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INDOXXI
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It is really true

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that you can only explore the solar system

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for the first time once.

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Ah, Voyager did that.

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How could one be so lucky?

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It's a dream and it came true.

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Fifty years from now

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Voyager will be the science project

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of the 20th century.

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The mission.

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The big mission.

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It opened our eyes to worlds,

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to real worlds.

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This may in the long run be

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the only evidence that we ever existed.

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Voyager to me was Homeric,

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it was years of passing
across the solar system

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from one planet to the other

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and then it was a week or two

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of frenzied activity
and discovery and conquest

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and then it was, well, back in the boats,

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oars in the water and
then on to the next conquest.

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It is the little engine that could.

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Nobody really knows how it does it,

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but everybody's rooting for it.

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Every second, it goes to another place

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where we have never been before.

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Voyager takes the cake.

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It's the most audacious mission.

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Who'd have thought

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that we'd actually be able
to do that in 1977?

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In 1977, a team
of scientists and engineers

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launched a mission of staggering ambition.

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Voyager.

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The initial idea was a grand
tour of the outermost planets,

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Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

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What were their atmospheres like?

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Their moons?

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At the time, our knowledge
of these worlds was scant.

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We knew a little because you can observe

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from the Earth with telescopes.

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We knew for example at Jupiter

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that there were moons

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Io, Europa, Ganymede
and Callisto going around.

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We knew that there were winds on Jupiter;

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we knew about the great
red spot on Jupiter;

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we knew that there was trapped radiation,

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so we knew there was a magnetic field.

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It was big.

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No, let's see, what did we know?

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We knew they were all gas giants,

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mostly made up of hydrogen and helium

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and some methane on the outer planets.

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For Saturn, we knew about the rings

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and we knew about the major satellites,

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but hardly anything more than that,

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and it was all very fuzzy.

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I had been staring at these planets

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through some of the best
telescopes on Earth,

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and yet all I could see was fuzzy blobs.

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Astronomers had worked pretty hard

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to know what the physical make-up was,

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there were some basic characteristics,

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but their real nature,
what they were really made of

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and what the means, moons, were like,

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we had none of that, just little glimpses.

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Human beings are a curious bunch.

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We want to know what's around the corner.

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We have to go past
that next bend in the road,

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so it's some sort
of innate drive, I think,

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that we have, as a species.

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One of the key things
that made this mission possible

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was gravity assist.

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That is when you fly by
Jupiter, you turn the corner

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and you take a little bit

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of Jupiter's orbital speed with you.

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Like a slingshot,

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so you better make sure
Saturn's in the right place.

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The positions of the outer planets

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presented an opportunity.

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A rare alignment meant the time

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needed to cross the solar system

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could be slashed.

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It would go Jupiter boom, Saturn boom,

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Uranus boom, Neptune boom.

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The planets had to be
lined up in just the right way

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to allow one spacecraft to do that.

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And that aligning up only occurs rarely.

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That only happens
once like once every hundred,

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more than a hundred years.

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...175 years, something like that.

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Once every 176 years.

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The previous time it happened,

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exploration was wooden sailing ships.

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It was named
"The Outer Planets Grand Tour,"

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and the cost of the mission
was estimated to be

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in excess of a billion dollars.

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The NASA administrator
went to the President,

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and he said the last time the planets

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were lined up like that,

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President Jefferson was sitting
at your desk, and he blew it.

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So, Mr. Nixon laughed and
said all right, just do two.

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So, only two planets.

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Jupiter and Saturn were officially a go.

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It would be a less grand
but still ambitious tour.

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Yet the Voyager team

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wasn't ready to give up on going farther.

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As they assembled the
spacecraft in a giant hangar,

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some of them kept a secret goal alive.

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We knew right from the get-go

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that we were going to try
as hard as we could

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to extend the mission
to go to Uranus and Neptune.

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We designed that in from the beginning.

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We knew that we were endowing
Voyager with the option

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if the chance was there to use it.

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We didn't want to
build anything into the design

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that would have prevented us
from going further.

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So, it was a mission
within a mission, yeah.

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A group of scientists
and visionaries realized

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that these spacecraft
would leave the solar system.

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They figured don't let
this opportunity pass,

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you're going to throw a bottle
into the ocean.

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Put a message in it.

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What would we want
to tell intelligent aliens

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about our planet?

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What would we want to tell them about us?

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The driving force behind the message

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was the astronomer Carl Sagan.

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Would you expect someone
to find this record out there?

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Is there something out there?

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Well, nobody knows.

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One of the great unsolved questions

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is whether we're alone or whether...

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Carl Sagan has become probably

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the best-known scientist
of the late 20th century.

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He was a working scientist,
he played a key role

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in many of the NASA missions
to the planets,

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including the Voyager one.

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He was one of the scientists
on the Voyager imaging team,

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but he also was the astronomer
who as much as any one person

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made the study of
extraterrestrial life credible.

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A comment by Thomas Carlyle,

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a somewhat crusty old fellow

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who upon thinking about the stars said,

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"A sad spectacle.

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If they be inhabited, what
a scope for misery and folly.

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If they be not inhabited...
what a waste of space."

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Carl Sagan was a good friend of mine,

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and I called him up and said,

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"Hey, would you be willing to undertake

151
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to come up with something

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for us to put on the Voyager spacecraft?"

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He says, "Yes, sure."

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And he told me he could do it
for 25,000 bucks,

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so I authorized him to go ahead and do it,

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and I sort of was hands-off at that point.

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The Golden Record
followed in the footsteps

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of a project called the Pioneer plaque.

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The Pioneer spacecraft
had some line drawings

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of a male and female form,

161
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and some people went absolutely bonkers.

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I don't know if you've seen it,

163
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but it's the most innocent
thing you can imagine,

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and it caused a lot of commotion.

165
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But I thought that was great.

166
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At first Carl thought
they'd simply do another plaque,

167
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maybe with some more information,

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but Frank Drake,

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a brilliant theoretical physicist

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but also a very hands-on kind of guy,

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he came up with the idea

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that for the same amount
of weight and space,

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you could send a phonograph record.

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The people who actually
did the science part of Voyager

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are always jealous and mad

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because the Golden Record
gets more attention

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than all the wonderful things they did

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exploring the outer planets
of the solar system

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except Pluto and all that.

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But the main attention goes
to the Golden Record.

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Because of the aura
that surrounds anything to do

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with extraterrestrial intelligent life,

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any kind of effort to contact
extraterrestrial life

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is more fascinating than
knowing the chemical makeup

185
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of a mineral on Mars or something.

186
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The record is an old-style LP recording.

187
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The only difference is it's on metal,

188
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and that's so it will last a long time.

189
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And it was recorded at half-speed

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so that gave us two hours of total time.

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An hour and a half of it
was devoted to music

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and the other half hour contains

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all of the other data on the record:

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the natural sounds of Earth,
the spoken greetings

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and the encoded photographs of Earth.

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One of the first
questions a lot of people ask

197
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is, well, they'll never
figure out how to play it.

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And in fact, we included

199
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a cartridge and stylus
in the package with the record,

200
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and the drawing on the cover
of the record shows the method

201
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by which the stylus is to be
placed on the record.

202
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Maybe what's written on it

203
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will seem like kindergarten
scribbles to them,

204
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but they should be able to figure it out

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if they've got some smart minds
or whatever's in their heads,

206
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if they even have heads.

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What I find interesting

208
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is to protect it from the dust

209
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and tiny particles of the journey,

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they put a cover over it,

211
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and on the cover was engraved
the location of Earth,

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our solar system,

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in terms of its direction
from different pulsars.

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A lot of people said,
well, why would you do that?

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I said what do you mean?

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They say, well, why would you
announce where you are,

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you know, because there
are aliens out there,

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that probably raid planets
and use them for food

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or eat the people or make them slaves.

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You know, if they find it,

221
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their technology is probably
more advanced than ours,

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they'll come here and destroy us,

223
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so why would you do something like that.

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Why would these people expose themselves

225
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to our voracious appetite?

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They must be very altruistic, you know?

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In 1972, preparation
for the mission got underway.

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Other great journeys of discovery,

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by Magellan, Columbus, Da Gama--

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all involved more than one ship.

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And so would Voyager.

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Two spacecraft would be built,
two chances for success.

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One of the things I just admire most

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about the engineers who built Voyager

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is that they're always thinking

236
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about the most improbable
things happening.

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You know, you want to take those people

238
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on a camping trip with you
because they will think of...

239
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well, you've got to bring...

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what if these bugs come out,
what if the tent gets flooded,

241
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what if you run out of gas,

242
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what if you can't
start the fire, you know.

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They're the what if people,

244
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and when you're sending
something out into space

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you can't go do a service call,
you can't bring it back,

246
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so your what if list
had better be like that long

247
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or you're not going to be able to survive.

248
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These projects begin

249
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with a conceptualization period.

250
00:13:03,958 --> 00:13:05,791
How do we arrange the spacecraft,

251
00:13:05,833 --> 00:13:09,500
how do we take the communications system,

252
00:13:09,541 --> 00:13:13,375
this large 12-foot diameter fixed antenna,

253
00:13:13,416 --> 00:13:17,958
and arrange it relative
to the propulsion system?

254
00:13:18,000 --> 00:13:21,375
The spacecraft took on
the dimension of being a child,

255
00:13:21,416 --> 00:13:25,125
and our design teams, you know,
were like kind of parents.

256
00:13:25,166 --> 00:13:29,000
This was actually a nurturing process.

257
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Bringing that "child",
if you will, into reality.

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00:13:36,791 --> 00:13:39,750
All spacecraft are made
basically of the same things,

259
00:13:39,791 --> 00:13:41,791
silicon and aluminum, that's about it.

260
00:13:41,833 --> 00:13:43,708
You know, that's probably 95% of it.

261
00:13:43,750 --> 00:13:45,625
Silicon and aluminum is cheap

262
00:13:45,666 --> 00:13:48,166
until you start making stuff
out if it, you know.

263
00:13:49,750 --> 00:13:51,958
1972 was when
you had the technology freeze,

264
00:13:52,000 --> 00:13:53,916
remember we launched in 1977,

265
00:13:53,958 --> 00:13:56,291
so you freeze technology
several years earlier,

266
00:13:56,333 --> 00:13:59,250
and at the time the biggest
computers in the world

267
00:13:59,291 --> 00:14:00,958
were comparable to the kinds of things

268
00:14:01,000 --> 00:14:02,791
we have in our pockets today,

269
00:14:02,833 --> 00:14:05,125
and I'm not talking about a cell phone.

270
00:14:05,166 --> 00:14:07,958
I'm actually talking about a key fob.

271
00:14:08,000 --> 00:14:09,625
What's wrong with 70s technology?

272
00:14:09,666 --> 00:14:14,583
I mean, you're looking at me,
I'm a 30s technology, right?

273
00:14:14,625 --> 00:14:16,583
I don't apologize for the limitations

274
00:14:16,625 --> 00:14:18,625
that we were working with at the time.

275
00:14:18,666 --> 00:14:22,458
We milked the technology
for what we could get from it.

276
00:14:23,666 --> 00:14:26,666
Voyager is about 800 kilograms.

277
00:14:26,708 --> 00:14:29,333
Its main antenna is 12 feet in diameter,

278
00:14:29,375 --> 00:14:31,333
which was the largest we could launch.

279
00:14:31,375 --> 00:14:32,708
There's this body,

280
00:14:32,750 --> 00:14:35,875
this ten-sided can called The Bus,

281
00:14:35,916 --> 00:14:39,041
and that's got all the
electronics and the computers.

282
00:14:39,083 --> 00:14:42,291
And that's got these arms and
these appendages that stick out.

283
00:14:42,333 --> 00:14:44,916
It has these feet
that connected it to the rocket

284
00:14:44,958 --> 00:14:46,791
and then a really long arm

285
00:14:46,833 --> 00:14:49,083
with a magnetic field sensor
on it over here

286
00:14:49,125 --> 00:14:51,875
and another arm over there with
this plutonium power supply

287
00:14:51,916 --> 00:14:53,375
to give it its electricity.

288
00:14:53,416 --> 00:14:55,125
You can't keep that too close
to the spacecraft

289
00:14:55,166 --> 00:14:56,958
because it will radiate the spacecraft.

290
00:14:57,000 --> 00:14:58,875
And another arm with this device

291
00:14:58,916 --> 00:15:00,958
that had the cameras
and other instruments on it

292
00:15:01,000 --> 00:15:03,125
that could point around,
kind of like the eyes,

293
00:15:03,166 --> 00:15:06,666
and the big antenna was the ears.

294
00:15:06,708 --> 00:15:08,583
We had eleven scientific instruments

295
00:15:08,625 --> 00:15:11,791
peeking out to see what's out there.

296
00:15:11,833 --> 00:15:13,666
When everything is fully extended

297
00:15:13,708 --> 00:15:15,333
to its greatest dimensions,

298
00:15:15,375 --> 00:15:18,666
it's comparable in size
to sort of a small school bus.

299
00:15:19,916 --> 00:15:23,166
A strange-looking being for our planet,

300
00:15:23,208 --> 00:15:25,625
but perfectly happy in space.

301
00:15:47,875 --> 00:15:49,541
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony

302
00:15:49,583 --> 00:15:51,916
was one of twenty-seven pieces of music

303
00:15:51,958 --> 00:15:54,083
chosen for the Golden Record.

304
00:15:54,125 --> 00:15:58,125
I became the producer
of only one record in my career,

305
00:15:58,166 --> 00:15:59,833
and only two copies of it were made,

306
00:15:59,875 --> 00:16:01,708
and they were both hurled off the earth,

307
00:16:01,750 --> 00:16:03,708
so I don't know if that's
a credential or not.

308
00:16:07,291 --> 00:16:09,750
The launch window for Voyager was set.

309
00:16:09,791 --> 00:16:13,041
and they sure as hell weren't
going to wait for the record.

310
00:16:14,625 --> 00:16:16,208
We had six weeks to do it,

311
00:16:16,250 --> 00:16:18,625
that's what always draws the biggest gasp,

312
00:16:18,666 --> 00:16:21,625
that you had to figure out a way
to explain the world to aliens,

313
00:16:21,666 --> 00:16:24,000
and by the way it has to be
finished in six weeks.

314
00:16:26,708 --> 00:16:29,791
We had two goals
in making the Voyager record,

315
00:16:29,833 --> 00:16:31,916
we wanted the music to represent

316
00:16:31,958 --> 00:16:34,000
many different cultures around the world

317
00:16:34,041 --> 00:16:36,583
and not just the culture of the society

318
00:16:36,625 --> 00:16:39,291
that had built and launched
the spacecraft.

319
00:16:41,375 --> 00:16:45,000
The other criterion was we
wanted it to be a good record.

320
00:16:46,625 --> 00:16:48,916
It's a very idiosyncratic message.

321
00:16:48,958 --> 00:16:51,125
It doesn't seem like something
made by a committee.

322
00:16:51,166 --> 00:16:52,583
It's too quirky.

323
00:17:03,083 --> 00:17:04,875
If you listen to the Voyager record,

324
00:17:04,916 --> 00:17:07,458
it would be remarkable if you
didn't hear some pieces of music

325
00:17:07,500 --> 00:17:09,958
that were quite unlike anything
you had heard before.

326
00:17:10,000 --> 00:17:12,000
The Japanese shakuhachi piece

327
00:17:12,041 --> 00:17:15,208
or the sixteen-year-old pygmy girl singing

328
00:17:15,250 --> 00:17:16,750
what's called an initiation song,

329
00:17:16,791 --> 00:17:18,541
a kind of puberty song,

330
00:17:18,583 --> 00:17:23,791
in the Ituri forest of Africa
is just unbelievably beautiful.

331
00:17:27,125 --> 00:17:28,416
There was a certain amount

332
00:17:28,458 --> 00:17:32,666
of hunting up rare records here and there.

333
00:17:32,708 --> 00:17:37,083
I remember the back of an Indian
appliance store in New York

334
00:17:37,125 --> 00:17:39,125
where they had some Indian records,

335
00:17:39,166 --> 00:17:41,333
and there was one copy of a raga

336
00:17:41,375 --> 00:17:43,791
that we ended up putting on the record.

337
00:17:55,333 --> 00:17:57,291
I would love
to have had a Bob Dylan piece.

338
00:17:57,333 --> 00:17:59,250
But really there's only room

339
00:17:59,291 --> 00:18:03,375
for at most one contemporary rock piece.

340
00:18:05,250 --> 00:18:07,291
But you know you're up against
Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode,

341
00:18:07,333 --> 00:18:10,291
which Bob Dylan himself would
admit is an awfully good single.

342
00:18:10,333 --> 00:18:12,916
It may be just four simple words,

343
00:18:12,958 --> 00:18:15,041
but it is the first positive proof

344
00:18:15,083 --> 00:18:17,791
that other intelligent beings
inhabit the universe.

345
00:18:17,833 --> 00:18:20,083
What are the four words, Cocuwa?

346
00:18:20,125 --> 00:18:22,708
Send more Chuck Berry.

