ᴴᴰ [Documentary] Destination: Titan

January the 14th 2005 the day had finally arrived the day that I thought about every day for 17 years a billion and a half miles away out there near Saturn there was something that we built and it was hurtling through space at 20,000 miles an hour would it do just what we designed it to do or would it all be wasted we went into the the science room that morning knowing that whatever was going to happen was going to happen this was the day there was an enormous air of expectation basically everyone I met was as excited but also as nervous as I was about the whole mission frankly I think we will all petrified about the very worst thing that shouldn't have happened happened and it turned out that there was a major problem I just wanted to go away and cry in a corner that really ramped up the nerves and a missing command what else is wrong I really had visions now of the last 17 years having been wasted everybody who watch the sky - are jumping I'll tell you why growing up in the late 50s all I knew about space travel was probably from reading about Dan there for example in the Eagle comic I knew very little about the planets probably from school books all we knew was from often rather blurry indistinct images from telescopes on the ground I think I knew that Saturn was a large ball of gas you know we call it a gas giant and that it was about a billion miles away from us here on the earth but I certainly didn't know anything about Titan I didn't know that it was one of Saturn's moons orbiting around it I mean you have to remember we didn't have any spacecraft images of course and then something happened to change all of that half an hour ago the Russians announced that they'd put the first man into space it's the voice in space of major Yuri Gagarin am I the greatest scientific events were one of the greatest occasions in the history of man it was absolutely mind-boggling it's and it's impossible now really to imagine the impact that it made excuse me what do you think of the new earth I think it's fantastic well I can tell you he's now back saved him some dearly I didn't think he would get back well I say it's very best first good luck for chair myself within months of Gagarin flights embarked on a world tour and I think it's true that the first port of call was the United Kingdom in London major Gurgaon could you tell us what you think of the reception of the British public about three Union West Indies Camaro them pre Oman discs in the rotor busy watching Joe player Ching Hiroshi Roger skip really welcome I have been given by the British public has been overwhelming it has been most friendly and kind everywhere currently only get your place it sir I see smiling faces everywhere what about you if you like to be a spaceman oh well it all depends if it comes up like mmm everybody is kind of praise I think I might have a go you might ever go my Jim what do you think of the major oh I like to journey for my life I like company all around the school that I was at Highgate was very close to Highgate Cemetery of course every visiting Russian dignitary had to visit a tomb of Karl Marx I remember school was cancelled for the afternoon it was such a big event you know Gagarin coming to London coming to Highgate I think I only decided to come along here at the last minute I'm not sure why and I'm doing that I'm a believer in fate but it must have been fate mustn't it and it was my Eureka moment seeing that man standing here small man but the thought he had been in space for what was it 96 minutes the first astronaut and I was hooked from that moment on the phenomenon of the merger establish little fly area for their I am the Gagarin flight was really what kick-started it all it really took us out of that science fiction era into the era of practicality and one can see it as the first step on our exploration of the solar system with humans and also with robotic spacecraft it's one of those things if you grew up in the late 60s early 70s you know space was everywhere was a most exciting thing you just wanted to be involved in it probably couldn't even imagine that you would be there was a little bit of affluence and some of the social boundaries and barriers were breaking down you know there was the so-called youth revolution and I was caught up in many of the demonstrations that were going on against the Vietnam War it was it was a fascinating time at one of their program but fire please prepare I was always interested in space I was interested in unmanned space exploration you know seeing other planets have closed all of this helped to cement I think this this hoped this dream that I had that I could I could actually take this further I could get my physics degree I could then perhaps do a PhD and and really move to be a part of this whole worldwide space activity only once every 175 years are the major planets Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune so aligned that a spacecraft can visit all four on a single flight the rare opportunity to probe these planets occurs in this decade the 1970s and will not recur until the middle of the 22nd century you most of what we knew about Titan at least at this time was from the Voyager spacecraft we knew the Titan was about five thousand kilometers in diameter so bigger than the planet Mercury it had a thick atmosphere this is what really made it stand out amongst all of the planetary satellites in the solar system it's the only one that does but we knew essentially nothing about the surface because Titan is permanently shrouded in orange haze or smog which meant that none of the images showed anything of the surface we know it's very cold Saturn and it's satellites are so far from the Sun the atmosphere is very complex it was known