crickets chirping]
CAROLYN PORCO: We knew very little about the solar system
before we started sending spacecraft there.
The outer planets were just tiny points of light,
we knew very little about them.
And much less about the moons in orbit around them.
[radio chatter] [rocket ignition]
NARRATOR: But in the 40 years since NASA's Voyager missions
began their grand tour of the outer planets,
we've made huge leaps in space exploration.
We've sent rovers to explore Mars,
discovered volcanoes on distant moons,
and found frozen worlds that hide oceans
beneath thick crusts of ice.
[crackling]
Features and processes once thought unique to Earth
are turning up all over the solar system,
and there's a growing optimism
that one day we will find life, somewhere out among the stars.
[radio chatter] [rocket ignition]
More and more, that search for extraterrestrial life
is driving exploration.
Finding it would revolutionize our understanding
of our place in the cosmos.
[boom]
PORCO: Copernicus completely revamped
our views about our universe
when he postulated the sun, and not the Earth,
was at the center of the solar system.
Darwin announced that all of life on Earth,
including humans, came from a common root.
And now, we are searching for evidence
that life began and evolved somewhere other than Earth.
A completely independent second genesis.
And to find it would force us to rewrite the story of life.
[music swells]
NARRATOR: NASA's Voyager missions
were an epic drive-by of the outer planets.
Carolyn Porco began her career on Voyager,,
helping to transform
our understanding of the solar system
and unravel the mystery and beauty
of the gas giants and their moons.
[projector whirring]
In 1990, she was selected as the lead imaging scientist
on a next-generation NASA mission, called Cassini.
VOICE ON RADIO: 3...2...1...
and lift-off of the Cassini spacecraft
on a billion-mile trek to Saturn.
NARRATOR: Launched in 1997,
Cassini has been orbiting Saturn for the last 13 years,
gathering data and beaming back spectacular images
of the planet...
[camera shutter]
its rings...
[camera shutter]
and many of its 62 moons.
[camera shutter]
Carolyn was initially fascinated
by the interactions of the rings and moons...
[radio static]
but a major discovery in 2005
pushed her toward the search for life.
[dust crackling]
PORCO: We had planned to take a close look at Enceladus,
which is this tiny moon in orbit around Saturn.
NARRATOR: What Cassini revealed...was spectacular.
[camera shutter]
PORCO: In November of 2005,
we saw dozens of geysers coming from Enceladus.
[dust crackling]
Narrow spiky-looking jets of fine icy particles
erupting from the south pole.
[static crackling]
NARRATOR: Enceladus--a moon less than 500 miles around.
And because of its icy surface,
one of the brightest objects in the solar system.
And in the southern hemisphere,
mysterious fractures nicknamed "tiger stripes"--
the source of the watery jets,
and a link to a liquid ocean beneath the ice.
PORCO: Once we found the geysers
and knew that they were coming from liquid water,
I realized this had tremendous implications
for the study of life elsewhere in the solar system.
NARRATOR: Tremendous implications,
because liquid water is considered crucial for life.
And that made Enceladus an alluring candidate
as a home for life beyond Earth.
PORCO: I kind of did a pivot.
I just started to throw myself into the study of Enceladus.
NARRATOR: The search for life
on places like Enceladus, Mars, or Jupiter's icy moon Europa
represents a new wave in space exploration.
But the quest is still rooted in what we know
about the history of life on Earth.
[birds chirping]
Today life is rich and varied,
found almost everywhere, in wondrous forms.
[bats squeaking]
[crowd screaming in excitement]
But only in the last 500 million years or so
did it begin evolving
into the animals and plants we now know.
Before that, for some 3 billion years,
the planet was teeming with life that came in only one size:
microscopic.
Because microbes were the first forms of life
to appear on Earth
and have endured for billions of years,
scientists believe they are our best bet
for the size and shape of life elsewhere in the solar system.
[whoosh]
But they're not the easiest creatures to find.
[birds chirping] [indistinct chatting]
Carolyn is meeting
with evolutionary biologist Andy Knoll,
who studies ancient life on Earth,
and the clues it left behind.
He's also helping guide NASA's rover teams
as they search for evidence of ancient life on Mars.
[rover whirrs]
PORCO: So what do you actually do
in searching for early life on Earth,
and how does that translate to Mars?
ANDY KNOLL: It turns out, when you look outside,
you see plants and animals,
there's conspicuous forms of life.
[jungle sounds]
[seagulls squawking] [crickets chirping]
Those are evolutionary latecomers.