347
00:18:24,416 --> 00:18:27,166
The world is full of fantastic music,

348
00:18:27,208 --> 00:18:29,541
and it goes without saying
there's a lot more great music

349
00:18:29,583 --> 00:18:33,000
that's not on the Voyager
record than there is on it.

350
00:18:33,041 --> 00:18:34,375
Which is a good thing, too,

351
00:18:34,416 --> 00:18:36,458
I mean, if you imagine living on a planet

352
00:18:36,500 --> 00:18:38,250
that was so pathetic

353
00:18:38,291 --> 00:18:40,458
that it only had 90 minutes
of decent music.

354
00:18:41,875 --> 00:18:44,041
In the summer of 1977,

355
00:18:44,083 --> 00:18:48,375
final preparations for two
launches began in Florida.

356
00:18:51,125 --> 00:18:52,500
When it was launched,

357
00:18:52,541 --> 00:18:54,333
it was of course all folded up,
it was like origami.

358
00:18:56,583 --> 00:19:03,166
Here was this almost
unexpected encapsulation.

359
00:19:03,208 --> 00:19:05,708
I mean, we knew that we were
going to be encapsulated,

360
00:19:05,750 --> 00:19:09,208
but the emotional effect on
that was kind of surprising,

361
00:19:09,250 --> 00:19:13,208
I noticed that in just looking around me.

362
00:19:13,250 --> 00:19:16,291
I realized that this was the last time

363
00:19:16,333 --> 00:19:21,541
any of us were going to see
the spacecraft with eyes.

364
00:19:22,750 --> 00:19:27,875
And, um, that's a f...

365
00:19:27,916 --> 00:19:32,000
that's a fairly moving experience.

366
00:19:33,500 --> 00:19:35,958
Journalists converged on Cape Canaveral

367
00:19:36,000 --> 00:19:39,333
to cover a once in a lifetime mission.

368
00:19:39,375 --> 00:19:41,125
When the reporters came to the launch,

369
00:19:41,166 --> 00:19:44,333
they all wanted to know more
about the record.

370
00:19:44,375 --> 00:19:46,708
Most of the press release drawings

371
00:19:46,750 --> 00:19:48,708
show the other side of the spacecraft

372
00:19:48,750 --> 00:19:50,375
so you can't see the record.

373
00:19:50,416 --> 00:19:53,375
There was always a lot of
ambiguity in NASA about this.

374
00:19:53,416 --> 00:19:56,000
There's no question that
the Voyager record is useless

375
00:19:56,041 --> 00:19:58,000
from a scientific standpoint,

376
00:19:58,041 --> 00:20:01,583
and the officials reluctantly
arranged a press conference.

377
00:20:05,458 --> 00:20:07,666
The press conference was a joke really.

378
00:20:07,708 --> 00:20:10,041
It was held in a hotel room

379
00:20:10,083 --> 00:20:13,416
separated by one of those
accordion folding barriers

380
00:20:13,458 --> 00:20:16,000
from what was literally,
as memory serves me,

381
00:20:16,041 --> 00:20:17,916
a Polish wedding reception.

382
00:20:17,958 --> 00:20:19,666
We did the whole press conference

383
00:20:19,708 --> 00:20:23,375
with the oompah sound of
a wedding reception next door.

384
00:20:23,416 --> 00:20:25,875
But I think the public seemed to get it.

385
00:20:29,041 --> 00:20:30,708
Environmental control, ready.

386
00:20:30,750 --> 00:20:32,083
Roger.

387
00:20:32,125 --> 00:20:35,208
We actually launched Voyager 2 first,

388
00:20:35,250 --> 00:20:40,333
and this gave the media,
uh, drove them nuts.

389
00:20:40,375 --> 00:20:42,625
We launched Voyager 1 later,

390
00:20:42,666 --> 00:20:45,375
but it was launched
on a faster trajectory,

391
00:20:45,416 --> 00:20:49,583
so it overtook Voyager 2
in December of 1977.

392
00:20:49,625 --> 00:20:51,083
From that point on, Voyager 1

393
00:20:51,125 --> 00:20:54,041
always got to the planet before Voyager 2,

394
00:20:54,083 --> 00:20:56,000
and the press was happy,
they understood it.

395
00:20:56,041 --> 00:20:57,458
We have just had a report

396
00:20:57,500 --> 00:21:01,041
from John Casani,
the Voyager project manager,

397
00:21:01,083 --> 00:21:04,958
that we'll be able to count down at 10:25.

398
00:21:08,750 --> 00:21:10,541
After five years of planning,

399
00:21:10,583 --> 00:21:13,916
the assembly of the
spacecraft's 65,000 parts

400
00:21:13,958 --> 00:21:16,625
and untold mathematical calculations,

401
00:21:16,666 --> 00:21:18,208
it all came down to this.

402
00:21:19,375 --> 00:21:25,208
Five, four, three, two, one.

403
00:21:25,250 --> 00:21:28,625
We have ignition and we have lift-off.

404
00:21:28,666 --> 00:21:31,208
You see those solids ignite,

405
00:21:31,250 --> 00:21:34,333
and you are really not prepared
for what's about to occur.

406
00:21:37,125 --> 00:21:45,208
The sound waves then catch up
and then this forceful shaking,

407
00:21:45,250 --> 00:21:51,208
the body is actually moved
in resonance with this energy,

408
00:21:52,208 --> 00:21:53,916
shaking it, right.

409
00:21:56,833 --> 00:21:58,333
We were sitting in bleachers,

410
00:21:58,375 --> 00:22:01,041
and they keep you pretty far
from the launch vehicle

411
00:22:01,083 --> 00:22:04,166
because they can explode, and
it's basically, it's a big bomb.

412
00:22:04,208 --> 00:22:05,708
So there's a little bit

413
00:22:05,750 --> 00:22:08,291
of holding your breath and
wanting to make sure you see it

414
00:22:08,333 --> 00:22:14,166
get that first little motion off
the pad starting into space.

415
00:22:14,208 --> 00:22:15,750
We were all thinking this thought:

416
00:22:15,791 --> 00:22:18,875
There it goes, it's going to be
out there to represent us

417
00:22:18,916 --> 00:22:20,833
for the next five billion years.

418
00:22:28,125 --> 00:22:31,708
There were outbursts of joy.

419
00:22:31,750 --> 00:22:34,125
We were on our way!

420
00:22:35,458 --> 00:22:36,958
And then we launched it,

421
00:22:37,000 --> 00:22:39,000
and then other things went crazy.

422
00:22:41,291 --> 00:22:43,208
The spacecraft began to do things

423
00:22:43,250 --> 00:22:46,416
that we had no expectation
that it would have done.

424
00:22:46,458 --> 00:22:48,375
Voyager was not in control of itself,

425
00:22:48,416 --> 00:22:50,250
it's just riding this big rocket,

426
00:22:50,291 --> 00:22:51,916
and that was shaking it in such a way

427
00:22:51,958 --> 00:22:54,000
that it thought it was failing,

428
00:22:54,041 --> 00:22:56,291
and so it started
switching off various boxes,

429
00:22:56,333 --> 00:22:58,625
changing to the back-up this,
to the back-up that.

430
00:22:58,666 --> 00:23:01,000
Trying to figure out why
all this stuff was happening.

431
00:23:01,041 --> 00:23:03,000
As the launch vehicle
leaves the launchpad,

432
00:23:03,041 --> 00:23:05,458
it has to roll through a certain angle

433
00:23:05,500 --> 00:23:08,333
to get to the right direction
for departure,

434
00:23:08,375 --> 00:23:11,333
and the rate that it rolls at
is a much higher rate

435
00:23:11,375 --> 00:23:14,541
than the spacecraft would ever
normally experience flying,

436
00:23:14,583 --> 00:23:17,500
and so the gyro hits the stops.

437
00:23:17,541 --> 00:23:19,625
Us poor people on Earth,

438
00:23:19,666 --> 00:23:22,416
we're like, "what is it doing?"

439
00:23:22,458 --> 00:23:24,916
For a couple of days
it was a real nail-biter.

440
00:23:24,958 --> 00:23:27,291
People were asking us,
have you lost the spacecraft

441
00:23:27,333 --> 00:23:29,500
and we would say we don't know for sure

442
00:23:29,541 --> 00:23:30,833
because we didn't know for sure.

443
00:23:30,875 --> 00:23:34,666
And the headline read "Mutiny in Space."

444
00:23:34,708 --> 00:23:36,791
The Voyager spacecraft had decided

445
00:23:36,833 --> 00:23:39,208
it just didn't want
to follow the instructions

446
00:23:39,250 --> 00:23:41,041
that its human controllers were giving it

447
00:23:41,083 --> 00:23:43,625
and it was going to do
what it wanted to do.

448
00:23:43,666 --> 00:23:45,625
So early in the mission
it's like, oh, man,

449
00:23:45,666 --> 00:23:48,291
is this mission going to be
plagued with problems?

450
00:23:48,333 --> 00:23:51,916
Is there some fundamental flaw
in the design?

451
00:23:51,958 --> 00:23:54,791
That was a cliff hanger.

452
00:23:54,833 --> 00:23:56,458
That was the end of the mission.

453
00:23:56,500 --> 00:23:58,250
It could have been the end of the mission.

454
00:23:59,375 --> 00:24:01,083
Fortunately, the person

455
00:24:01,125 --> 00:24:02,916
who had written that code

456
00:24:02,958 --> 00:24:06,583
was able to say this is okay,
it's doing this, it tried that,

457
00:24:06,625 --> 00:24:10,666
it's doing this, it tried that
and calm everyone else down.

458
00:24:15,125 --> 00:24:17,166
The limits were set simply too tight.

459
00:24:17,208 --> 00:24:23,208
It needed to be able to
wiggle more and vibrate more.

460
00:24:23,250 --> 00:24:27,666
Finally stabilized,
Voyager 2 was bound for Jupiter.

461
00:24:27,708 --> 00:24:30,458
The launch of Voyager 1
was coming up fast,

462
00:24:30,500 --> 00:24:31,750
so the team scrambled

463
00:24:31,791 --> 00:24:33,875
to fine-tune the spacecraft's software

464
00:24:33,916 --> 00:24:36,125
to head off another mutiny.

465
00:24:36,166 --> 00:24:38,125
With the launch window closing soon,

466
00:24:38,166 --> 00:24:40,000
Voyager 1 finally took off.

467
00:24:41,583 --> 00:24:45,666
But rocket science
is famously complicated.

468
00:24:45,708 --> 00:24:47,875
Centaur 6, Titan Centaur 6

469
00:24:47,916 --> 00:24:49,458
has lifted off at 8:56 from here

470
00:24:49,500 --> 00:24:51,875
at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station...

471
00:24:51,916 --> 00:24:53,458
We're thinking everything's okay,

472
00:24:53,500 --> 00:24:56,875
and then we begin to hear
that something wasn't right.

473
00:24:56,916 --> 00:24:58,416
I looked over at him

474
00:24:58,458 --> 00:24:59,916
and he looked like he was
a little worried, you know.

475
00:24:59,958 --> 00:25:01,416
And I said, "what's the matter, Charley?"

476
00:25:01,458 --> 00:25:02,916
And he says, "I don't know,

477
00:25:02,958 --> 00:25:05,875
I don't think we're
going to make it, you know."

478
00:25:05,916 --> 00:25:07,916
There was a leak in the propellant line,

479
00:25:07,958 --> 00:25:09,833
and we were losing propellant overboard,

480
00:25:09,875 --> 00:25:11,541
so while it was burning,

481
00:25:11,583 --> 00:25:13,458
propellant was escaping
from the launch vehicle

482
00:25:13,500 --> 00:25:16,583
and second stage never got
to deliver its full thrust

483
00:25:16,625 --> 00:25:18,458
because it ran out of fuel.

484
00:25:18,500 --> 00:25:20,750
And so, the upper stage
which was a Centaur

485
00:25:20,791 --> 00:25:23,458
liquid hydrogen and oxygen stage

486
00:25:23,500 --> 00:25:24,958
had to make up for that.

487
00:25:25,000 --> 00:25:26,458
And the Centaur is the stage

488
00:25:26,500 --> 00:25:27,708
that's doing the guidance,

489
00:25:27,750 --> 00:25:29,125
so the Centaur knows

490
00:25:29,166 --> 00:25:31,333
that it's not reaching
the required velocity,

491
00:25:31,375 --> 00:25:34,541
and when it separates
from the second stage

492
00:25:34,583 --> 00:25:39,333
it knows it has to burn longer
to add more velocity.

493
00:25:39,375 --> 00:25:41,750
The Centaur had to use

494
00:25:41,791 --> 00:25:44,500
1,200 pounds of extra propellant.

495
00:25:46,125 --> 00:25:47,708
Now we're all thinking

496
00:25:47,750 --> 00:25:50,708
is it going to have enough
left in the tanks

497
00:25:50,750 --> 00:25:52,791
or is it going to run out of fuel?

498
00:25:55,416 --> 00:26:00,208
Fortunately, it had three and a
half seconds of thrusting left

499
00:26:00,250 --> 00:26:02,916
before it had run to fuel depletion.

500
00:26:02,958 --> 00:26:04,875
Three and a half seconds,

501
00:26:04,916 --> 00:26:08,083
so Voyager 1 just barely made it.

502
00:26:08,125 --> 00:26:09,666
It wouldn't have gotten enough velocity

503
00:26:09,708 --> 00:26:11,125
to get to Jupiter, you know,

504
00:26:11,166 --> 00:26:12,833
so instead of getting
to Jupiter, you know,

505
00:26:12,875 --> 00:26:14,500
we'd have gotten almost to Jupiter

506
00:26:14,541 --> 00:26:16,458
and then we'd come back toward the sun,

507
00:26:16,500 --> 00:26:18,708
which would not have been good.

508
00:26:37,500 --> 00:26:40,958
And then of course,
you know, there's the thought

509
00:26:41,000 --> 00:26:42,041
that it's out of our hands.

510
00:26:45,458 --> 00:26:51,500
Now the major reason for this
mission was about to unfold,

511
00:26:51,541 --> 00:26:53,083
that is the science.

512
00:26:54,041 --> 00:27:00,291
But our role as keepers,

513
00:27:01,250 --> 00:27:03,625
as progenitors, as...

514
00:27:03,666 --> 00:27:06,666
our role had been finished.

515
00:27:52,208 --> 00:27:53,750
Thanks to the dedicated work

516
00:27:53,791 --> 00:27:56,958
of hundreds of the world's best
scientists and engineers,

517
00:27:57,000 --> 00:28:00,875
the twin Voyagers had at last
embarked on their odyssey

518
00:28:00,916 --> 00:28:02,916
across the solar system.

519
00:28:02,958 --> 00:28:07,541
The first leg was almost
400 million miles to Jupiter.

520
00:28:07,583 --> 00:28:10,791
You can never really imagine,

521
00:28:10,833 --> 00:28:12,791
you can try, but you can
never really imagine

522
00:28:12,833 --> 00:28:17,583
what mother nature
will actually have in store

523
00:28:17,625 --> 00:28:19,208
when you get there.

524
00:28:35,958 --> 00:28:38,416
It's worth realizing
that a human life ago,

525
00:28:38,458 --> 00:28:40,708
less than 100 years ago, 87 years ago,

526
00:28:40,750 --> 00:28:43,750
the universe consisted of one,
of one galaxy,

527
00:28:43,791 --> 00:28:45,333
our Milky Way galaxy,

528
00:28:45,375 --> 00:28:49,208
in a static eternal universe
with eternal empty space.

529
00:28:49,250 --> 00:28:51,916
We didn't know about the other
hundred billion galaxies

530
00:28:51,958 --> 00:28:53,500
a single human lifetime ago.

531
00:28:55,583 --> 00:28:57,583
In January 1979,

532
00:28:57,625 --> 00:29:01,500
Voyager 1 was coming up on its
first planetary encounter,

533
00:29:04,375 --> 00:29:07,208
and Voyager 2 was four months behind.

534
00:29:10,750 --> 00:29:14,750
It seems like time really flew.

535
00:29:14,791 --> 00:29:18,125
I don't think we really fully understood

536
00:29:18,166 --> 00:29:20,000
before the first Jupiter encounter

537
00:29:20,041 --> 00:29:21,666
just how intense it was going to be.

538
00:29:21,708 --> 00:29:22,916
No, we didn't.

539
00:29:24,125 --> 00:29:27,333
We found out.

540
00:29:27,375 --> 00:29:30,458
You start working on a mission in 1972,

541
00:29:30,500 --> 00:29:35,291
you launch in 1977,
all of that there's no science,

542
00:29:35,333 --> 00:29:37,083
it's all getting ready.

543
00:29:37,125 --> 00:29:40,416
And then March '79: the flood.

544
00:29:55,875 --> 00:29:58,958
The encounters, they creep up on you.

545
00:30:01,208 --> 00:30:03,208
When we were approaching, every picture

546
00:30:03,250 --> 00:30:05,583
was the greatest picture
ever taken of Jupiter.