to have at least twelve different gases and probably having some similarity to Earth's very primitive atmosphere one that we lost probably billions of years ago there was organic chemistry on Titan which was interesting but the time wasn't warm enough to have liquid water which of course is one of the sort of prerequisites for life as we as we know it and I think Titan sort of you know faded into the background in a sense for much of the following decade well towards the end of the 1970s jobs in British universities were very difficult to come by and I saw an advertisement which was very hard to resist to go and work on a project called Giotto now Giotto was Europe's Halley's Comet mission and the job was at the University of Kent to be project manager for the dust instrument I applied and I got it so at the end of 1981 we moved to Canterbury on a two-year contract I ended up staying there 18 years Giotto flew 594 kilometers from the nucleus of Halley's Comet I mean remarkably close and we detected about 30,000 dust particles you know these are the particles that make up the tail of a comet I think it was the mission that gave Europe confidence that he could really do ambitious things in space after the success of Giotto the European Space Agency were very democratic about selecting the next sound of admission they had five candidate mission and we got involved in a team on a mission called Vesta now Vesta was going to fly past an asteroid and we were part of the group that was looking at the possibility of firing some penetrators they will be fired into the surface of the asteroid and make measurements of the physical properties and we came to the day of selection and to our horror it wasn't Vesta that they chose they selected a mission called Cassini going to a place called Titan a place that I'd hardly heard of and we were completely deflated and dejected by this I remember still the journey back to Canterbury from Bruges we went on the train and the ferry and it was a pretty depressing glum journey we got back to the lab and I said look have we really wasted the last year is it possible that some of the work that we've done on the Vesta mission which they didn't choose we could actually adapt to this strange place Titan that they were proposing to go to we sat down with a cup of coffee and had a look at what it was that the European Space Agency had chosen cassini as proposed was going to be the most ambitious space mission ever sent to the outer solar system it was planned to carry the first dedicated set of instruments for Saturn and its system and it was to carry a probe that would detach and land on the surface of Titan now pretty soon we realized that the part of it that really interested us was the probe which was going to descend through Titans atmosphere he was going to make the bulk of its measurements during the descent and we realized of course how embarrassing it would be if the thing landed and it didn't have anything with which to make measurements on the surface so we literally listed all of the physical properties that you might want to measure on the surface of Titan we then wrote a proposal in response to the call for proposals to produce a quite ambitious though small little instrument called the surface science package we beat the deadline by about a day we sat and waited for the decision and to our amazement we were selected a new and very exciting space probe is being planned for the 1990s dr. John design a key is closely associated with this probe and we are delighted to welcome and out of the sky at night for the first time but I certainly hope not last welcome John I do better at night program I'll give you a play about Titan whose invites are it obviously John I didn't know then what the good world cos he was and he came and he discussed Titan but of course so far we've only been able to study the top part of it we still don't know what the service is like and that's the reason to sending up this Titan Lander will you tell us about that John I should tell you that it's already been christened in fact it's called the Huygens probe named after the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens who discovered Titan I was billed as a Titan expert I hadn't written a single scientific paper about Titan and this was a very bizarre situation he didn't know much about the surface of Titan better neither did anybody else knew as much as anybody all in all this is one of the most ambitious vehicles ever planned what do you think of the chances of success we must be optimistic you would never embark on a mission like this if if one wasn't optimistic and I I expect that we might be sitting here in 13 years time discussing the results from the Cassini mission I think it began to dawn on us just you know in the weeks after we were selected we had to produce an instrument one of a set of six scientific instruments a bit bigger than a shoebox it had to travel in a probe in deep space for over seven years descend through this thick rather mysterious atmosphere and then make measurements on this very alien and unknown surface and he had to give us answers he had to make sense of this alien world I mean that was a daunting prospect I had to start building up the team and there are several critical positions arguably the most important position is the project manager that's the person who really runs the show day to day and brings the whole thing together okay one thing we've got to decide is exactly who to send to the meet indeed sir one of my colleagues Anu Jones on a key film maybe 10 15 years earlier and they said I saw Johnny the day and he's looking for a project manager why don't you give him a ring and amazingly because of him I had this new space science career the instrument had