Most of the history of life on Earth is microbial
and over the years we've learned how to search successfully
for both physical and chemical signatures
of ancient microbial life on Earth.
And once you learn how to do that
then it's a fairly easy matter to export it to Mars.
Let me show you an example.
So what you're looking at here is this so-called stromatolite,
and we see these wavy laminations
which actually represent microbial life
that trapped and bound sediments
and built up this reef-life structure...
This particular specimen is 2.7 billion years old...
PORCO: Wow.
KNOLL: ...and it is an unambiguous signature
of life on Earth.
PORCO: Okay, very interesting.
So this is what you referred to
as the physical remains or the physical evidence...
KNOLL: That's right.
PORCO: ...of life, but then you said...
you're also looking for chemical evidence,
how do you do that?
KNOLL: Okay, well, all life that we know of is cellular.
All cells that we know of have DNA and RNA,
which are the information library of the cell--
that doesn't preserve very well.
Cells have proteins that do the structural work,
and enzymatic work of the cell,
they don't preserve very well either.
But then there's a third constituent called lipids,
which make up the membranes of cells,
and membranes actually separate the cell from its environment.
And the good news there is that some lipids
actually preserve very well in the geologic record.
PORCO: How do you find those molecules?
KNOLL: Well, as sediments accumulate on the seafloor,
organic matter will get buried with those sediments.
And if you extract that organic matter,
you'll find lipids, and those lipids can be related
to the types of organisms that made them.
NARRATOR: These lipids--
preserved in rocks nearly 2.5 billion years old--
are signatures of life.
In this case, evidence of early life on Earth.
[wind]
Jump to Mars, where Andy and the rover team
are looking for exactly the same thing.
[rover whirrs]
[sand slides]
[rover buzzes]
[rover drives away]
PORCO: One time in its history Mars had bodies of water on it.
We don't know how long those bodies of water lasted,
so where on Mars are you going to look?
KNOLL: Really it's a matter of saying where was there water?
Where did that water result in sedimentary rock deposits
capable of preserving a signature of life?
And can the rover get there?
I mean in some ways we're in the golden age
of Mars exploration,
we've found rocks that are capable of preserving
various physical and chemical signatures.
PORCO: Right.
KNOLL: And we actually have instruments
that can detect organic molecules.
What we have not yet found
is any strong, you know, biosignatures.
[rover buzzing]
NARRATOR: They'll keep looking,
and someday soon astronauts could join the search.
But in the meantime,
Carolyn is pushing for a shift in focus to Enceladus.
There, they can have access to water that is still flowing,
and search not for fossilized evidence
of life billions of years old,
but for signatures of life that could be living right now.
[particles crackle in the air]
PORCO: Those of us interested in water in places like Enceladus,
we're in a different position
because we're not going to be picking up rocks.
We're looking at it completely from the chemical point of view.
NARRATOR: That's the beauty of Enceladus.
The plume is offering free samples of the liquid ocean
to anyone who stops by.
[particles falling and crackling in the air]
What those samples contain
is the billion-dollar question--
one Cassini made a valiant first attempt to answer.
[voices murmuring and voice over radio]
Soon after the plume was discovered,
the team reprogrammed the craft to fly right through it.
[crackling of radio signal]
NPR REPORTER: In today's news from Saturn, a NASA spacecraft
is flying through some geysers on one of the planet's moons.
[plumes shooting out particles that crackle in the air]
PORCO: Cassini's instruments managed to return information
about the content,
water vapor and carbon dioxide,
and methane and simple organic compounds,
and even ammonia were found in the plume.
[particles crackling in the air]
NARRATOR: These simple chemicals were present and necessary
for the formation of life on early Earth.
Enceladus is now two for two.
It has a liquid ocean,
and the right starting materials for life.
And further analysis of the samples
revealed another exciting surprise.
PORCO: When my Cassini colleagues
analyzed the particles in the plume,
they found microscopic particles of silica.
And this is very good indication of hydrothermal vents,
because at hydrothermal vents
you have hot, mineral-laden fluids
being injected into the cold ocean
and these particles like silica
get carried from the bottom of the ocean
all the way up to the base of the ice shell,
and they get forced out the fractures.
[particles crackling as they shoot out fractures]
And so this is how we know,
there are likely hydrothermal vents
on the seafloor of Enceladus.
NARRATOR: This was a find with exciting implications.
On Earth, deep sea vents support life--
in fact, entire ecosystems of strange creatures
get their energy directly from the vent chemicals,
or by eating those that do.