547
00:30:06,708 --> 00:30:08,375
In the beginning,

548
00:30:08,416 --> 00:30:09,666
it would be just a little dot

549
00:30:09,708 --> 00:30:12,041
getting bigger on the screen every day,

550
00:30:12,083 --> 00:30:14,958
and as we would get closer and closer

551
00:30:15,000 --> 00:30:18,750
the images became more dramatic.

552
00:30:18,791 --> 00:30:21,083
Incredibly strange and beautiful,

553
00:30:21,125 --> 00:30:27,833
and now by Voyager revealed
in all of its splendor.

554
00:30:27,875 --> 00:30:30,250
That acceleration as
you're approaching encounters

555
00:30:30,291 --> 00:30:32,833
is really something that
becomes very, very exciting.

556
00:30:32,875 --> 00:30:34,833
We called it drinking
out of a fire hose, you know,

557
00:30:34,875 --> 00:30:36,041
you're trying to take a little sip,

558
00:30:36,083 --> 00:30:38,791
and this torrent of data is coming out.

559
00:30:40,875 --> 00:30:42,250
Would someone care to speculate

560
00:30:42,291 --> 00:30:44,791
what you would say to Galileo Galilei

561
00:30:44,833 --> 00:30:47,750
if he walked into the room today?

562
00:30:47,791 --> 00:30:50,708
How... how, how are you
able to live so long?

563
00:30:55,958 --> 00:30:57,666
I think Galileo...

564
00:30:57,708 --> 00:31:00,000
Jupiter is more than ten
times the diameter of Earth,

565
00:31:00,041 --> 00:31:02,708
it's huge, and it's mainly
hydrogen and helium;

566
00:31:02,750 --> 00:31:04,375
there are no solid surface
on these planets.

567
00:31:04,416 --> 00:31:08,208
These planets are liquid,
gas and liquid deep inside.

568
00:31:08,250 --> 00:31:10,083
The gas is compressed

569
00:31:10,125 --> 00:31:11,291
the farther down you go,

570
00:31:11,333 --> 00:31:13,750
and it gets very hot indeed

571
00:31:13,791 --> 00:31:17,875
and you would melt, vaporize, in fact,

572
00:31:17,916 --> 00:31:20,416
if you tried to fly through Jupiter.

573
00:31:20,458 --> 00:31:22,416
Let me first modify your statement,

574
00:31:22,458 --> 00:31:24,125
not that it was wrong...

575
00:31:24,166 --> 00:31:27,416
The atmospheric
scientists got long-range views

576
00:31:27,458 --> 00:31:30,500
because we weren't looking at tiny moons,

577
00:31:30,541 --> 00:31:32,958
we were looking at the big planet,

578
00:31:33,000 --> 00:31:35,000
and so we could see things going on

579
00:31:35,041 --> 00:31:38,333
before the other groups could see things,

580
00:31:38,375 --> 00:31:42,041
and we were always the first
to start shouting.

581
00:31:43,666 --> 00:31:48,083
Even to this day
we don't fly color detectors.

582
00:31:48,125 --> 00:31:52,166
You get a much higher-resolution
image in black and white,

583
00:31:52,208 --> 00:31:54,083
and so when we want to make color,

584
00:31:54,125 --> 00:31:55,833
we take them through different filters

585
00:31:55,875 --> 00:31:57,708
and then on the ground you put it together

586
00:31:57,750 --> 00:31:59,958
and make a color image out of it.

587
00:32:05,833 --> 00:32:07,708
You go to Jupiter

588
00:32:07,750 --> 00:32:10,625
and you have a storm that's been
around for more than 300 years,

589
00:32:10,666 --> 00:32:12,208
that's the Great Red Spot.

590
00:32:12,250 --> 00:32:16,583
You could fit two or three
Earths inside it.

591
00:32:16,625 --> 00:32:19,125
When Voyager started getting
close-up images,

592
00:32:19,166 --> 00:32:21,875
we realized that it was very active,

593
00:32:21,916 --> 00:32:23,958
and that deepened the mystery

594
00:32:24,000 --> 00:32:27,083
of how these big storms could even exist

595
00:32:27,125 --> 00:32:31,083
with all this turbulence going on.

596
00:32:31,125 --> 00:32:35,250
It was swallowing up
clouds and spitting out others.

597
00:32:35,291 --> 00:32:40,833
We knew that it was a vortex,
but to see it in action...

598
00:32:40,875 --> 00:32:43,708
Another feature of
Jupiter's dynamic environment

599
00:32:43,750 --> 00:32:46,291
posed a great danger to Voyager.

600
00:32:46,333 --> 00:32:50,208
Powerful radiation might destroy
the spacecraft's electronics.

601
00:32:51,666 --> 00:32:52,958
Every day you're wondering

602
00:32:53,000 --> 00:32:54,708
did we build the spacecraft well enough?

603
00:32:54,750 --> 00:32:57,208
Did we anticipate all the possible things

604
00:32:57,250 --> 00:32:58,833
that could go wrong?

605
00:33:06,500 --> 00:33:09,083
You're approaching
this monster magnetic field,

606
00:33:09,125 --> 00:33:12,250
this monster radiation
environment on purpose,

607
00:33:12,291 --> 00:33:14,250
because you need to get close
because you want to see

608
00:33:14,291 --> 00:33:17,208
all the little moons
and the clouds and the storms

609
00:33:17,250 --> 00:33:19,958
and you want to slingshot on to Saturn,

610
00:33:20,000 --> 00:33:23,000
but you just don't know
if you're going to survive.

611
00:33:23,041 --> 00:33:24,500
Thing gets fried, you lose the mission.

612
00:33:24,541 --> 00:33:26,708
Still out there physically
intact probably,

613
00:33:26,750 --> 00:33:30,291
but unable to communicate
with it, the mission's over.

614
00:33:30,333 --> 00:33:34,041
Two months before
shipping to the Cape for launch,

615
00:33:34,083 --> 00:33:36,541
the scientists were predicting

616
00:33:36,583 --> 00:33:39,500
that the magnetic fields around Jupiter

617
00:33:39,541 --> 00:33:44,125
were intense enough that they
would accelerate particles.

618
00:33:44,166 --> 00:33:47,875
Whoa! We were hearing
initially 40,000 volts,

619
00:33:47,916 --> 00:33:51,083
that would be the end of our spacecraft.

620
00:33:51,125 --> 00:33:54,541
Cabling on these appendages
were conductors

621
00:33:54,583 --> 00:33:56,458
that would take these destroying pulses

622
00:33:56,500 --> 00:34:00,208
and just feed them right
into our systems and kill us,

623
00:34:00,250 --> 00:34:03,291
so we needed to ground everything.

624
00:34:04,125 --> 00:34:05,333
We didn't have time

625
00:34:05,375 --> 00:34:08,041
to go through the normal design reviews,

626
00:34:08,083 --> 00:34:11,916
so in order to get this
protection done quickly enough,

627
00:34:11,958 --> 00:34:14,750
an ad hoc team was formed

628
00:34:14,791 --> 00:34:17,250
and we did some things
that were out of the ordinary,

629
00:34:17,291 --> 00:34:19,958
very out of the ordinary.

630
00:34:20,000 --> 00:34:22,583
I can remember asking
one of the technicians

631
00:34:22,625 --> 00:34:25,958
to go out and buy aluminum foil.

632
00:34:26,000 --> 00:34:28,875
It was the only material
that was available to us.

633
00:34:28,916 --> 00:34:35,125
Normally our procurement of
spacecraft hardware supplies,

634
00:34:35,166 --> 00:34:40,708
materials, are a much more
sophisticated process.

635
00:34:40,750 --> 00:34:43,750
We're actually cutting continuous strips

636
00:34:43,791 --> 00:34:47,333
and then cleaning them
with wipes and alcohol

637
00:34:47,375 --> 00:34:52,125
and then finally wrapping these
on all of our exterior cabling,

638
00:34:52,166 --> 00:34:55,291
but yeah, same material that's
in your Christmas turkey.

639
00:34:57,000 --> 00:34:59,583
I don't think we created
any shortage per se.

640
00:34:59,625 --> 00:35:01,958
It may have been a local shortage

641
00:35:02,000 --> 00:35:04,375
in the local grocery store for a few days

642
00:35:04,416 --> 00:35:06,208
until they reordered right.

643
00:35:06,250 --> 00:35:09,166
Your turkey wrapping
is protecting Voyager,

644
00:35:09,208 --> 00:35:11,875
and now fast forward, you know,

645
00:35:11,916 --> 00:35:15,083
did we know whether we had done enough?

646
00:35:20,000 --> 00:35:22,208
Voyager survived the onslaught

647
00:35:22,250 --> 00:35:26,916
and went on to record signals
that led to a discovery.

648
00:35:26,958 --> 00:35:28,791
If you had the right kind of antennas

649
00:35:28,833 --> 00:35:31,875
on your ears, you could go out
and hear what we record.

650
00:35:32,958 --> 00:35:34,625
I'm going to call them radio sounds

651
00:35:34,666 --> 00:35:37,208
because we have to detect them
with antennas.

652
00:35:37,250 --> 00:35:40,708
Amazingly we heard all kinds of sounds.

653
00:35:43,958 --> 00:35:45,333
Whistlers.

654
00:35:45,375 --> 00:35:48,291
These things that go like that.

655
00:35:49,333 --> 00:35:51,750
Yeah, whistlers mean lightning.

656
00:35:51,791 --> 00:35:54,125
There are lightning flashes at Jupiter

657
00:35:54,166 --> 00:35:55,583
that would go halfway

658
00:35:55,625 --> 00:35:57,250
from the east coast of the United States

659
00:35:57,291 --> 00:35:58,833
to the west coast.

660
00:35:58,875 --> 00:36:00,750
That was the first detection of lightning

661
00:36:00,791 --> 00:36:03,291
on a planet other than Earth.

662
00:36:03,333 --> 00:36:05,000
The two Voyagers were poised

663
00:36:05,041 --> 00:36:07,333
to study Jupiter's little known moons.

664
00:36:11,583 --> 00:36:13,875
Having picked up 36,000 miles an hour

665
00:36:13,916 --> 00:36:16,125
from Jupiter's gravity assist,

666
00:36:16,166 --> 00:36:18,375
the spacecraft were now traveling fast.

667
00:36:20,583 --> 00:36:22,500
When you're on a flyby mission,

668
00:36:22,541 --> 00:36:25,208
there ain't no second chance.

669
00:36:25,250 --> 00:36:26,666
We were getting pictures,

670
00:36:26,708 --> 00:36:28,083
they were getting better and better,

671
00:36:28,125 --> 00:36:30,375
and you could begin to see detail

672
00:36:30,416 --> 00:36:32,125
as these moons got bigger.

673
00:36:32,166 --> 00:36:35,125
You know the dread you have
is that you don't want to see

674
00:36:35,166 --> 00:36:36,958
a lot of worlds that look
like Earth's moon.

675
00:36:37,000 --> 00:36:38,500
Let's face it, it's dull.

676
00:36:38,541 --> 00:36:41,458
I think everyone figured they would be

677
00:36:43,000 --> 00:36:46,041
just battered ice-balls, you know,

678
00:36:46,083 --> 00:36:47,750
kind of like the highlands of the moon,

679
00:36:47,791 --> 00:36:49,708
nothing but impact craters.

680
00:36:49,750 --> 00:36:51,125
And when we saw Callisto,

681
00:36:51,166 --> 00:36:53,500
basically it's totally hammered, right,

682
00:36:53,541 --> 00:36:55,333
it's saturated with impact craters.

683
00:36:55,375 --> 00:36:59,583
Ganymede shows a lot of
interesting grooves and ridges,

684
00:36:59,625 --> 00:37:03,208
but it's pretty blasted
with impact craters.

685
00:37:03,250 --> 00:37:05,166
Every crater lasts for eons

686
00:37:05,208 --> 00:37:08,833
because no forces were present
to resculpt the surface.

687
00:37:10,333 --> 00:37:13,708
The first two moons were dormant worlds.

688
00:37:13,750 --> 00:37:17,333
And then as we went into the inner two...

689
00:37:17,375 --> 00:37:20,333
You could not see
craters on either one of them.

690
00:37:20,375 --> 00:37:21,791
Well, this was encouraging,

691
00:37:21,833 --> 00:37:24,333
because now we think maybe this mission

692
00:37:24,375 --> 00:37:27,375
is going to find a lot of diversity.

693
00:37:27,416 --> 00:37:32,708
Discovering this
billiard ball smooth icy crust

694
00:37:32,750 --> 00:37:34,833
of Europa with cracks in it

695
00:37:34,875 --> 00:37:37,000
and what looked like plates of ice

696
00:37:37,041 --> 00:37:39,458
that might be moving
relative to each other,

697
00:37:39,500 --> 00:37:41,125
the best explanation for that

698
00:37:41,166 --> 00:37:44,291
is that there's a thick ocean
of liquid water, salty water

699
00:37:44,333 --> 00:37:47,666
underneath that icy crust.

700
00:37:47,708 --> 00:37:49,958
More ocean water than on the entire Earth,

701
00:37:50,000 --> 00:37:51,333
probably two or three times.

702
00:37:51,375 --> 00:37:53,541
It's the largest ocean in the solar system

703
00:37:53,583 --> 00:37:55,708
in a moon going around Jupiter.

704
00:37:55,750 --> 00:37:57,208
And then of course, you know,

705
00:37:57,250 --> 00:38:00,833
kind of the showstopper
for Voyager, we get to Io.

706
00:38:00,875 --> 00:38:03,458
Io, of course, Io was the star of the show

707
00:38:03,500 --> 00:38:07,166
and we didn't learn that
until after the encounter.

708
00:38:08,833 --> 00:38:10,708
Everyone had gone home,

709
00:38:10,750 --> 00:38:14,208
and Linda Morabito, an engineer whose job

710
00:38:14,250 --> 00:38:18,125
was to find out the positioning
and the orbit of the spacecraft,

711
00:38:18,166 --> 00:38:22,666
noticed some bumps on images of Io.

712
00:38:22,708 --> 00:38:24,375
I was on the mission

713
00:38:24,416 --> 00:38:26,666
as a mission navigator,

714
00:38:26,708 --> 00:38:29,708
and our job involved just looking back

715
00:38:29,750 --> 00:38:32,375
over the shoulder of the spacecraft

716
00:38:32,416 --> 00:38:36,375
to say, "Okay, one more picture
of the realm of Jupiter,"

717
00:38:36,416 --> 00:38:39,125
so it wasn't high-priority work.

718
00:38:39,166 --> 00:38:42,250
It was an optical navigation image,

719
00:38:42,291 --> 00:38:47,208
and Linda saw this strange
thing on the limb.

720
00:38:47,250 --> 00:38:51,291
An enormous object emerged, enormous.

721
00:38:51,333 --> 00:38:54,833
And the first thing I said
to myself: "What is that?"

722
00:38:54,875 --> 00:38:59,916
And I'm like it looks
like another satellite

723
00:38:59,958 --> 00:39:04,041
in the picture emerging from behind Io.

724
00:39:04,083 --> 00:39:08,083
An object that size, at that
range, at that distance,

725
00:39:08,125 --> 00:39:11,958
would have been seen from Earth,
it was sufficiently large.

726
00:39:12,000 --> 00:39:14,833
I felt with certainty,
it's the only thing I knew,

727
00:39:14,875 --> 00:39:17,500
that I was seeing something that
had never been seen before.

728
00:39:18,583 --> 00:39:22,791
This was an umbrella-shaped plume

729
00:39:22,833 --> 00:39:28,666
rising 250 kilometers
above the surface of Io

730
00:39:28,708 --> 00:39:31,333
with volcanic activity.

731
00:39:34,416 --> 00:39:39,958
I found the very first evidence
of active volcanism

732
00:39:40,000 --> 00:39:41,791
on a world beyond the Earth.

733
00:39:46,625 --> 00:39:48,750
It was so hard to
believe that a little moon

734
00:39:48,791 --> 00:39:50,958
could have 10 times
the volcanic activity of Earth,

735
00:39:51,000 --> 00:39:52,833
which was the only known active volcanoes

736
00:39:52,875 --> 00:39:54,958
in the solar system were here on Earth.

737
00:39:55,000 --> 00:39:56,208
And then there's Io.

738
00:39:56,250 --> 00:39:58,625
Suddenly we had realized

739
00:39:58,666 --> 00:40:01,750
this was a different journey we were on.

740
00:40:01,791 --> 00:40:03,666
Io's volcanoes can shoot lava

741
00:40:03,708 --> 00:40:06,125
over 200 miles into space.

742
00:40:06,166 --> 00:40:08,791
These eruptions are powered
by Jupiter's gravity,

743
00:40:08,833 --> 00:40:12,708
which endlessly compresses
and releases the moon.

744
00:40:12,750 --> 00:40:14,291
I wanted to say one other thing,

745
00:40:14,333 --> 00:40:16,166
we've been saying that perhaps
there's some funny way

746
00:40:16,208 --> 00:40:18,833
in which Jupiter gobbles up all
the things that are coming in

747
00:40:18,875 --> 00:40:20,875
and doesn't let Io be hit by any.