originally been selected in 1990 but the team were just getting going in 1992 and I arrived they just really had a few prototypes on the bench some of them were very blue Peter I remember a washing up bottle with a steel ruler attached that was the density sensor and the thing was huge and we had to turn this into a eight gram sensor to fly to fly the Titans well when Mark came on board there were two big issues that we had to face one was to put the final team together and more importantly was to get the funding because being selected was only half of the battle we then had to get funding from our national agencies our funding situation is stable if you call under funding a good thing to report are we were underfunded two years ago and we're underfunded to the same extent now we were cut back to about two thirds of what we actually needed to do the job so we had to look at clever ways of getting around the funding shortfall this was around the time of perestroika when the Iron Curtain was coming down bulldozers tonight began to open new holes in the Berlin Wall throughout the day thousands of people have been crossing freely from east to west to Berlin and back again nice horn opportunity here to use some of the professional connections that I had with Poland to see whether we could go there and use their desire to work with the West in scientific research and we found out that they were quite experienced at building space instruments so basically we cut a deal they would build a part of the instrument in exchange for coming on board and seeing essentially how space research was done in Western Europe now that was one thing that we did the other was to take advantage of the fact that we were a university and one thing that universities have generally in profusion is students and generally students are fairly cheap I won't quite say slave labor but nearly the whole project seemed a lot like science-fiction in the sense that somehow we were going to build this thing that was going to travel a billion miles through space and then parachute down through this atmosphere at you know minus 200 Celsius and touch the surface of one of the moons of Saturn emit just sort of boggles the mind that you can contemplate doing that Ralph is enthusiastic about everything he turns his attention to and he became very quickly embroiled in all aspects of Titan and one of the tasks that we assigned to him was to develop the penet Ramat er well one of the the things we really want to answer with the the surface science package is what is the actual nature of the surface of Titan what's it made of is it solid like ice or is it slushy or is it liquid and this part of the package called a penny trauma to aims to do that by measuring how hard we land in it but as the probe comes down we measure the impact forces it's very strange you sort of come into this from the outside thinking that there's some massive team of top-notch engineers and scientists who've done this all before and that you'll be allocated some little part of it and the reality is there's never enough people and everyone sort of improvising because nobody's built anything that went to Titan before so it was at first little strange and surprising that I'd get to do this but there was an incredible opportunity in the early days of the project we were being followed by a BBC crew who were filming some aspects of the project for an Open University program it was an eye opening the first time I've been involved in that kind of thing they actually set up a sort of little video diary for us a little passport photo who's where you sit in front of this video camera and say what had happened tape of the 13th last week we done these crazy suits and went in the clean room to assemble the engineering model penetrator this instrument will perform thermal properties measurements show the thermal conductivity and the temperature of the Titan ocean this will be sent away to be shaken baked and electrically tested in what is called the top hat that is the thing that holds all the experiments the things here it's quite small and fiddly but I'm rather pleased with it science students tend to be nerdy and I think I think as a group we can form to that stereotype but it means you're really utterly focused on what you're doing when you have sort of three years where you have no other commitments other than to do your research and because you know building a space experiment going to going to Titan is such a motivating thing it was really really wonderful actually tear to have that focus the penet Ramat er was a fairly simple sense of in concept but actually doing it well took a lot of a lot of work and a lot of effort ralph was involved with running loads of prototype tests and dropping things in the buckets of sand and seeing how different tips shapes responded etc I remember one of the first things we did was got some sand from Whitstable Beach and that was a huge mistake because it was real sand at the sea and so it's all wet and salty and of course salty water is an electrical conductor and of course the signals we got from that which is terrible it was building an instrument to go somewhere that we didn't know what we're going to land on and that was real part of the fascination it's one thing to make a measurement in the laboratory it's another to make an experiment that is going to for sure seven years later after travelling through space for a billion miles is going to work at 200 degrees below zero and that isn't going to suffer any kind of problem the biggest fears we had were landing on absolutely sharp exposed ice which meant that the probe might die pretty quickly and our challenge was to get the data back before the probe died at the time one of the main speculations about Titan