[rumbling and bubbling of vents]
[birds chirping]
At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
planetary chemist Laurie Barge is investigating
how the chemicals spewing from hydrothermal vents
fuel life--
and whether they could be involved in creating it.
[whirring and buzzing of machinery]
PORCO: Aha, so this is the famous chimney.
LAURIE BARGE: Yeah, so this is where we simulate
the hydrothermal vent, injecting through cracks in the seafloor.
And then this is your ocean, which contains anything
that would be reacting with this fluid.
PORCO: So that's a simulation
of what could be happening on Enceladus?
BARGE: Right, exactly.
NARRATOR: The simulations test how the chemicals interact
with each other and the seawater,
and how different combinations produce different results.
BARGE: Vents are more than just the chimney itself,
it actually has all this sediment
around it and underneath it.
And that sediment is also very reactive,
because it gives you a lot of surface area.
So when you have this pile of minerals,
all those mineral surfaces are available for reacting.
That stuff can come up
and if it can interact with mineral surfaces
then it might be able to concentrate
and make things like amino acids or maybe nucleotides.
NARRATOR: These are the building blocks
of the very large molecules-- proteins, DNA and RNA--
that govern life as we know it.
While Laurie and others
are trying to create them in their labs,
Carolyn is thinking bigger, and farther afield.
[heels clacking]
She wants to hunt them down in the wild,
and believes she knows just where to look.
[plumes shooting out particles that crackle in the air]
PORCO: Enceladus checks all the boxes.
It's really no more complicated than that.
It has liquid water, it has abundant energy,
it has organic compounds.
It even has evidence for hydrothermal activity
at the bottom of its ocean.
NARRATOR: Jupiter's moon Europa is also a good target.
Beneath its icy surface, the moon is believed to conceal
a global ocean twice the volume of Earth's.
NASA recently approved a new mission to explore it.
But the moon poses some serious challenges.
PORCO: Europa is embedded
in Jupiter's very intense radiation field.
It's nasty, and it can quickly destroy organic materials,
and even, eventually,
the spacecraft that you send there to find them.
And in the meantime Enceladus is spewing its ocean into space.
You fly through it, and you can just do tremendous things.
If you could land on its surface you could do even more.
[spacecraft whooshing through space]
NARRATOR: For Carolyn, a return to Enceladus
is not just wishful thinking.
Competition for NASA dollars is fierce,
but she and her colleagues
recently submitted an official proposal
to do further testing of the plume
with a more advanced orbiter.
After that, she's hoping for a lander,
and has been working on 3-D visualizations
of what these missions might look like.
PORCO: We already know where would be the best place to land.
JOHNNY FISK: Okay.
PORCO: And that is, in this other picture that we took.
You could see the geysers are very jam packed there.
Okay, very close together.
FISK: That's what I would think, right?
You would want to get
right in the middle of the valley, yeah, yeah.
PORCO: That would, that would be lovely, really.
But even just getting in the vicinity of these fractures
would be good because you have material just falling on you.
[rumble of spacecraft flying through space]
NARRATOR: The orbiter would carry instruments
far more powerful than Cassini's,
able to sniff out life itself,
or detect the chemical biosignatures
life leaves behind.
[crackle of particles flying through the air]
The lander would do even more--
gathering samples of larger particles
that fall back to the surface like snow.
[whoosh of lander shooting off of spacecraft
and thud of its landing]
[crackle of particles flying through the air]
PORCO: Material from the plumes,
which means of course material from the oceans,
which means materials
from in and around the hydrothermal vents.
And that's what makes this so exciting.
All you have to do is just stand back
and look at the big picture and think about the magnitude
of the questions we're trying to ask.
We could find life.
NARRATOR: Such missions, if they're approved,
are still at least a decade away.
But Carolyn and her colleagues are charging ahead, undeterred.
A decade means nothing when the stakes are this high.
[crackle of particles flying through the air]
PORCO: Anything we find at this point
just pushes us all that much closer
to understanding life's origins.
[blowing of particles in the wind]
Right now all of life we know of happens on this one planet.
And our planet has gone hog wild with life.
[whoosh of dolphins swimming through ocean]
But it's all based on one root.
That's one biochemical recipe operating on one small planet,
in one small solar system
in the corner of one ordinary galaxy.
So the chances are excellent
that there is life somewhere else.
and finding it elsewhere, anywhere...
just once...in any form...
[child laughing]
would finally be proof
that we are but one of many manifestations
that life can take in the cosmos.
[music playing]