748
00:40:20,916 --> 00:40:24,500
Well, we aimed a spacecraft
and went very close,

749
00:40:24,541 --> 00:40:27,833
and had we missed we would have
made the first impact crater.

750
00:40:29,416 --> 00:40:33,666
The flyby is basically a week-long affair

751
00:40:33,708 --> 00:40:36,666
that's 24 hours a day.

752
00:40:36,708 --> 00:40:38,083
It's intense.

753
00:40:38,125 --> 00:40:40,833
There will be a Voyager report

754
00:40:40,875 --> 00:40:42,666
in 30 seconds.

755
00:40:51,208 --> 00:40:52,750
Instant science,

756
00:40:52,791 --> 00:40:54,583
because there's going to be
a press conference that night.

757
00:40:54,625 --> 00:40:56,250
This picture comes down,

758
00:40:56,291 --> 00:40:58,791
and you've got three hours
to figure out what's going on

759
00:40:58,833 --> 00:41:00,666
and then tell the world about it.

760
00:41:00,708 --> 00:41:03,791
Oh, no pressure there, right?

761
00:41:03,833 --> 00:41:06,250
The confines of being a piece of biology

762
00:41:06,291 --> 00:41:07,625
got in the way of that.

763
00:41:07,666 --> 00:41:09,500
I mean, you got hungry,
you got tired, you know,

764
00:41:09,541 --> 00:41:10,750
you had to go to the bathroom,

765
00:41:10,791 --> 00:41:12,458
I mean, you're going to miss something,

766
00:41:12,500 --> 00:41:14,083
you don't want to miss anything

767
00:41:14,125 --> 00:41:16,708
because every 48 seconds
a new image would come down.

768
00:41:21,375 --> 00:41:24,291
No one got any sleep
during one of these flybys

769
00:41:24,333 --> 00:41:27,375
when the spacecraft would go zooming past.

770
00:41:27,416 --> 00:41:30,833
The photo labs were working day and night,

771
00:41:30,875 --> 00:41:34,083
and people were sleeping in their cars.

772
00:41:39,708 --> 00:41:43,625
It was just way too
exciting to... to sleep.

773
00:41:54,458 --> 00:41:56,250
During its Jupiter encounter,

774
00:41:56,291 --> 00:41:58,750
Voyager revealed a feature
of the giant planet

775
00:41:58,791 --> 00:42:00,791
never seen before.

776
00:42:02,333 --> 00:42:03,875
Jupiter had something in common

777
00:42:03,916 --> 00:42:06,708
with its flashier neighbor, Saturn.

778
00:42:06,750 --> 00:42:10,791
The engineer in
charge of the camera came in,

779
00:42:10,833 --> 00:42:14,416
and he was like, "Candy,
what have you done?

780
00:42:14,458 --> 00:42:16,791
What is the matter with our camera?"

781
00:42:16,833 --> 00:42:20,625
And I looked at it and went,
ah, it's Jupiter's ring.

782
00:42:22,916 --> 00:42:26,000
It went from being
you've broken the camera

783
00:42:26,041 --> 00:42:29,958
to, "This is the first picture
ever of Jupiter's ring."

784
00:42:37,541 --> 00:42:38,750
Jupiter was a game-changer.

785
00:42:38,791 --> 00:42:40,875
Jupiter reset all the registers.

786
00:42:40,916 --> 00:42:42,833
Now we're really up for something.

787
00:42:43,958 --> 00:42:45,458
And to know that this was just

788
00:42:45,500 --> 00:42:48,041
the very, very beginning of this journey.

789
00:42:48,083 --> 00:42:50,166
If we're blown away by Jupiter,

790
00:42:50,208 --> 00:42:52,041
just wait until we get to Saturn.

791
00:42:59,541 --> 00:43:02,291
The journey to
Saturn would take over a year

792
00:43:02,333 --> 00:43:04,125
and bring Voyager and its message

793
00:43:04,166 --> 00:43:07,291
one tiny step closer to other stars

794
00:43:07,333 --> 00:43:08,916
where, just possibly,

795
00:43:08,958 --> 00:43:11,375
intelligent aliens might discover it.

796
00:43:16,958 --> 00:43:20,000
The Golden Record contained
the call of a humpback whale

797
00:43:20,041 --> 00:43:23,458
and greetings in 55 human languages.

798
00:43:23,500 --> 00:43:26,041
Most were recorded at Cornell University,

799
00:43:26,083 --> 00:43:28,666
where Carl Sagan was
professor of astronomy.

800
00:43:31,125 --> 00:43:32,833
My father was Carl Sagan,

801
00:43:32,875 --> 00:43:35,708
and my mother is Linda Salzman Sagan,

802
00:43:35,750 --> 00:43:37,708
and she's a writer and an artist

803
00:43:37,750 --> 00:43:40,166
and she designed
the iconic Pioneer plaque,

804
00:43:40,208 --> 00:43:41,541
she actually drew it,

805
00:43:41,583 --> 00:43:43,833
and she's the one
who got all the greetings

806
00:43:43,875 --> 00:43:46,208
for the Voyager Golden Record.

807
00:43:46,250 --> 00:43:48,166
I like to think of her,
that she kind of put together

808
00:43:48,208 --> 00:43:51,250
a kind of a choir of voices
of greetings to the stars.

809
00:44:00,875 --> 00:44:02,333
The greetings to the universe

810
00:44:02,375 --> 00:44:05,041
are almost like proto-tweets,
the first tweets,

811
00:44:05,083 --> 00:44:07,041
keep it short, keep it simple,

812
00:44:07,083 --> 00:44:11,500
and there was a limit to what
they could put on the record.

813
00:44:11,541 --> 00:44:15,500
It's like kind of a tasting menu.

814
00:44:15,541 --> 00:44:17,583
It's enough to get the aliens

815
00:44:17,625 --> 00:44:21,541
to understand that, um, we're diverse.

816
00:44:21,583 --> 00:44:23,750
My parents wanted a child

817
00:44:23,791 --> 00:44:26,041
to have a voice of one of the voices,

818
00:44:26,083 --> 00:44:27,625
and they just came to me one day

819
00:44:27,666 --> 00:44:29,833
and said, "Nick, if you'd like
to leave a message to aliens

820
00:44:29,875 --> 00:44:31,375
if they happen to exist,

821
00:44:31,416 --> 00:44:33,583
what would you like to say to them?"

822
00:44:36,916 --> 00:44:40,166
Hello from the children of planet Earth.

823
00:44:40,208 --> 00:44:41,833
"Oh, hello from
the children of planet Earth,"

824
00:44:41,875 --> 00:44:44,625
that's what I would say to aliens.

825
00:44:44,666 --> 00:44:47,458
They loved that, and so it's
like great, let's record you.

826
00:44:49,166 --> 00:44:51,250
It's a bit of a blur.

827
00:44:51,291 --> 00:44:53,958
Like the only thing that I know
that I remember from that time

828
00:44:54,000 --> 00:44:56,250
is those knobs
and the little recording level

829
00:44:56,291 --> 00:44:58,500
that goes into the red
if you speak too much,

830
00:44:58,541 --> 00:45:00,541
this 70s, kind of, um...

831
00:45:00,583 --> 00:45:02,000
so I remember that,

832
00:45:02,041 --> 00:45:04,458
and I remember watching
the needle move as I spoke

833
00:45:04,500 --> 00:45:06,791
and seeing where it got,
oh, that got close to the red

834
00:45:06,833 --> 00:45:07,958
but actually didn't go into the red,

835
00:45:08,000 --> 00:45:09,583
okay, that's probably good.

836
00:45:09,625 --> 00:45:10,791
And that was that.

837
00:45:10,833 --> 00:45:13,291
And then I, you know, drank my apple juice

838
00:45:13,333 --> 00:45:14,916
and went back to my books.

839
00:45:16,291 --> 00:45:18,541
It was really not till considerably later

840
00:45:18,583 --> 00:45:22,708
that the kind of enormity of
what that meant actually hit me.

841
00:45:42,000 --> 00:45:43,958
Well, that brings up the whole question:

842
00:45:44,000 --> 00:45:45,875
Is there anybody out there?

843
00:45:47,458 --> 00:45:51,958
Listen, there are, give or take,

844
00:45:52,000 --> 00:45:55,333
200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

845
00:45:55,375 --> 00:45:58,250
There are about 200 billion
galaxies in the universe,

846
00:45:58,291 --> 00:46:00,375
or at least in the universe we know about.

847
00:46:01,500 --> 00:46:03,916
It's a pretty small spacecraft,

848
00:46:03,958 --> 00:46:06,958
and it's a pretty big universe.

849
00:46:07,000 --> 00:46:11,541
If you take a piece of sky
the size of a soda straw

850
00:46:12,333 --> 00:46:15,166
up there in the Big Dipper

851
00:46:15,208 --> 00:46:18,666
in that tiny piece of what
we thought was blank sky,

852
00:46:18,708 --> 00:46:21,375
there's thousands of galaxies.

853
00:46:21,416 --> 00:46:23,500
And each one of those galaxies

854
00:46:23,541 --> 00:46:26,041
is filled with billions of stars.

855
00:46:27,541 --> 00:46:28,916
That's just the soda straw,

856
00:46:28,958 --> 00:46:31,625
and now you imagine the whole sky filled

857
00:46:31,666 --> 00:46:34,708
with thousands upon thousands
upon thousands of galaxies,

858
00:46:34,750 --> 00:46:37,125
each of which is billions
and billions of stars,

859
00:46:37,166 --> 00:46:41,166
there's a lot of possibility out there.

860
00:46:48,291 --> 00:46:50,708
There has to be other civilizations,

861
00:46:50,750 --> 00:46:53,250
the numbers just compel it.

862
00:46:53,291 --> 00:46:55,416
It would be almost
statistically impossible

863
00:46:55,458 --> 00:46:59,125
for there not to be other life forms

864
00:46:59,166 --> 00:47:00,916
and other life forms that have evolved

865
00:47:00,958 --> 00:47:03,208
to a state of intelligence.

866
00:47:03,250 --> 00:47:05,375
But the chance that an intelligent alien

867
00:47:05,416 --> 00:47:08,958
might encounter Voyager
also hinges on another factor,

868
00:47:09,000 --> 00:47:11,958
the sheer vastness of space.

869
00:47:12,000 --> 00:47:13,833
The bigger you think space is,

870
00:47:13,875 --> 00:47:16,166
the less probable it is
you're going to find them

871
00:47:16,208 --> 00:47:20,875
because they're needles
in infinite haystacks.

872
00:47:20,916 --> 00:47:23,208
If you want to realize
how empty our galaxy is,

873
00:47:23,250 --> 00:47:25,208
the nearest galaxy to our own
is Andromeda,

874
00:47:25,250 --> 00:47:27,208
it's about two million light years away.

875
00:47:27,250 --> 00:47:29,625
It's on a collision course
with us right now,

876
00:47:31,291 --> 00:47:32,708
and in five billion years

877
00:47:32,750 --> 00:47:34,583
that galaxy's going to collide
with our own.

878
00:47:34,625 --> 00:47:36,083
And you might say, "Oh, no, oh, no,"

879
00:47:36,125 --> 00:47:40,416
but it turns out space is,
even in our galaxy,

880
00:47:40,458 --> 00:47:41,500
it's mostly empty space.

881
00:47:41,541 --> 00:47:43,458
When our two galaxies collide,

882
00:47:43,500 --> 00:47:45,583
almost no stars will hit any other star.

883
00:47:45,625 --> 00:47:49,500
There's just a lot of
room out there, a lot of room.

884
00:47:49,541 --> 00:47:52,541
Once you start getting
into the astronomical scales,

885
00:47:52,583 --> 00:47:54,458
our solar system is pretty tiny,

886
00:47:54,500 --> 00:47:56,958
and so this adventure of Voyager

887
00:47:57,000 --> 00:48:00,083
which seems so remote and distant

888
00:48:00,125 --> 00:48:04,125
for this little spacecraft
to go out to the giant planets

889
00:48:04,166 --> 00:48:09,791
is really just exploring the
tiniest closest neighborhood

890
00:48:09,833 --> 00:48:12,750
when you start thinking
about cosmic scales.

891
00:48:15,166 --> 00:48:17,916
The distances are almost unfathomable.

892
00:48:18,958 --> 00:48:20,833
These were the fastest spacecraft

893
00:48:20,875 --> 00:48:24,000
that had ever been built
and launched and flown,

894
00:48:24,041 --> 00:48:29,375
and they're traveling
at ten miles per second.

895
00:48:29,416 --> 00:48:31,291
You wouldn't even see it, right?

896
00:48:31,333 --> 00:48:33,000
And yet, even at those

897
00:48:33,041 --> 00:48:36,291
unfathomable by Earth standard speeds,

898
00:48:36,333 --> 00:48:40,833
it takes decades, decades to get out there

899
00:48:40,875 --> 00:48:42,416
into the outer solar system.

900
00:48:46,750 --> 00:48:50,166
I'd like to know the answer, are we alone?

901
00:48:50,208 --> 00:48:53,000
I'd like to know the answer
to that question.

902
00:49:01,291 --> 00:49:03,625
The big division
with extraterrestrial life

903
00:49:03,666 --> 00:49:06,000
is not space, it's time.

904
00:49:10,458 --> 00:49:13,625
In our galaxy,
our sun is relatively young.

905
00:49:13,666 --> 00:49:15,208
The galaxy's about 12 billion years old,

906
00:49:15,250 --> 00:49:16,791
our sun's four and a half
billion years old,

907
00:49:16,833 --> 00:49:18,375
there are many stars that are a lot older:

908
00:49:18,416 --> 00:49:20,333
therefore, you could have
imagined some civilization

909
00:49:20,375 --> 00:49:23,125
around such a star that might
have watched our Earth form

910
00:49:23,166 --> 00:49:24,791
over the last
four and a half billion years.

911
00:49:24,833 --> 00:49:26,958
Well, over that last
four and a half billion years,

912
00:49:27,000 --> 00:49:29,208
the only evidence of intelligent life

913
00:49:29,250 --> 00:49:30,958
would have been in the last
fifty or sixty years

914
00:49:31,000 --> 00:49:32,708
by watching Star Trek or I Love Lucy

915
00:49:32,750 --> 00:49:35,833
or whatever signals we sent
out, so even if you knew,

916
00:49:35,875 --> 00:49:38,583
even if someone told you
look at that star,

917
00:49:38,625 --> 00:49:40,541
and then look at the third rock
from that star,

918
00:49:40,583 --> 00:49:41,916
and that's where
you're going to find life.

919
00:49:41,958 --> 00:49:44,416
Even if they knew which object
to look for,

920
00:49:44,458 --> 00:49:48,125
there's only a 50-year period
over five billion years almost

921
00:49:48,166 --> 00:49:51,583
where you'd be able to find
intelligent life.

922
00:49:55,625 --> 00:49:58,500
If we're alone, then we're truly unique,

923
00:49:58,541 --> 00:50:00,833
and how did that happen and why us

924
00:50:00,875 --> 00:50:02,583
and how are we so special

925
00:50:02,625 --> 00:50:04,583
and yet in such a kind of far-flung

926
00:50:04,625 --> 00:50:06,791
kind of humdrum part of the universe?

927
00:50:06,833 --> 00:50:09,416
And if we're not alone,
how did we all get here

928
00:50:09,458 --> 00:50:12,708
and can we learn about ourselves
by these other groups out there

929
00:50:12,750 --> 00:50:14,291
and what are they like

930
00:50:14,333 --> 00:50:17,708
and are they the creatures of
our dreams or our nightmares?

931
00:50:26,333 --> 00:50:28,166
In the fall of 1980,

932
00:50:28,208 --> 00:50:32,250
Voyager got its first close
views of the planet Saturn.

933
00:50:44,750 --> 00:50:46,291
We started off with images

934
00:50:46,333 --> 00:50:47,541
that were probably no better

935
00:50:47,583 --> 00:50:49,250
than what you can get from the ground,

936
00:50:49,291 --> 00:50:51,375
and then it keeps getting
better and better and better

937
00:50:51,416 --> 00:50:53,291
as you get closer and closer.

938
00:50:53,333 --> 00:50:57,000
What are we going to see
when we get really close?

939
00:50:57,041 --> 00:50:59,750
Having seen Saturn
in a telescope with the rings

940
00:50:59,791 --> 00:51:02,458
just looking like these little
tiny ears on either side,

941
00:51:02,500 --> 00:51:05,708
to now seeing detail and
the beauty of Saturn's rings,

942
00:51:05,750 --> 00:51:07,041
you know, looking like,

943
00:51:07,083 --> 00:51:09,375
almost like the grooves
on a phonograph record.

944
00:51:09,416 --> 00:51:12,416
The rings of Saturn, what are they?

945
00:51:12,458 --> 00:51:16,500
Billions of icy particles,
some the size of a house.

946
00:51:16,541 --> 00:51:19,875
They're enormous, much wider
than many Earths strung together

947
00:51:19,916 --> 00:51:23,083
but less than a kilometer thick.