surface was that it was covered by a global ocean of liquid methane and so I spent quite a lot of time doing my PhD modeling the splashdown dynamics you know looking at all the old Apollo literature of how a capsule decelerates when it hits the water and trying to figure out how much the Huygens probe will decelerate if it landed in the liquid methane a lot of it was theoretical stuff do we have global oceans that we have seas do we have lakes anywhere in between the natural sort of speculation was well there it'll be like landing on Mars or landing on the moon but we we have no idea what the materials really are or is the it's ice or if it's sort of ground-up ice like sand or if it's some sort of organic dust this is very fluffy so we had to sort of consider all these possibilities certainly didn't know anything that would let us exclude any of them this is the final engineering model of the Huygens surface science package containing its nine different sensors we've got here the speed of sound instrument to measure the speed of sound in the atmosphere and on the surface here we have the sonar designed to send a signal down to the surface of Titan or to the bottom of the lake to measure its depth inside this enclosure here we've got six further instruments to measure various properties of the liquid or the solid surface and finally we have here the penetrator yep output lines are clear and we're running out about 6 psi over ambience once you get into the hardware phase of the project there's testing testing testing and some of these tests run for tens of hours at a time there were times when I felt that I knew my milkman better than my family because I was arriving home at you know five o'clock in the morning we have temperatures please James top cavity 111 bottom cavity 114 for this particular mission when the read unusual things was when we got there we were going into a very very cold environment so many of the sensors we needed to test in liquid methane it is a little bit hazardous so we were doing this on the roof of the physics building I guess the logic being that if we blew up we only blew ourselves up and no one else a project like this inevitably puts strains on on all the individuals involved and and that's you know challenging enough I'm not sure that my family really understood quite what I was doing they sort of supported me but probably thought that I was you know the crazy scientist and maybe every family had to have one crazy scientist I was very lucky in the sense that I'm quite a sort of self-motivated self driven kind of guy so I didn't need a lot of lot of hand-holding and that was just as well because John was a busy man you know the job he was doing as a university lecturer and building the space experiment you know it's quite demanding and he was going through some personal difficulties at the time - the early days of the project coincided with you know the breakdown of my marriage so I have to say that there was about a year in the project that was very very difficult I mean I I find it difficult even to think back to those times he it was difficult to keep everything going - frankly and I was very lucky I had a really good team who when things got very difficult for me they were more than able to keep the show on the road there were some very very long working hours involved particularly when you get to the flight model and you're trying to get everything to meet the deadlines if you miss the delivery you're not going to tighten you ever have one of those weeks where nothing works our fax machine is broken the photocopier didn't work the coffee machine is broken down even the bbc's bloody lightest top so we have to improvise with this desk lamp I'm sitting in this this this dark old laboratory with an experiment that's not working and you sort of think you know this is really what I want to do if I made the right decision but but then you sort of remember the bigger picture the project developed it was hard and painful at times but finally we got to the very last test this was the vibration test and can you believe what happened the damn thing broke the structure which held our instrument together cracked I was personally devastated to heard the news I realized the impact on the straightaway that even just rebuilding the top-hat was going to be a problem with the fact we had to mute those sensors to made the remember every aspect of the of the project had his hands full with a huge huge workload there was really the possibility that the European Space Agency might say I'm sorry guys you're not going to make the delivery date you're not going to be on the probe you're not going to tighten and at that point it was at least four years of my life dedicated to that instrument you know we we had to find a solution we had to get out of this hole it had taken maybe maybe six months to to build this flat model and we were two weeks away from delivery and had to rebuild the whole thing for John it was an even longer time on this project and again he knew instantly that does a chance we were getting thrown off this mission we came up with a strategy whereby we would deliver the engineering model to the spacecraft that will enable ISA to continue with their program they couldn't hold it up this meant we have to dismantle the whole thing remove all the harness fix the structure but also build flight spare instruments calibrate them put the whole thing back together in the end it took about three or four months to go through the whole thing again but it was touch-and-go we worked around it we came up with an alternative design and we delivered that to the spacecraft late but it was working tighten the hazy moon around Saturn today a huge rocket is being prepared to explore that distant world Europe