948
00:51:23,125 --> 00:51:24,583
We get there and we find

949
00:51:24,625 --> 00:51:28,208
that it's a blizzard of
features throughout the rings,

950
00:51:28,250 --> 00:51:31,250
and it got very complex.

951
00:51:43,708 --> 00:51:46,333
We become junkies who...

952
00:51:46,375 --> 00:51:50,208
This is how you become
a planetary flyby junkie,

953
00:51:50,250 --> 00:51:51,875
it's because you've gone
through one of them

954
00:51:51,916 --> 00:51:53,375
and you just know
it's the greatest feeling

955
00:51:53,416 --> 00:51:56,500
and you want to keep doing it
again and again.

956
00:51:56,541 --> 00:52:00,416
At some point,
perhaps a year or so from now,

957
00:52:00,458 --> 00:52:04,500
it may be possible to put
all of this into perspective,

958
00:52:04,541 --> 00:52:07,750
but right at the moment I cannot recall

959
00:52:07,791 --> 00:52:11,958
being in such a state of euphoria

960
00:52:12,000 --> 00:52:14,625
for any previous planetary encounter,

961
00:52:14,666 --> 00:52:20,666
including our two remarkable
Voyager encounters at Jupiter.

962
00:52:51,708 --> 00:52:53,166
The largest moon of Saturn,

963
00:52:53,208 --> 00:52:55,833
Titan's the most extraordinary place.

964
00:52:55,875 --> 00:52:58,375
There's a dense methane atmosphere

965
00:52:58,416 --> 00:53:01,375
where a complex organic
chemistry has been going on

966
00:53:01,416 --> 00:53:02,916
for perhaps billions of years,

967
00:53:02,958 --> 00:53:07,833
and we are in a moment
of extraordinary discovery.

968
00:53:07,875 --> 00:53:10,500
We had both spacecraft programmed

969
00:53:10,541 --> 00:53:12,958
to do identical missions at Saturn,

970
00:53:13,000 --> 00:53:15,708
and that was the prime mission
and it involved Titan.

971
00:53:17,541 --> 00:53:19,833
There's a huge amount
of scientific interest in Titan

972
00:53:19,875 --> 00:53:22,208
because many people think
that early in our own history,

973
00:53:22,250 --> 00:53:24,000
our own planet may have been like that

974
00:53:24,041 --> 00:53:27,541
with very little oxygen,
lots of hydrocarbons,

975
00:53:27,583 --> 00:53:30,458
very thick, different, smoggy atmosphere

976
00:53:30,500 --> 00:53:34,250
that was changed dramatically
on our planet by life,

977
00:53:34,291 --> 00:53:36,333
so if you want to understand
the starting conditions,

978
00:53:36,375 --> 00:53:38,250
go study Titan.

979
00:53:38,291 --> 00:53:41,125
If Voyager 1 was successful at Titan,

980
00:53:41,166 --> 00:53:44,458
Voyager 2, which is nine months
behind going to Saturn,

981
00:53:44,500 --> 00:53:48,375
would be free to continue to
Uranus and to go on to Neptune.

982
00:53:48,416 --> 00:53:52,166
But it depended upon Voyager 1
succeeding at Titan.

983
00:53:52,208 --> 00:53:55,666
Because Voyager 1
had to be in a certain place

984
00:53:55,708 --> 00:53:57,541
in order to pass Titan,

985
00:53:57,583 --> 00:54:00,083
it couldn't go on to Uranus and Neptune.

986
00:54:00,125 --> 00:54:02,375
There was just no way
to bend its trajectory

987
00:54:02,416 --> 00:54:04,875
to go anywhere else.

988
00:54:04,916 --> 00:54:08,958
Voyager 2 would have
done exactly that same thing

989
00:54:09,000 --> 00:54:11,125
if Voyager 1 had failed,

990
00:54:11,166 --> 00:54:14,083
we would have gone like this,
no more planets.

991
00:54:14,125 --> 00:54:15,958
That would have been really tough.

992
00:54:16,000 --> 00:54:19,500
You gonna try for Titan again
and give up two other worlds,

993
00:54:19,541 --> 00:54:20,625
Uranus and Neptune?

994
00:54:22,416 --> 00:54:27,375
So there was a lot
of pressure on Voyager 1.

995
00:54:27,416 --> 00:54:28,708
Mostly what we looked at

996
00:54:28,750 --> 00:54:31,916
was a giant ball of brown smog

997
00:54:31,958 --> 00:54:36,833
with some sort of electric blue
hazes above it.

998
00:54:36,875 --> 00:54:38,250
Was it Voyager camera,

999
00:54:38,291 --> 00:54:41,041
you couldn't see through
the clouds and haze.

1000
00:54:47,125 --> 00:54:50,208
But the radio signal from the spacecraft

1001
00:54:50,250 --> 00:54:52,958
passed through the atmosphere of the moon,

1002
00:54:53,000 --> 00:54:56,875
and that gave them a measure
of the pressure at the surface

1003
00:54:56,916 --> 00:54:59,208
and also the temperature at the surface,

1004
00:54:59,250 --> 00:55:03,000
and so we learned a lot about
Titan from that radio signal.

1005
00:55:04,583 --> 00:55:05,958
Voyager 1 revealed a world

1006
00:55:06,000 --> 00:55:09,333
at nearly 300 degrees
below zero Fahrenheit

1007
00:55:09,375 --> 00:55:11,625
that might have lakes of liquid methane

1008
00:55:11,666 --> 00:55:13,500
under its smoggy atmosphere.

1009
00:55:14,916 --> 00:55:19,250
Voyager 1 had succeeded.

1010
00:55:19,291 --> 00:55:22,250
And shortly after that,
NASA Headquarters agreed

1011
00:55:22,291 --> 00:55:24,625
that we should continue with Voyager 2

1012
00:55:24,666 --> 00:55:25,916
on its Uranus trajectory.

1013
00:55:29,041 --> 00:55:32,125
Voyager 1, its planetary mission over,

1014
00:55:32,166 --> 00:55:34,833
sped away from the plane of the planets.

1015
00:55:34,875 --> 00:55:38,958
Voyager 2, in part to get
on its trajectory to Uranus,

1016
00:55:39,000 --> 00:55:42,500
would have to fly dangerously
close to Saturn's rings.

1017
00:55:49,333 --> 00:55:52,500
We're getting pictures and
other data back from Voyager 2.

1018
00:55:52,541 --> 00:55:55,875
But at some point in time,
it had to go behind the planet,

1019
00:55:55,916 --> 00:55:59,791
and that blocks us from getting
radio signals to the Earth,

1020
00:55:59,833 --> 00:56:02,000
and that happened to be
in the middle of the night.

1021
00:56:02,041 --> 00:56:04,250
It was a period of time, several hours,

1022
00:56:04,291 --> 00:56:05,708
that everybody knows we're going to be

1023
00:56:05,750 --> 00:56:07,708
out of contact with the spacecraft.

1024
00:56:07,750 --> 00:56:09,666
Everybody's expecting
to pop champagne corks

1025
00:56:09,708 --> 00:56:11,000
and say "hey, we made it,"

1026
00:56:11,041 --> 00:56:12,750
and all the data's on the tape recorder

1027
00:56:12,791 --> 00:56:14,791
because it couldn't be
transmitted to the Earth,

1028
00:56:14,833 --> 00:56:17,458
and instead it pops out of the other side,

1029
00:56:17,500 --> 00:56:19,875
and there's all these crazy error signals

1030
00:56:19,916 --> 00:56:20,958
coming from the spacecraft.

1031
00:56:21,000 --> 00:56:22,583
Something bad has happened.

1032
00:56:24,875 --> 00:56:26,041
Something happened

1033
00:56:26,083 --> 00:56:27,625
right around ring-plane crossing,

1034
00:56:27,666 --> 00:56:29,958
and the images that were
coming back were blank.

1035
00:56:34,208 --> 00:56:35,666
People thought maybe it crashed

1036
00:56:35,708 --> 00:56:37,250
into the rings of Saturn.

1037
00:56:37,291 --> 00:56:39,333
Is this it, is it dead?

1038
00:56:42,125 --> 00:56:44,833
Okay.

1039
00:56:44,875 --> 00:56:47,625
Ladies and gentlemen,
we can start the briefing.

1040
00:56:50,000 --> 00:56:52,375
I wanted to make a very brief statement.

1041
00:56:52,416 --> 00:56:55,333
We do have a problem on board
the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

1042
00:56:55,375 --> 00:56:57,083
The spacecraft has a problem.

1043
00:56:57,125 --> 00:56:59,875
The scan platform operating mechanism

1044
00:56:59,916 --> 00:57:01,416
is not operating properly.

1045
00:57:01,458 --> 00:57:03,291
Make sure we understand where we're headed

1046
00:57:03,333 --> 00:57:06,333
for the following instruments
are mounted on the platform:

1047
00:57:06,375 --> 00:57:08,958
the wide-angle camera,
the narrow-angle camera,

1048
00:57:09,000 --> 00:57:11,958
the infrared instrument,
the ultraviolet instrument

1049
00:57:12,000 --> 00:57:13,833
and the photopolarimeter.

1050
00:57:13,875 --> 00:57:16,083
A frozen scan platform

1051
00:57:16,125 --> 00:57:19,958
could be a fatal, crippling event.

1052
00:57:20,000 --> 00:57:24,291
Yeah, that was
the darkest, the darkest day

1053
00:57:24,333 --> 00:57:25,708
of the whole mission.

1054
00:57:25,750 --> 00:57:27,791
There is circumstantial evidence...

1055
00:57:27,833 --> 00:57:30,333
I came into the auditorium,

1056
00:57:30,375 --> 00:57:34,041
and there was just gloom
on everybody's face.

1057
00:57:34,083 --> 00:57:36,083
You're beginning to speculate.

1058
00:57:36,125 --> 00:57:38,791
I quickly learned what had happened.

1059
00:57:38,833 --> 00:57:41,833
The scan platform had frozen.

1060
00:57:41,875 --> 00:57:43,708
The problem is not with the camera,

1061
00:57:43,750 --> 00:57:46,041
it's with the articulated platform

1062
00:57:46,083 --> 00:57:47,458
that moves all of the instruments.

1063
00:57:47,500 --> 00:57:49,833
Our cameras, as far as we
know, are working just fine,

1064
00:57:49,875 --> 00:57:54,166
it's just that we're taking lots
of pictures of black space.

1065
00:57:54,208 --> 00:57:56,083
The rest of the Saturn mission

1066
00:57:56,125 --> 00:58:00,041
and Uranus and Neptune were dead.

1067
00:58:00,083 --> 00:58:06,041
And seeing everything that
we were planning just gone,

1068
00:58:06,083 --> 00:58:08,333
just suddenly gone.

1069
00:58:10,625 --> 00:58:12,875
All of the science
that we had hoped to do,

1070
00:58:12,916 --> 00:58:14,375
and Uranus and Neptune--

1071
00:58:14,416 --> 00:58:15,625
there were no other spacecraft

1072
00:58:15,666 --> 00:58:17,208
that were going to be going there.

1073
00:58:17,250 --> 00:58:19,416
It was up to Voyager to do it,
and all of a sudden it looked

1074
00:58:19,458 --> 00:58:21,708
as though Voyager was not going to do it.

1075
00:58:21,750 --> 00:58:23,708
It was devastating, it was...

1076
00:58:25,875 --> 00:58:29,541
So, we've analyzed the slew data.

1077
00:58:29,583 --> 00:58:31,166
It took a couple of days

1078
00:58:31,208 --> 00:58:35,541
while the engineering team went
to work diagnosing the problem.

1079
00:58:35,583 --> 00:58:38,125
We are going to command an azimuth slew

1080
00:58:38,166 --> 00:58:41,833
and an elevation slew
to the Saturn position...

1081
00:58:41,875 --> 00:58:43,583
It turns out the scan platform

1082
00:58:43,625 --> 00:58:45,666
has small motors to rotate it,

1083
00:58:45,708 --> 00:58:47,583
and we could run it at slow speed,

1084
00:58:47,625 --> 00:58:49,166
tick, tick, tick, tick--

1085
00:58:49,208 --> 00:58:52,000
fast...medium speed or very fast.

1086
00:58:52,041 --> 00:58:54,000
We were of course wanting
to look at lots of places,

1087
00:58:54,041 --> 00:58:56,333
so we had the thing looking
lots of places,

1088
00:58:56,375 --> 00:59:01,291
and the lubrication wasn't
adequate and it just jammed.

1089
00:59:01,333 --> 00:59:04,416
It was frozen sort of like a car

1090
00:59:04,458 --> 00:59:06,291
stuck in the, stuck in the snow.

1091
00:59:06,333 --> 00:59:08,375
You try to go forward
or backward little bit...

1092
00:59:08,416 --> 00:59:11,333
and keep working on it
and try to get it out,

1093
00:59:11,375 --> 00:59:13,250
and that's what we did
with the scan platform.

1094
00:59:13,291 --> 00:59:16,291
We would try to push it
a little bit in one direction

1095
00:59:16,333 --> 00:59:17,750
and it would yield a little bit,

1096
00:59:17,791 --> 00:59:19,708
and then we'd push it
in the other direction,

1097
00:59:19,750 --> 00:59:21,333
and it would yield a little bit more,

1098
00:59:21,375 --> 00:59:24,750
and then we kept doing that
back and forth, back and forth,

1099
00:59:24,791 --> 00:59:27,833
and finally that was enough

1100
00:59:27,875 --> 00:59:31,208
to get the lubrication into the gears.

1101
00:59:31,250 --> 00:59:34,541
It was freed up
and back came the spacecraft

1102
00:59:34,583 --> 00:59:37,041
and back came the imaging system,

1103
00:59:37,083 --> 00:59:39,791
and there was Saturn on exit.

1104
00:59:42,041 --> 00:59:45,291
Yeah.

1105
00:59:53,541 --> 00:59:57,208
We were looking at the
shadow of Saturn on the rings,

1106
00:59:57,250 --> 01:00:02,041
and it was clearly
from this wild, crazy angle.

1107
01:00:02,083 --> 01:00:05,791
Wow. Holy cow, we're on
the other side of Saturn.

1108
01:00:31,083 --> 01:00:33,416
We felt like we were there.

1109
01:00:33,458 --> 01:00:36,125
Nobody even thought about it.

1110
01:00:37,458 --> 01:00:39,750
Voyager was part of us.

1111
01:00:40,583 --> 01:00:41,416
We...

1112
01:00:55,916 --> 01:00:57,958
All of planetary exploration to me

1113
01:00:58,000 --> 01:01:02,833
is a story about longing, it's
a longing to know ourselves.

1114
01:01:02,875 --> 01:01:05,666
It's a longing to understand
the significance

1115
01:01:05,708 --> 01:01:07,333
of our own existence.

1116
01:01:07,375 --> 01:01:09,125
It's a longing to communicate,

1117
01:01:09,166 --> 01:01:12,500
to say to the universe
we're here, you know, know us.

1118
01:01:12,541 --> 01:01:15,458
You know, where are you?

1119
01:01:32,250 --> 01:01:34,750
In the grooves of the Golden Record

1120
01:01:34,791 --> 01:01:37,500
was another gift from us to them.

1121
01:01:40,416 --> 01:01:44,000
The Voyager record
has a set of pictures on it.

1122
01:01:44,041 --> 01:01:46,458
It depicts our civilization,

1123
01:01:46,500 --> 01:01:49,791
but we only had the ability
to do about a hundred pictures,

1124
01:01:49,833 --> 01:01:52,166
that was as much data as we could send,

1125
01:01:52,208 --> 01:01:54,083
so that was kind of hard.

1126
01:01:54,125 --> 01:01:56,291
It was a process of distillation.

1127
01:01:56,333 --> 01:01:58,041
You can't describe the Earth

1128
01:01:58,083 --> 01:01:59,791
in a hundred pictures.

1129
01:01:59,833 --> 01:02:02,666
You can't describe the Earth
in a thousand pictures,

1130
01:02:02,708 --> 01:02:08,541
but what art is about is
taking something that's small

1131
01:02:08,583 --> 01:02:10,541
but can represent the whole.

1132
01:02:22,000 --> 01:02:23,458
We thought it was very important

1133
01:02:23,500 --> 01:02:26,625
to put some pictures
of humans nude on the record

1134
01:02:26,666 --> 01:02:30,458
to show just what our anatomy
and physiology was really like.

1135
01:02:31,708 --> 01:02:34,750
NASA had been seriously criticized

1136
01:02:34,791 --> 01:02:36,541
about the Pioneer plaque.

1137
01:02:36,583 --> 01:02:39,583
There were actually letters
to the editors of newspapers

1138
01:02:39,625 --> 01:02:44,375
saying that NASA
was sending smut to space.

1139
01:02:44,416 --> 01:02:47,625
For Voyager, NASA decided to play it safe.

1140
01:02:47,666 --> 01:02:51,583
Still, they gave the aliens
some hints about our bodies.