and America joined forces in a three and a half billion dollar mission called Cassini this was it we flew out to Florida for the launch to our surprise we were actually greeted there by protesters with legions of protesters climbing the gates at the air station opponents have maintained that NASA's plutonium-powered satellite could kill the innocent should something go wrong they blow up all the time here you know and for some reason of insanity that I can't imagine you're going to stick 72 pounds of blue tawny atop this there what I want to see is a safe world I don't want nuclear in space if you go out to the distance of Saturn from the Sun sunlight is very weak so you can't use the traditional way of generating electricity on a spacecraft which is to use solar cells so you have to do something else and this is true of all outer solar system missions and what is done is to use radioactive material this case plutonium and you use the radiation that it emits to essentially to generate electricity that's the only way you can do it just seem to be the sort of knee-jerk reaction that you know regular activity is this terrible thing but for me it was just you know just a esses Airy part of the spacecraft but you know how would how would the protests affect the launch would they you know get in the way would be be you know getting Tomatoes thrown at us I mean it took me back to my time as a student in the 1960s when I was doing the protesting when I was carrying the banners now there I was I was having to cross the picket line the launch was in the middle of the night at about 3 o'clock in the morning and I think because security and so on they had special buses arranged for us you nervous yeah I'm a little nervous yeah just a bit seven years work and this is the make-or-break night I mean there's a lot of work down the line from here but but this is really where one place where it could fall down it was always in the back of our mind that any rocket is only 95 97 percent reliable so there's a good chance that if the mission fails it was going to fail now healthy if I see our two recorders are running launch command system is now enabled t-minus one minute 30 seconds suck they're biting fingernails and try not to get too nervous waiting for the the okay that they are going to launch t-minus ten nine eight seven six five four three two one saw flames at the base of the rocket and the first thing that went through my mind was that the Rockets caught fire and you know it's about to blow up or something because the ignition happens but it's it's several miles away and so the sound of the ignition hasn't reached you yet you just see the flames and then you see the rocket start to to ascend and then the direct sound hits you and there's this wall of deep rumbling bass and you get a sense well now we're on our way cassini goes up and it was almost by design there was a cloud about I think a thousand feet or so right above the launcher and then after a few seconds it went into this cloud it was almost an explosion of light it looked like the thing had blown up this cloud was just a huge ball of fire looked like for a fraction of a second it was horror it's gone we've lost it but then we saw Cassini appearing above the cloud it was coming through and then it went up into this clear black sky absolutely serene truly wonderful sight once it was often through that cloud you knew it was going I knew it's gonna be good love I guess I kept an eye on the rocket all the way up till it's a tiny dot during the journey to Titan we actually moved our team to the Open University in Milton Keynes a lot of things do happen in some respects I mean one is rather sad because the team that we'd built up to design build and launch the SSP much of that team dissolves we don't have the funding to keep that team going all the way through but we kept a core team together because roughly every six months we switch the instruments on and we ran through what are called housekeeping tests how do you go in to move fall on time or on altitude this time we went in using the seven kilometres of okay we check out the instrument to make sure the space buffers working fine that our instrument was working fine a few minor things we monitored and a few software bits we changed nothing too major from from our side what you have to understand is that when Huygens was planned to be descending onto the surface of Titan it will be relaying its data not directly back to earth there just wasn't the power for that but sending the data up to Cassini which would be flying some thousands of kilometres overhead Cassini would then relay it a few hours later back to the earth there was a major scale on the spacecraft they tried a particular test of the communication system and realized that there was a problem and with admission as it was designed we weren't going to get the science data back one thing that was tried was using a radio telescope on the ground to sort of pretend to be Huygens and transmit a signal as if it was Huygens to check that Cassini could receive that signal correctly and you know when the results of that test were reported to us in a science meeting you know they sort of said riah that we did the test and you know we were not sure quite what happened because we didn't get all of the data back to put it simply it's as if Huygens was transmitting on Radio 1 and concei knee was receiving on Radio 2 in other words there was a very slight mismatch in the frequencies but it was enough to potentially scupper the whole of the Huygens project that was obviously a huge huge problem very frightening from the scientists point of view but the system quickly got together came up with some options for solutions there were eleven possible options that were found that