1141
01:02:53,125 --> 01:02:57,625
Now it's five years
of cruising out to Uranus.

1142
01:02:57,666 --> 01:03:00,083
Uranus would be the most remote object yet

1143
01:03:00,125 --> 01:03:01,750
visited by a spacecraft,

1144
01:03:01,791 --> 01:03:03,750
and it's so remote
that it was not even known

1145
01:03:03,791 --> 01:03:05,250
until 200 years ago,

1146
01:03:05,291 --> 01:03:06,958
and it's a great distance out there,

1147
01:03:07,000 --> 01:03:08,333
and if we'd launched directly from Earth

1148
01:03:08,375 --> 01:03:10,375
it would have taken
thirty years to get there,

1149
01:03:10,416 --> 01:03:11,958
so we were very fortunate

1150
01:03:12,000 --> 01:03:14,125
that we could swing by Jupiter
and Saturn on our way.

1151
01:03:14,166 --> 01:03:15,708
I've been trying to figure this thing out

1152
01:03:15,750 --> 01:03:17,083
for the past 25 years,

1153
01:03:17,125 --> 01:03:19,666
and it's very frustrating in a telescope

1154
01:03:19,708 --> 01:03:21,125
to look at that tiny little disc,

1155
01:03:21,166 --> 01:03:24,416
so the next few days
are going to be very exciting.

1156
01:03:30,583 --> 01:03:33,000
Once we got beyond Saturn,

1157
01:03:33,041 --> 01:03:36,125
essentially the engineers
threw out the rule book

1158
01:03:36,166 --> 01:03:39,875
and said how are we going
to make this work?

1159
01:03:39,916 --> 01:03:43,541
How are we going
to take pictures of planets

1160
01:03:43,583 --> 01:03:45,041
this far from the sun?

1161
01:03:46,166 --> 01:03:47,833
Voyager was the first

1162
01:03:47,875 --> 01:03:51,791
of a class of NASA spacecraft
that could be reprogrammed.

1163
01:03:51,833 --> 01:03:53,458
They could take what was on the computer

1164
01:03:53,500 --> 01:03:54,833
and just wipe it away

1165
01:03:54,875 --> 01:03:57,208
and give it a whole new set of software.

1166
01:03:57,250 --> 01:04:01,666
They trained the spacecraft to
pirouette like a ballet dancer,

1167
01:04:01,708 --> 01:04:03,916
basically you want to take
a picture of that thing

1168
01:04:03,958 --> 01:04:05,541
and it's going past you really fast,

1169
01:04:05,583 --> 01:04:11,041
so you spin the whole spacecraft
and follow it like this,

1170
01:04:11,083 --> 01:04:13,666
and so even though it was darker at Uranus

1171
01:04:13,708 --> 01:04:15,166
and really dark at Neptune,

1172
01:04:15,208 --> 01:04:18,125
you could leave the shutter
open without smearing,

1173
01:04:18,166 --> 01:04:20,208
and that was just beautiful.

1174
01:04:21,791 --> 01:04:24,208
We had all of the rich set of goodies

1175
01:04:24,250 --> 01:04:30,625
from Jupiter and from Saturn,
but Uranus was unknown.

1176
01:04:32,750 --> 01:04:35,041
In January 1986,

1177
01:04:35,083 --> 01:04:37,875
Voyager 2 closed in on Uranus.

1178
01:04:39,791 --> 01:04:41,375
It would be by far

1179
01:04:41,416 --> 01:04:45,083
the most remote planetary
encounter ever attempted.

1180
01:04:58,250 --> 01:05:00,083
It was like taking something

1181
01:05:00,125 --> 01:05:03,250
that was almost fictional,
almost mythological,

1182
01:05:03,291 --> 01:05:05,958
and then seeing it as a real object.

1183
01:05:08,416 --> 01:05:11,000
Spacecraft flew through
that system like a bull's eye

1184
01:05:11,041 --> 01:05:13,333
because Uranus is tilted on its side,

1185
01:05:13,375 --> 01:05:16,875
with this beautiful aquamarine
blue methane atmosphere,

1186
01:05:16,916 --> 01:05:18,083
and all these pictures,

1187
01:05:18,125 --> 01:05:19,708
every single one of them is like whoa!

1188
01:05:19,750 --> 01:05:21,833
And you could hear people just, "whoa!"

1189
01:05:21,875 --> 01:05:23,416
And everybody would be doing something

1190
01:05:23,458 --> 01:05:24,708
and somebody would go, "whoa!"

1191
01:05:24,750 --> 01:05:25,958
And everybody would turn and look up.

1192
01:05:26,000 --> 01:05:27,791
"Oh, my gosh, look at that!"

1193
01:05:27,833 --> 01:05:29,166
There was no Internet,

1194
01:05:29,208 --> 01:05:32,708
there was no news stream
going out to live CNN.

1195
01:05:32,750 --> 01:05:35,333
The only way to experience that sensation

1196
01:05:35,375 --> 01:05:38,458
of being one of only
a small group of people

1197
01:05:38,500 --> 01:05:43,000
who saw a point of light become a world,

1198
01:05:43,041 --> 01:05:46,208
the only way to experience it
was to be in that room.

1199
01:05:46,250 --> 01:05:48,250
Well, just about two minutes ago,

1200
01:05:48,291 --> 01:05:52,083
Voyager 2 passed through
its closest approach to Uranus.

1201
01:05:54,000 --> 01:05:59,166
The new ring is right here.

1202
01:05:59,208 --> 01:06:01,958
Now, I don't...

1203
01:06:02,000 --> 01:06:03,958
you're telling me you can't see it.

1204
01:06:04,000 --> 01:06:04,958
I can.

1205
01:06:05,000 --> 01:06:06,291
Dr. Soderblom,

1206
01:06:06,333 --> 01:06:07,958
as you whizzed through your explanation,

1207
01:06:08,000 --> 01:06:10,333
I couldn't put it all together,
could you try that again?

1208
01:06:11,708 --> 01:06:12,666
Slower?

1209
01:06:14,041 --> 01:06:15,583
Slower and a few more details.

1210
01:06:15,625 --> 01:06:16,958
I thought that was pretty slow.

1211
01:06:21,083 --> 01:06:22,833
Every time we arrived at a new planet

1212
01:06:22,875 --> 01:06:24,166
there were always surprises,

1213
01:06:24,208 --> 01:06:25,958
even though we had gotten a lot smarter.

1214
01:06:26,000 --> 01:06:29,375
For instance, before Voyager,
all the magnetic fields

1215
01:06:29,416 --> 01:06:33,000
have the magnetic pole near the
rotation axis of the planet,

1216
01:06:33,041 --> 01:06:35,791
and that was true for Jupiter,
it was true for Saturn,

1217
01:06:35,833 --> 01:06:40,583
and then we flew by Uranus and
the pole was near the equator.

1218
01:06:40,625 --> 01:06:41,958
There's been a lot of speculation

1219
01:06:42,000 --> 01:06:44,250
about the magnetosphere of Uranus.

1220
01:06:44,291 --> 01:06:46,916
Would there be one, what would it be like?

1221
01:06:46,958 --> 01:06:49,166
And the magnetosphere of Uranus

1222
01:06:49,208 --> 01:06:51,375
is far more weird and wonderful...

1223
01:06:51,416 --> 01:06:54,500
We found the planet's tipped on its side,

1224
01:06:54,541 --> 01:06:56,875
but the magnetic field is then tipped

1225
01:06:56,916 --> 01:06:58,791
relative to the spin axis,

1226
01:06:58,833 --> 01:07:03,708
so you have this huge contortion
in the magnetic field

1227
01:07:03,750 --> 01:07:08,625
as the planet spins around, just bizarre.

1228
01:07:13,375 --> 01:07:15,333
At that point in its orbit,

1229
01:07:15,375 --> 01:07:17,750
the planet didn't look exciting,

1230
01:07:19,875 --> 01:07:23,541
and part of that is Uranus itself,

1231
01:07:23,583 --> 01:07:25,916
holding its secrets back.

1232
01:07:25,958 --> 01:07:29,000
That had to be, I guess, one of the...

1233
01:07:30,750 --> 01:07:34,583
well, disappointments in that Uranus

1234
01:07:34,625 --> 01:07:36,583
was not more photogenic than it was.

1235
01:07:36,625 --> 01:07:39,208
It was actually pretty blah.

1236
01:07:39,250 --> 01:07:40,916
Ah... poor Uranus.

1237
01:07:42,625 --> 01:07:43,750
Poor Uranus.

1238
01:07:59,416 --> 01:08:02,625
The big stars of the Uranus encounter

1239
01:08:02,666 --> 01:08:04,208
were actually the moons.

1240
01:08:08,000 --> 01:08:09,416
If you're going to go to Neptune,

1241
01:08:09,458 --> 01:08:12,625
you still have to use Uranus
for gravity assist.

1242
01:08:12,666 --> 01:08:16,958
The gravity assist aiming point at Uranus

1243
01:08:17,000 --> 01:08:20,458
just happened to be pretty
close to the orbit of Miranda.

1244
01:08:21,708 --> 01:08:23,833
If Uranus has been the last stop,

1245
01:08:23,875 --> 01:08:26,541
the scientists might have
wanted to go to a larger moon,

1246
01:08:26,583 --> 01:08:30,916
which ironically, I don't see
how anything could have been

1247
01:08:30,958 --> 01:08:32,416
any more interesting than Miranda.

1248
01:08:36,958 --> 01:08:39,458
It looked like a jumbled-up mess.

1249
01:08:43,083 --> 01:08:45,916
This moon looked like
it had been ripped to pieces

1250
01:08:45,958 --> 01:08:48,583
and then just sort of shoved
back together again.

1251
01:08:48,625 --> 01:08:50,125
Whoa! Come look at this.

1252
01:08:50,166 --> 01:08:51,916
Going up to the
screen and pointing and saying,

1253
01:08:51,958 --> 01:08:53,666
"did you...look at that, look at that."

1254
01:08:53,708 --> 01:08:56,333
Nobody was ready for Miranda.

1255
01:08:56,375 --> 01:08:59,541
There were enormous cliffs and gashes,

1256
01:08:59,583 --> 01:09:02,625
one of them, you can see
the edge of a cliff,

1257
01:09:02,666 --> 01:09:05,041
it's got to be ten kilometers tall.

1258
01:09:05,083 --> 01:09:07,333
The gravity on Miranda is so weak,

1259
01:09:07,375 --> 01:09:09,083
if you jumped off that cliff,

1260
01:09:09,125 --> 01:09:13,750
you could read the newspaper
on the way down,

1261
01:09:13,791 --> 01:09:15,166
but when you hit the bottom

1262
01:09:15,208 --> 01:09:16,875
you'd still be going
a hundred miles an hour,

1263
01:09:16,916 --> 01:09:19,625
so it probably wouldn't...

1264
01:09:19,666 --> 01:09:22,916
it would be the last newspaper you read.

1265
01:09:22,958 --> 01:09:26,916
At Uranus, Voyager
detected intense radiation belts

1266
01:09:26,958 --> 01:09:31,416
and discovered two new rings
and ten tiny moons.

1267
01:09:31,458 --> 01:09:36,625
We were just about
to present all our results,

1268
01:09:36,666 --> 01:09:38,083
we were all about to have

1269
01:09:38,125 --> 01:09:43,500
the big final finale
press conference and...

1270
01:09:43,541 --> 01:09:45,041
came back from breakfast,

1271
01:09:45,083 --> 01:09:50,083
and I went to go watch
the shuttle being launched...

1272
01:09:50,125 --> 01:09:52,333
We have main engines start...

1273
01:09:52,375 --> 01:09:57,541
Four, three, two, one and lift-off!

1274
01:09:57,583 --> 01:10:00,833
Lift off of the 25th
space shuttle mission,

1275
01:10:00,875 --> 01:10:03,125
and it has cleared the tower.

1276
01:10:03,166 --> 01:10:04,625
...and we thought, "okay, great,

1277
01:10:04,666 --> 01:10:05,958
we'll watch the shuttle launch

1278
01:10:06,000 --> 01:10:08,041
and then we'll go
to the press conference."

1279
01:10:08,083 --> 01:10:10,041
But of course that was Challenger.

1280
01:10:11,208 --> 01:10:12,375
Engines throttling up.

1281
01:10:12,416 --> 01:10:13,875
Three engine now at 104%.

1282
01:10:13,916 --> 01:10:16,000
Challenger, go with throttle up.

1283
01:10:16,041 --> 01:10:17,708
Roger, go with throttle up.

1284
01:10:27,125 --> 01:10:28,916
People were just like astonished.

1285
01:10:28,958 --> 01:10:31,666
This gasp of like, "oh, my,
did you see that,

1286
01:10:31,708 --> 01:10:33,375
did it really blow up?"

1287
01:10:33,416 --> 01:10:35,416
Because we had stopped in our meeting

1288
01:10:35,458 --> 01:10:36,833
so everyone could watch it,

1289
01:10:36,875 --> 01:10:39,666
and then there was just
silence, people were crying.

1290
01:10:41,750 --> 01:10:44,500
Well, what can you say?

1291
01:10:44,541 --> 01:10:47,458
You knew right away that
a bunch of people were dead.

1292
01:10:49,125 --> 01:10:50,500
Flight Throttle. Go ahead.

1293
01:10:50,541 --> 01:10:52,541
RSO reports vehicle exploded.

1294
01:10:56,041 --> 01:10:57,541
Copy.

1295
01:10:57,583 --> 01:11:00,666
And then of course
they showed replays and replays

1296
01:11:00,708 --> 01:11:03,166
and replays over and over and over again.

1297
01:11:04,833 --> 01:11:06,833
We have no down link.

1298
01:11:06,875 --> 01:11:09,416
Okay, everybody, just stay
off the telephones.

1299
01:11:09,458 --> 01:11:11,250
Make sure you maintain all your data,

1300
01:11:11,291 --> 01:11:13,250
start pulling it together.

1301
01:11:13,291 --> 01:11:14,666
The Challenger accident happened

1302
01:11:14,708 --> 01:11:16,750
as we were receding from Uranus.

1303
01:11:16,791 --> 01:11:19,833
I have this vivid memory
of picture after picture

1304
01:11:19,875 --> 01:11:22,083
of the crescent Uranus coming back

1305
01:11:22,125 --> 01:11:24,833
and the replay
of the Challenger explosion,

1306
01:11:24,875 --> 01:11:27,291
and it was just devastating.

1307
01:11:27,333 --> 01:11:30,791
Today is a day
for mourning and remembering.

1308
01:11:30,833 --> 01:11:32,666
Nancy and I are pained to the core

1309
01:11:32,708 --> 01:11:35,000
over the tragedy
of the shuttle Challenger.

1310
01:11:35,041 --> 01:11:36,416
We know we share this pain

1311
01:11:36,458 --> 01:11:38,708
with all of the people of our country.

1312
01:11:38,750 --> 01:11:41,458
This is truly a national loss.

1313
01:11:41,500 --> 01:11:43,083
I know it's hard to understand,

1314
01:11:43,125 --> 01:11:46,375
but sometimes painful things
like this happen.

1315
01:11:46,416 --> 01:11:50,291
It's all part of the process
of exploration and discovery.

1316
01:11:50,333 --> 01:11:55,250
It's all part of taking a chance
and expanding man's horizons.

1317
01:11:55,291 --> 01:11:58,375
The future doesn't belong
to the faint hearted,

1318
01:11:58,416 --> 01:11:59,875
it belongs to the brave.

1319
01:12:16,375 --> 01:12:18,708
During these closest
approach time periods,

1320
01:12:18,750 --> 01:12:22,125
we would have hundreds
of reporters come to JPL,

1321
01:12:22,166 --> 01:12:26,791
and when the Challenger
exploded, everybody just left.

1322
01:12:43,708 --> 01:12:45,541
Those cosmic questions we hope to learn

1323
01:12:45,583 --> 01:12:47,166
by sending our machines out,

1324
01:12:47,208 --> 01:12:49,500
the very same questions
that you and I and every child

1325
01:12:49,541 --> 01:12:50,708
has asked themselves.

1326
01:12:50,750 --> 01:12:52,250
Where do we come from, are we alone,

1327
01:12:52,291 --> 01:12:54,666
what's the universe made of,
how will it end?

1328
01:12:54,708 --> 01:12:56,583
All of these basic questions

1329
01:12:56,625 --> 01:12:59,000
are the questions that drive science.

1330
01:13:09,541 --> 01:13:12,666
Finally at Neptune, Voyager has begun

1331
01:13:12,708 --> 01:13:15,583
the last of a decade's worth of encounters

1332
01:13:15,625 --> 01:13:17,208
with the outer planets.

1333
01:13:17,250 --> 01:13:19,333
It was another three and a half years

1334
01:13:19,375 --> 01:13:21,083
to get out to Neptune.

1335
01:13:21,125 --> 01:13:23,125
They had to reprogram
the spacecraft again,

1336
01:13:23,166 --> 01:13:24,666
give it, teach it some new tricks,

1337
01:13:24,708 --> 01:13:26,500
to work in this even darker environment,

1338
01:13:26,541 --> 01:13:27,875
even colder environment.