might be able to address this problem in the end we picked on one of them as being the potential Saviour this involved Cassini instead of releasing Huygens on the first orbit around Saturn releasing it on the third orbit that would change the geometry between Cassini and Huygens by just the right amount to bring the two frequencies back into synchronism quite remarkable now how long does it take a spacecraft to travel two billion miles between planet Earth and Saturn nearly seven years is the answer and tonight for the spacecraft Cassini the journey is nearly over well today's the the culmination of our seven-year trip through space and we are arriving at Saturn and we're going to fire the engine to stop us into orbit around Saturn so it's the end of the trip but they're really the start of the tour the excitement for me is is in the future when we get close to Titan but this is a big moment so kind of a bit of a party atmosphere here in Pasadena to sort of celebrate the year the arrival there have been one or two occasions in planetary exploration where spacecraft have blown up on arrival in a way they've used their engines for the first time current Cassini altitude twenty thousand seven hundred kilometers twelve thousand nine hundred miles with the speed of 30.7 km/h when we are slowing down Ksenia would have to use its main engine for a very large burn to break into orbit around center so it was a tense moment we'd be crossing the ring plane as well which has some element of hazard to it please go ahead as well come the doppler has lined up okay we have burn complete here for the SLI orbit insertion break that was a big moment and then once it was in orbit then sort of everything was just kind of quite and you know basically following the script just the way it was supposed to it would actually be a little over six months before Wiggins was delivered to Titan all the weather outside is frightful but the fire is so delightful and since we've no place to go let it snow let it snow let it crisp mistake 2004 it was the day of the planned release of the Huygens probe from Cassini basically there were a set of explosive bolts that released Huygens instead of Springs pushed it off on spiral rails that gave it a spin to stabilize it everything was pre-programmed on Cassini we were monitoring it and it went fantastically from that point on Huygens was on its own completely autonomous it didn't even carry a radio receiver so from then on if we'd wanted to change something we couldn't we were completely powerless the die was cast from that point when I got into the control center basically everyone I met was as excited but also as nervous as I was about the whole mission there was an enormous air of expectation it had been building up for the last few days we went into the the science room that morning knowing that whatever was going to happen was going to happen this was the day some people had said oh nobody will be interested in this but by this time we had something like 300 of the world's press they're waiting to see what would happen there was lots of fat vans and TV cameras parked outside and anyone who could be grabbed by media go I was getting grabbed there's a little bit of a siege mentality a scientist was kind of walled away in our little room it was hard to concentrate on the unimportant important work and not get distracted by but although all the calls for your time I couldn't stop thinking that about a billion and a half miles away out there there was something that I had built about this size and it was hurtling through space at 20,000 miles an hour and it was about to get a rude awakening the plan was Huygens would hit the top of Titan's atmosphere at a speed of seven kilometers a second over the next two minutes it would slow down to about 400 meters a second that point Huygens would deploy the first of three parachutes and that would enable it to float down to the surface at a relatively slow speed then the six scientific instruments would be switched on to really perform their job that they'd been waiting for for about seven and a half years around 10:30 in the morning a rumor comes through that one of the largest radio telescopes on the earth has picked up a signal directly from Huygens it looks like we heard the baby crying we still Canada somebody tells us but really it tells us that the probe is alive the aintry has been successful we are on the parachute and the probably stands VD project scientist jumpier lebreton announced that Newton was a huge chair really meant a lot to all of us we knew that the most critical part of the mission was successful this is absolutely fantastic news it's like hearing the ringing tone on the phone it tells us the phone is working there's no information on it yet but it's it's absolutely fantastic that was great news because it means that it wasn't it wasn't gone without trace that even if we didn't get all the data back or if the probe didn't make it down to the surface at least there was something we have a signal meaning that we know that youngsil is alive so the dream is alive though it will encouraged us we still had a long time to wait the real scientific data wasn't expected till halfway through the afternoon all positions on the PTO I'd like to let you know the Himba for minutes we will receive preliminary from organ we were expecting to get the data at around 1725 Central European Time so we were gathered in the main control room there was lots of banter lots of discussion people were excited people were talking as we got towards the time watching the screens I noticed that things were starting to get a bit tense the rules were not powered and I we wonder what was the plan to power it on I was just listening to some of the discussions on the voice link