1339
01:13:29,333 --> 01:13:30,916
If we take the Earth

1340
01:13:30,958 --> 01:13:35,250
being one astronomical unit
from the sun, or AU for short.

1341
01:13:35,291 --> 01:13:37,791
Neptune is 30 times that distance.

1342
01:13:37,833 --> 01:13:39,458
When we launched Voyager,

1343
01:13:39,500 --> 01:13:43,583
there was no capability to get
any images back from 30 AU.

1344
01:13:43,625 --> 01:13:46,791
That capability happened all after launch.

1345
01:13:46,833 --> 01:13:49,958
It involved taking two 34-meter antennas

1346
01:13:50,000 --> 01:13:52,208
and adding them to a 70-meter antenna.

1347
01:13:52,250 --> 01:13:54,083
Copy, we're ready to run that observation.

1348
01:13:54,125 --> 01:13:56,166
It meant using the entire
Very Large Array in New Mexico,

1349
01:13:56,208 --> 01:13:59,708
27 antennas to collect
the very weak signal

1350
01:13:59,750 --> 01:14:02,166
that we could get back from 30 AU.

1351
01:14:02,208 --> 01:14:04,500
The flybys past Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus

1352
01:14:04,541 --> 01:14:07,916
had sped up the spacecraft too,
so it's going even faster,

1353
01:14:07,958 --> 01:14:12,125
so enormous amounts
of pressure, and one shot.

1354
01:14:14,583 --> 01:14:16,333
In the summer of 1989,

1355
01:14:16,375 --> 01:14:20,083
Voyager 2 finally came up
on the ice giant Neptune.

1356
01:14:22,416 --> 01:14:25,875
Thanks to slingshots
at Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus,

1357
01:14:25,916 --> 01:14:29,458
the trip was almost 20 years
shorter than a direct approach,

1358
01:14:29,500 --> 01:14:31,333
one without gravity assist.

1359
01:14:37,458 --> 01:14:38,666
There it was just sitting

1360
01:14:38,708 --> 01:14:40,541
out on the edge of our solar system,

1361
01:14:40,583 --> 01:14:44,083
waiting for somebody to come
out and appreciate its beauty.

1362
01:14:44,125 --> 01:14:45,375
Just waiting for the day

1363
01:14:45,416 --> 01:14:50,375
that humans would get
out there, and go wow!

1364
01:14:50,416 --> 01:14:52,166
I had been taking pictures of Neptune

1365
01:14:52,208 --> 01:14:55,041
from the ground where
we couldn't see very much.

1366
01:14:55,083 --> 01:14:58,125
You know, in my head imagining
what it might look like

1367
01:14:58,166 --> 01:15:03,041
and seeing that turned
into reality, it's a rush.

1368
01:15:03,083 --> 01:15:08,666
Looking at this blue, bright blue orb,

1369
01:15:08,708 --> 01:15:10,541
it was evocative of the Earth,

1370
01:15:10,583 --> 01:15:14,875
which was bizarre for the last
planet that we were flying by.

1371
01:15:14,916 --> 01:15:17,791
I was a meticulous log taker

1372
01:15:17,833 --> 01:15:20,708
and I would make little
notations in these logs

1373
01:15:20,750 --> 01:15:22,333
and I would draw little pictures,

1374
01:15:22,375 --> 01:15:24,875
and you could see
what's this little dark spot,

1375
01:15:24,916 --> 01:15:27,458
bright clouds, I'm like wow!

1376
01:15:27,500 --> 01:15:29,291
Wow! Exclamation point!

1377
01:15:29,333 --> 01:15:31,916
And I'd draw pictures and arrows.

1378
01:15:31,958 --> 01:15:37,333
The most surprising thing
was a giant dark spot.

1379
01:15:37,375 --> 01:15:39,791
Nobody had any idea that would be there.

1380
01:15:39,833 --> 01:15:42,875
It's huge. It's like a hole in the planet.

1381
01:15:42,916 --> 01:15:45,250
So we called it The Great Dark Spot

1382
01:15:45,291 --> 01:15:48,208
because we're not very original
when it comes to names.

1383
01:15:55,083 --> 01:15:57,625
We had to basically make a forecast

1384
01:15:57,666 --> 01:15:59,958
of the storms on Neptune

1385
01:16:00,000 --> 01:16:03,166
in order to point the cameras
during the last day,

1386
01:16:03,208 --> 01:16:06,375
and at the same time there was a hurricane

1387
01:16:06,416 --> 01:16:08,958
off the east coast of the US,

1388
01:16:09,000 --> 01:16:11,666
and the weather forecasters

1389
01:16:11,708 --> 01:16:14,791
were trying to forecast that hurricane,

1390
01:16:14,833 --> 01:16:18,541
but they were trying to forecast
it twelve hours in advance

1391
01:16:18,583 --> 01:16:20,041
and they were having a lot of trouble

1392
01:16:20,083 --> 01:16:22,375
because the storm kept changing position.

1393
01:16:22,416 --> 01:16:26,291
And we were just calmly
plotting points on graph paper

1394
01:16:26,333 --> 01:16:28,416
and then said, "okay, two weeks from now,

1395
01:16:28,458 --> 01:16:32,625
this storm is going to be
right here and it usually was."

1396
01:16:37,333 --> 01:16:40,208
At Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus,

1397
01:16:40,250 --> 01:16:42,916
the goal was to do a flyby

1398
01:16:42,958 --> 01:16:45,416
that would take the spacecraft
on to the next planet.

1399
01:16:46,875 --> 01:16:48,666
When it came to Neptune

1400
01:16:48,708 --> 01:16:50,708
we knew that that was the last planet

1401
01:16:50,750 --> 01:16:52,125
that we were going to fly by,

1402
01:16:52,166 --> 01:16:55,875
and so we could take
a different trajectory.

1403
01:16:55,916 --> 01:17:00,416
This allowed us to get a really
spectacular view of the rings

1404
01:17:00,458 --> 01:17:02,625
and then look back on the system

1405
01:17:02,666 --> 01:17:06,166
in a way that was quite beautiful.

1406
01:17:06,208 --> 01:17:09,041
Think about imaging the rings of Neptune.

1407
01:17:09,083 --> 01:17:12,750
They have reflectivity which
is twice as dark as soot,

1408
01:17:12,791 --> 01:17:14,333
and the light that's falling on them

1409
01:17:14,375 --> 01:17:17,833
is a thousand times fainter than on Earth.

1410
01:17:17,875 --> 01:17:20,000
So you have one one-thousandth the light

1411
01:17:20,041 --> 01:17:21,833
and you're trying to image something

1412
01:17:21,875 --> 01:17:25,333
which is twice as dark as soot
against a jet-black background.

1413
01:17:25,375 --> 01:17:28,791
More than one ring can
be seen even in the raw images,

1414
01:17:28,833 --> 01:17:30,416
the so-called ring arcs,

1415
01:17:30,458 --> 01:17:34,416
and it seemed reasonable that
this was indeed the lost arc

1416
01:17:34,458 --> 01:17:37,958
that our imaging team raiders
were looking for.

1417
01:17:38,000 --> 01:17:40,833
Oh, dear!

1418
01:17:42,208 --> 01:17:44,250
Now you're going to turn on me, right?

1419
01:17:46,000 --> 01:17:50,208
We knew at Neptune we
wanted a close flyby of Triton,

1420
01:17:50,250 --> 01:17:53,125
which was a huge world around Neptune.

1421
01:17:53,166 --> 01:17:54,833
If you looked at them on the way in,

1422
01:17:54,875 --> 01:17:56,541
they weren't lined up.

1423
01:17:56,583 --> 01:17:58,541
One's up here; one's down here.

1424
01:17:58,583 --> 01:17:59,750
And so, what are you going to do?

1425
01:17:59,791 --> 01:18:01,250
Well, there was a way--

1426
01:18:01,291 --> 01:18:04,916
fly over the north pole,
very close to Neptune

1427
01:18:04,958 --> 01:18:07,916
to bend the spacecraft
so it would go down.

1428
01:18:07,958 --> 01:18:10,708
But the meant getting to
within just a few thousand miles

1429
01:18:10,750 --> 01:18:13,875
of the cloud tops, skimming the surface.

1430
01:18:13,916 --> 01:18:17,958
And they had to hit that,
you know, exactly right.

1431
01:18:18,000 --> 01:18:19,583
There was a lot of concern

1432
01:18:19,625 --> 01:18:23,125
that we didn't know enough
about Neptune's atmosphere

1433
01:18:23,166 --> 01:18:28,166
to really be sure that the
spacecraft would not tumble.

1434
01:18:28,208 --> 01:18:31,000
Just a slight error in the calculations

1435
01:18:31,041 --> 01:18:33,208
and instead of skimming
across the cloud tops,

1436
01:18:33,250 --> 01:18:36,750
you're skimming into the clouds
and the spacecraft burns up.

1437
01:18:36,791 --> 01:18:39,125
Slight error the other way,
you go a little too far,

1438
01:18:39,166 --> 01:18:41,708
you don't bend enough,
maybe you run right into Triton

1439
01:18:41,750 --> 01:18:43,666
and crash, and that's the end
of the mission.

1440
01:18:43,708 --> 01:18:44,916
You don't have enough time,

1441
01:18:44,958 --> 01:18:46,416
you have to make your last best guess,

1442
01:18:47,500 --> 01:18:49,583
hit the send button.

1443
01:18:50,916 --> 01:18:52,541
It would have been just fascinating

1444
01:18:52,583 --> 01:18:54,625
to be hanging on
to that spacecraft, right?

1445
01:18:54,666 --> 01:18:58,833
Skimming over these beautiful
blue cloud tops of Neptune

1446
01:18:58,875 --> 01:19:01,083
and then as you come
over the pole of Neptune

1447
01:19:01,125 --> 01:19:04,208
seeing that big moon Triton rise up...

1448
01:19:12,083 --> 01:19:14,458
After several billion miles of journey

1449
01:19:14,500 --> 01:19:16,208
to get us to within a few kilometers

1450
01:19:16,250 --> 01:19:17,291
of where we needed to be,

1451
01:19:17,333 --> 01:19:19,625
it's just absolutely remarkable.

1452
01:19:19,666 --> 01:19:21,791
You know, threading an incredible needle.

1453
01:19:23,250 --> 01:19:25,208
Southern hemisphere of Triton

1454
01:19:25,250 --> 01:19:28,625
is entirely covered with nitrogen ice,

1455
01:19:28,666 --> 01:19:33,208
and as we flew past,
we were able to look down

1456
01:19:33,250 --> 01:19:37,708
at markings on the surface
of the polar cap.

1457
01:19:37,750 --> 01:19:42,416
We were putting together
a mosaic of Triton's globe,

1458
01:19:42,458 --> 01:19:46,458
but we couldn't get things
to line up quite right.

1459
01:19:46,500 --> 01:19:50,166
Some of the dark streaks, two in
particular would not line up.

1460
01:19:50,208 --> 01:19:51,791
He's like just scratching his head,

1461
01:19:51,833 --> 01:19:54,166
like I have no idea what's going on here.

1462
01:19:54,208 --> 01:19:56,500
This guy's one of the world's experts

1463
01:19:56,541 --> 01:19:59,083
on anything having to do
with planets and moons,

1464
01:19:59,125 --> 01:20:00,541
and he can't figure this out.

1465
01:20:02,291 --> 01:20:04,666
I said, "well, let's
put it in a stereo viewer,

1466
01:20:04,708 --> 01:20:06,166
red and blue glasses."

1467
01:20:06,208 --> 01:20:09,208
And the images fused
into a three-dimensional model

1468
01:20:09,250 --> 01:20:11,583
and up popped these geysers.

1469
01:20:15,583 --> 01:20:20,458
And I said holy moly,
and so we knew what we had.

1470
01:20:32,541 --> 01:20:34,250
These plumes.

1471
01:20:34,291 --> 01:20:39,458
Black geysers spewing out this stuff.

1472
01:20:39,500 --> 01:20:45,083
The plumes extending out of the surface

1473
01:20:45,125 --> 01:20:47,500
for like kilometers.

1474
01:20:47,541 --> 01:20:50,875
We were seeing eruptions on a world

1475
01:20:50,916 --> 01:20:53,541
which should have been
just a frozen cinder.

1476
01:20:54,166 --> 01:20:55,333
This is too much.

1477
01:20:55,375 --> 01:20:56,791
The last place we would have expected

1478
01:20:56,833 --> 01:21:00,250
to see further dynamics, further eruptions

1479
01:21:00,291 --> 01:21:02,875
was at a moon this remote
in the solar system.

1480
01:21:02,916 --> 01:21:04,458
Just because an idea's crazy,

1481
01:21:04,500 --> 01:21:06,083
it's not necessarily wrong.

1482
01:21:08,875 --> 01:21:11,875
Geysers. Volcanoes on Io.

1483
01:21:11,916 --> 01:21:14,458
Hints of a giant ocean of liquid water

1484
01:21:14,500 --> 01:21:17,291
under Europa's icy crust.

1485
01:21:17,333 --> 01:21:20,958
Each of these features is
evidence of a source of energy.

1486
01:21:21,000 --> 01:21:24,125
And that's a prerequisite
for life as we know it.

1487
01:21:26,041 --> 01:21:28,458
We knew this was the last planet

1488
01:21:28,500 --> 01:21:30,541
Voyager would explore

1489
01:21:30,583 --> 01:21:33,416
before it headed on
for the rest of its journey,

1490
01:21:33,458 --> 01:21:36,958
and so I think
the times together as a team,

1491
01:21:37,000 --> 01:21:39,791
the times to look at the pictures, talk,

1492
01:21:39,833 --> 01:21:42,333
meet together, became more precious.

1493
01:21:42,375 --> 01:21:46,666
I was passing by the secretary's desk

1494
01:21:46,708 --> 01:21:48,083
and she said, "Oh, Candy,

1495
01:21:48,125 --> 01:21:50,291
there's a reporter
that wants to talk to you."

1496
01:21:51,375 --> 01:21:54,708
And he said, "The countdown clock

1497
01:21:54,750 --> 01:21:57,666
just went from minus,

1498
01:21:57,708 --> 01:22:01,333
counting down, to counting up."

1499
01:22:02,333 --> 01:22:06,333
Voyager's now leaving Neptune.

1500
01:22:06,375 --> 01:22:10,500
And he said,
"How does that make you feel?"

1501
01:22:10,541 --> 01:22:14,000
And in that moment,
I dissolved into tears.

1502
01:22:15,541 --> 01:22:17,166
After the spacecraft went past,

1503
01:22:17,208 --> 01:22:18,708
it turned around and looked back,

1504
01:22:18,750 --> 01:22:21,583
and there's this beautiful
crescent Neptune and Triton,

1505
01:22:21,625 --> 01:22:24,500
and people realized that's the end

1506
01:22:24,541 --> 01:22:26,500
of the planetary part of Voyager.

1507
01:22:26,541 --> 01:22:28,375
That's the last protocol,

1508
01:22:28,416 --> 01:22:31,958
the last thing we'll see in our
solar system is now behind us.

1509
01:22:37,166 --> 01:22:41,166
We could have enhanced the color a bit

1510
01:22:41,208 --> 01:22:42,833
to make a somewhat prettier picture,

1511
01:22:42,875 --> 01:22:45,791
but out of respect
to the Voyager spacecraft

1512
01:22:45,833 --> 01:22:48,625
we decided to show it to you
just as it is.

1513
01:22:59,541 --> 01:23:00,833
The way I looked at it was,

1514
01:23:00,875 --> 01:23:03,416
"Gee, we did something really great."

1515
01:23:05,333 --> 01:23:08,125
Very, very successful mission.

1516
01:23:08,166 --> 01:23:09,833
A little weepy.

1517
01:23:09,875 --> 01:23:15,250
I mean it's... there was a lot
of energy put into this mission.

1518
01:23:15,291 --> 01:23:19,125
We have ignition and we have lift-off.

1519
01:23:27,458 --> 01:23:31,291
Years of intense effort.

1520
01:23:33,541 --> 01:23:36,041
It was the end of a sentimental journey.

1521
01:23:40,041 --> 01:23:41,291
We did it.

1522
01:23:41,333 --> 01:23:45,166
We pulled it off, and that's important.

1523
01:23:45,208 --> 01:23:46,125
It is.

1524
01:23:58,166 --> 01:24:00,291
We had a big party at JPL,

1525
01:24:00,333 --> 01:24:01,833
Chuck Berry was there,

1526
01:24:01,875 --> 01:24:03,833
so that was a good send-off for Voyager.

1527
01:24:21,833 --> 01:24:26,416
Rock star moment and sail on Voyager.

1528
01:24:26,458 --> 01:24:28,041
And I'm going to go get some sleep

1529
01:24:28,083 --> 01:24:30,083
or maybe I'll do a little more dancing...

1530
01:24:30,125 --> 01:24:31,291
Thank you very much, Lou?

1531
01:24:36,791 --> 01:24:37,958
Meanwhile, Voyager 1

1532
01:24:38,000 --> 01:24:39,750
is still kind of cruising out there,

1533
01:24:39,791 --> 01:24:41,416
getting farther and farther out,

1534
01:24:41,458 --> 01:24:42,875
and a number of folks on the team,

1535
01:24:42,916 --> 01:24:44,416
including Carl Sagan,

1536
01:24:44,458 --> 01:24:48,250
had this idea that before we
have to shut the cameras down,

1537
01:24:48,291 --> 01:24:51,166
let's turn around,
look back towards the sun

1538
01:24:51,208 --> 01:24:53,708
and let's take a picture
of our solar system

1539
01:24:53,750 --> 01:24:55,958
unlike any that had ever
been taken before.

1540
01:24:56,000 --> 01:24:58,125
And there was actually opposition to it.

1541
01:24:58,166 --> 01:24:59,583
They just didn't want to do it.

1542
01:24:59,625 --> 01:25:01,000
They couldn't get their heads around

1543
01:25:01,041 --> 01:25:03,125
what would be the point
of taking a picture

1544
01:25:03,166 --> 01:25:05,333
of the Earth and Jupiter and so on

1545
01:25:05,375 --> 01:25:07,958
because they're just going to
be little points of light.

1546
01:25:08,000 --> 01:25:10,500
So, Carl being Carl

1547
01:25:10,541 --> 01:25:14,208
actually went all the way
to the NASA administrator

1548
01:25:14,250 --> 01:25:17,375
and got him to direct
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

1549
01:25:17,416 --> 01:25:19,958
to take this series of pictures.

1550
01:25:20,000 --> 01:25:22,333
Absolutely zero science in it.

1551
01:25:22,375 --> 01:25:24,000
Absolutely none.

1552
01:25:25,416 --> 01:25:27,291
From a unique vantage point,

1553
01:25:27,333 --> 01:25:29,541
nearly four billion miles away,

1554
01:25:29,583 --> 01:25:32,291
Voyager 1's cameras turned homeward

1555
01:25:32,333 --> 01:25:34,708
to take family snapshots.

1556
01:25:34,750 --> 01:25:37,666
It was Valentine's Day, 1990.

1557
01:25:49,000 --> 01:25:50,375
When we did our portrait

1558
01:25:50,416 --> 01:25:52,333
of each of the planets,

1559
01:25:52,375 --> 01:25:54,750
I was the first person
to look at the pictures

1560
01:25:54,791 --> 01:25:56,458
and I knew every blemish,

1561
01:25:56,500 --> 01:25:59,666
and so I could pretty quickly
go blemish, blemish, blemish,

1562
01:25:59,708 --> 01:26:02,625
and I thought, well, where's the Earth?

1563
01:26:02,666 --> 01:26:05,333
Where? How could we... you know?

1564
01:26:05,375 --> 01:26:08,250
And then I realized there was a lot of...

1565
01:26:08,291 --> 01:26:11,625
there were a lot of streaks
of light in that image,

1566
01:26:13,000 --> 01:26:15,166
and I realized, finally,

1567
01:26:15,208 --> 01:26:19,000
that the Earth was sitting
in one of those rays of light.

1568
01:26:20,916 --> 01:26:22,541
You know, I just sat there for a while

1569
01:26:22,583 --> 01:26:27,625
just kind of realizing, "wow,
that's the Earth, you know,

1570
01:26:27,666 --> 01:26:30,125
that's Voyager looking back at the Earth."

1571
01:26:30,166 --> 01:26:31,750
And then once I had sort of recovered,

1572
01:26:31,791 --> 01:26:33,125
I started calling people.

1573
01:26:33,166 --> 01:26:34,541
I called Brad.

1574
01:26:34,583 --> 01:26:37,083
"Brad, we got it." Called
Carl, "Carl, we got it."

1575
01:26:37,125 --> 01:26:38,083
Called my dad.

1576
01:26:39,750 --> 01:26:41,833
And so this is
a different kind of milestone

1577
01:26:41,875 --> 01:26:43,916
than the scientific milestones we've had.

1578
01:26:43,958 --> 01:26:45,750
One that is really symbolic...

1579
01:26:45,791 --> 01:26:47,791
I'm an imaging
scientist, so I first realized,

1580
01:26:47,833 --> 01:26:49,166
"Oh, this didn't turn out

1581
01:26:49,208 --> 01:26:50,875
the way we thought
it was going to turn out,"

1582
01:26:50,916 --> 01:26:53,875
and my first impulse is to take my hand

1583
01:26:53,916 --> 01:26:56,916
and wipe away the dust, because
there was some dust on it.

1584
01:26:56,958 --> 01:27:00,333
Well, one of the pieces of dust
that I wanted to wipe away

1585
01:27:00,375 --> 01:27:03,000
was the Earth.

1586
01:27:03,041 --> 01:27:05,791
But it didn't matter
because in the hands of Carl,

1587
01:27:05,833 --> 01:27:10,625
he turned it into an allegory
on the human condition.

1588
01:27:10,666 --> 01:27:12,500
And the next slide.

1589
01:27:19,875 --> 01:27:21,166
The Earth in a sunbeam.

1590
01:27:24,000 --> 01:27:25,416
And in this color picture

1591
01:27:25,458 --> 01:27:29,041
you can see that it is in fact
less than a pixel,

1592
01:27:29,083 --> 01:27:32,208
and this is where we live, on a blue dot.

1593
01:27:33,125 --> 01:27:36,083
On that blue dot,

1594
01:27:36,125 --> 01:27:40,291
that's where everyone you know
and everyone you ever heard of

1595
01:27:40,333 --> 01:27:42,541
and every human being who ever lived

1596
01:27:43,458 --> 01:27:47,083
lived out their lives.

1597
01:27:47,125 --> 01:27:52,166
I think this perspective
underscores our responsibility

1598
01:27:52,208 --> 01:27:56,166
to preserve and cherish that blue dot,

1599
01:27:56,208 --> 01:27:58,375
the only home we have.

1600
01:28:00,666 --> 01:28:03,125
The two Voyagers
still communicate with Earth

1601
01:28:03,166 --> 01:28:05,500
nearly every day.

1602
01:28:05,541 --> 01:28:09,416
It takes huge antennas
to detect their faint signals,

1603
01:28:09,458 --> 01:28:13,250
now less than one trillionth of a watt.

1604
01:28:13,291 --> 01:28:15,166
The spacecraft continue to be tracked

1605
01:28:15,208 --> 01:28:18,416
as they begin the final part
of their mission,

1606
01:28:18,458 --> 01:28:21,625
to travel beyond the edge
of our solar system,

1607
01:28:21,666 --> 01:28:24,041
into interstellar space.

1608
01:28:24,083 --> 01:28:27,000
It's in this never traveled
region between the stars

1609
01:28:27,041 --> 01:28:29,708
that Voyager and its Golden Record

1610
01:28:29,750 --> 01:28:33,041
will have a chance of being discovered.

1611
01:28:33,083 --> 01:28:36,125
At the time we were designing Voyager,

1612
01:28:36,166 --> 01:28:40,333
interstellar space,
where the boundary was,

1613
01:28:40,375 --> 01:28:42,875
was totally unknown.

1614
01:28:42,916 --> 01:28:46,958
We had our eyes
on the interstellar mission.

1615
01:28:47,000 --> 01:28:49,375
Are we going to boost the spacecraft

1616
01:28:49,416 --> 01:28:53,958
to get out of our solar system
and into the galaxy?

1617
01:28:54,000 --> 01:28:57,333
It was a shot in the dark
because nobody knew how far.

1618
01:29:00,291 --> 01:29:02,458
Uncharted waters.

1619
01:29:17,166 --> 01:29:20,083
The magnetic field of
the sun can only extend so far,

1620
01:29:20,125 --> 01:29:22,958
it's a bubble around our star,
all the stars have bubbles,

1621
01:29:23,000 --> 01:29:25,708
we can see the bubbles
around other stars out there,

1622
01:29:25,750 --> 01:29:27,250
so we know that they have bubbles.

1623
01:29:27,291 --> 01:29:29,333
Where does our bubble end?

1624
01:29:29,375 --> 01:29:30,833
Somewhere beyond Neptune

1625
01:29:30,875 --> 01:29:33,750
is the edge of the bubble around our sun.

1626
01:29:33,791 --> 01:29:36,833
At the heliopause two forces balance--

1627
01:29:36,875 --> 01:29:38,875
the outward pressure of the solar wind

1628
01:29:38,916 --> 01:29:42,208
and the pressure of interstellar space.

1629
01:29:42,250 --> 01:29:45,250
But how far out it was, no one was sure.

1630
01:29:46,458 --> 01:29:47,666
We kept going

1631
01:29:47,708 --> 01:29:49,250
and years went by and years went by

1632
01:29:49,291 --> 01:29:52,833
and we don't detect
the interstellar medium.

1633
01:29:58,000 --> 01:30:00,458
Throughout the 1990s,

1634
01:30:00,500 --> 01:30:03,125
still didn't find the edge of the bubble.

1635
01:30:03,166 --> 01:30:04,666
Throughout the 2000s,

1636
01:30:04,708 --> 01:30:07,541
still didn't find the edge of the bubble,

1637
01:30:07,583 --> 01:30:11,583
and then finally in 2012 Voyager 1,

1638
01:30:11,625 --> 01:30:14,458
which is going the fastest,
which is the farthest,

1639
01:30:14,500 --> 01:30:16,583
started to see these funny things happen

1640
01:30:16,625 --> 01:30:18,208
to the squiggly lines.

1641
01:30:18,250 --> 01:30:19,708
This crazy spike.

1642
01:30:19,750 --> 01:30:20,916
And everybody goes, "Oh, is that it?"

1643
01:30:20,958 --> 01:30:23,041
And then it goes back to normal.

1644
01:30:23,083 --> 01:30:26,250
And then it was just literally
one magical day in...

1645
01:30:26,291 --> 01:30:30,833
it was in August of 2012
that everything changed

1646
01:30:30,875 --> 01:30:34,000
and it was like pfff, just...
popped out of the bubble.

1647
01:30:34,041 --> 01:30:36,625
Voyager 1 has left our solar system.

1648
01:30:36,666 --> 01:30:38,000
It's the first thing built by humans

1649
01:30:38,041 --> 01:30:39,416
that has left our solar system

1650
01:30:39,458 --> 01:30:41,791
and now it's in interstellar space.

1651
01:30:41,833 --> 01:30:43,708
NASA says that Voyager 1

1652
01:30:43,750 --> 01:30:46,166
has become the first man-made object

1653
01:30:46,208 --> 01:30:48,166
to reach interstellar space,

1654
01:30:48,208 --> 01:30:50,500
the cold dark region between stars.

1655
01:30:50,541 --> 01:30:52,458
And we've slipped the outermost grasp

1656
01:30:52,500 --> 01:30:54,916
of our solar system with Voyager 1,

1657
01:30:54,958 --> 01:30:56,958
the first human-made object

1658
01:30:57,000 --> 01:31:00,125
to venture into interstellar space.

1659
01:31:00,166 --> 01:31:01,750
It's a wonderful achievement, actually.

1660
01:31:01,791 --> 01:31:03,041
When you think of it, it's historic,

1661
01:31:03,083 --> 01:31:05,875
it's our first step out of our bubble

1662
01:31:05,916 --> 01:31:08,708
which has been around all the planets

1663
01:31:08,750 --> 01:31:10,375
and around the Earth essentially forever,

1664
01:31:10,416 --> 01:31:14,125
and now finally some little
thing that we have built

1665
01:31:14,166 --> 01:31:18,208
has left that bubble and is
in the space between the stars.

1666
01:31:18,250 --> 01:31:19,791
It was like humanity

1667
01:31:19,833 --> 01:31:23,000
had just become an interstellar species.

1668
01:31:23,041 --> 01:31:25,875
It was like knocking on eternity's door.

1669
01:31:27,833 --> 01:31:31,583
When the Voyagers' power sources go dead

1670
01:31:31,625 --> 01:31:35,083
and when the spacecraft
can no longer send back

1671
01:31:35,125 --> 01:31:37,125
any useful information,

1672
01:31:37,166 --> 01:31:41,083
that's really the point
at which the Golden Record

1673
01:31:41,125 --> 01:31:45,500
becomes the primary function
of those missions,

1674
01:31:45,541 --> 01:31:47,625
that when everything else is turned off,

1675
01:31:47,666 --> 01:31:52,458
those records are still floating
somewhere in interstellar space,

1676
01:31:52,500 --> 01:31:55,458
completing the last part of the mission.

1677
01:31:58,541 --> 01:32:02,083
The chance that
advanced intelligence beyond us

1678
01:32:02,125 --> 01:32:06,166
would detect, "Oh, hey,
there is a radiating body

1679
01:32:06,208 --> 01:32:08,500
coming into our area,

1680
01:32:08,541 --> 01:32:12,416
let's go out and find out
what this bottle in the ocean,

1681
01:32:12,458 --> 01:32:14,666
what message it might have.

1682
01:32:14,708 --> 01:32:17,291
Now is that a grand mystery?

1683
01:32:18,708 --> 01:32:19,916
Whoa!"

1684
01:32:22,708 --> 01:32:24,875
I love the optimism of it,

1685
01:32:24,916 --> 01:32:27,125
I love the idea that these are things

1686
01:32:27,166 --> 01:32:28,250
that are meaningful to us,

1687
01:32:28,291 --> 01:32:29,875
maybe you'll find them meaningful, too,

1688
01:32:29,916 --> 01:32:35,333
hypothetical alien, and yeah,
it just touches my heart.

1689
01:32:38,125 --> 01:32:40,166
One thing we know about a metal record

1690
01:32:40,208 --> 01:32:42,458
with these grooves engraved on it

1691
01:32:42,500 --> 01:32:46,458
is that information is good
for at least one billion years.

1692
01:32:46,500 --> 01:32:48,000
The inside of the record,

1693
01:32:48,041 --> 01:32:51,208
which was more protected from cosmic rays,

1694
01:32:51,250 --> 01:32:53,666
two billion years or more.

1695
01:32:53,708 --> 01:32:57,041
There's no wind, water, rain, weathering,

1696
01:32:57,083 --> 01:33:00,833
there's no planets or comets
that they're going to run into,

1697
01:33:00,875 --> 01:33:06,083
and over thousands, millions,
billions of years

1698
01:33:06,125 --> 01:33:10,416
they're predicted to remain pretty intact.

1699
01:33:10,458 --> 01:33:12,458
Because there's
no proof that there's anything

1700
01:33:12,500 --> 01:33:14,166
that Voyager's ever going to encounter,

1701
01:33:14,208 --> 01:33:17,875
ultimately, it's a story about us.

1702
01:33:17,916 --> 01:33:20,750
Voyager is rarely out of my thoughts.

1703
01:33:20,791 --> 01:33:22,166
Always some little part of me

1704
01:33:22,208 --> 01:33:25,000
is wondering where is Voyager tonight.

1705
01:33:25,041 --> 01:33:27,166
Whenever I look up at the night stars,

1706
01:33:27,208 --> 01:33:32,000
I look in the direction
that each of them is going.

1707
01:33:32,041 --> 01:33:35,416
There is never going
to be another mission like it.

1708
01:33:35,458 --> 01:33:39,750
It was the first and last of its own kind.

1709
01:33:39,791 --> 01:33:43,916
Maybe someday, another
being might find Voyager

1710
01:33:43,958 --> 01:33:46,000
and at least know of our existence.

1711
01:33:46,041 --> 01:33:49,500
It's highly unlikely,
but it's not impossible.

1712
01:33:49,541 --> 01:33:54,833
And that small possibility
surely gives us hope.

1713
01:33:54,875 --> 01:33:57,958
Is the universe
any different than it was then?

1714
01:33:58,000 --> 01:33:59,500
No.

1715
01:33:59,541 --> 01:34:01,500
But are we different?

1716
01:34:01,541 --> 01:34:03,458
Absolutely!

1717
01:34:03,500 --> 01:34:09,041
The thrill of the discoveries,
reaching the heliopause,

1718
01:34:09,958 --> 01:34:12,541
completing the Grand Tour,

1719
01:34:12,583 --> 01:34:17,541
I mean man, our child has just made it.

1720
01:34:27,458 --> 01:34:28,958
We're the generation

1721
01:34:29,000 --> 01:34:31,125
that sent something out into space

1722
01:34:31,166 --> 01:34:33,958
that's not only going to outlive us,

1723
01:34:34,000 --> 01:34:37,583
it's going to outlive our star.

1724
01:34:37,625 --> 01:34:42,583
Four billion years from now when
our sun turns into a red giant,

1725
01:34:42,625 --> 01:34:44,625
Voyager is still going to be trucking

1726
01:34:44,666 --> 01:34:47,333
out there through the stars,

1727
01:34:47,375 --> 01:34:50,958
and the songs of our time
are going to be out there.

1728
01:34:51,000 --> 01:34:53,250
Chuck Berry is still out there...

1729
01:34:53,291 --> 01:34:54,833
We'll still be out there.