and there was something that concerned me there was a missing command and I knew that for some instruments it was going to be a technical problem we're maybe going to have some some system problems and lose some data so that really ramped up the nerves after we've had a really good news we know the probe itself worked have we lost the data 17:25 came and went nothing absolutely nothing on the screens I can remember Mouse going very dry and he got very quiet in that room and okay maybe I've got the time slightly wrong as my watch exactly right and for the first minute it wasn't too much of a concern and then you could feel the tension in the room building I really had visions now of the last 17 years having been wasted something had happened to our probe parachutes hadn't deployed the probe had burnt up the transmitter it malfunctioned I really imagined us staring at blank screens and then and I think it was about six minutes later than we expected suddenly there was a shout and I looked up and I could see on the screen in front of me one of the columns where we expecting data was full this was real data coming through from Huygens it was absolute huge relief to see the screens light up with earth color and display you could just feel the tension pop in the room people could start seeing from the data various aspects of the descent they could tell what speed we were falling at after a while somebody think you know we've had two hours of descent I mean we must be getting close to the surface my instrument the surface science package its main aim was to make measurements for however long we lasted on the surface we were told initially anyway to plan for three minutes on the surface only so we designed it for all of our measurements to be done in that very narrow time frame if we didn't reach the surface by 151 minutes then actually we time out into surface mode which would be disaster because we'd actually lose some of our major data and the probe was descending way way slower than anyone expected 311 stable support OMS SP space with nominal on vegetation as big a big B as possibly we think to take it there in the end we had just over three minutes to spare and we had the surface I came back into the support area and heard that the data had been delivered and so I went up to to my colleagues and they all wanted the data on it on the stick size who's got a stick give me the stick I run into the lab the guys are there clustered around one single pc screen and just as I got there I was about to ask the question do we have data yet the screen burton de life when we saw every single sense of it worked we've got effectively a perfect data set and the boys were ecstatic there was tremendous outpouring of emotion in that room and I have to say that I did I did go off at one point into the corner and I I was crying frankly it was I think the release of all that emotion after all of those years we've been through so much together so we are the first visitors of Titan and scientific data that we are collecting now shall unveil the secrets whew the guys were looking just to the impact data and looking at the penetrated data and there was a distinct spike right at the start of the signal we've hit something hard it's as if we've hit a crust on the top and then after that the material below is much softer and we pushed into that without much resistance we had to make a chart for John to present to the media the press conference later that evening of what the possibilities were and we sort of wrote well could be sort of like packed snow or maybe sort of wet clay but this is extra spike at the beginning so maybe there's a crust and one of my team actually has suggested an alternative analogue and this is because of the the trust perhaps we see there and that is creme brulee but I don't suppose that will be appearing in our papers and the media just loved that that was you know in the headline in nature magazine that week you know Titan team gets its just desserts with creme brulee surface or something so that was that was really good PR coming up with that analogy we can report that the surface science package collected data for three hours and 37 minutes apart from any scientific and engineering importance of that figure some of you might have heard that we had a sweepstake in our team for the moment of impact and I'm slightly embarrassed to have to tell you that it was I who won the sweepstake and the prize which was a very old bottle of Scottish medicine was consumed by the team at about 2:30 this morning jump on a good bet he was 10 seconds off on a two-and-a-half-hour at the same time that's a that's almost the magical touch I think oh no it seemed actually entirely appropriate I mean you know he was there he was the leader he was the guy that made it all happen there was barely a single day since the project had started when I hadn't tried to imagine what the surface of Titan looked like I remember the first few images that we saw were quite remarkable we saw this landscape carved with what looked like river channels favorite have been liquid on the surface of Titan was true it was absolutely amazing to see it first people to see that image also struck me that it looks so much like Earth it looked like Arizona it looked like the French Riviera it looked familiar and that wasn't something I think we're expecting and then we saw the landing image the area immediately around the probe it was an area that seemed to be strewn with boulders and I just couldn't believe that our probe that we of course knew so well and and my beloved instruments on board were actually sitting quietly serenely on this surface environment what we've learned is that tightened surface is incredibly varied each hose features which show some similarity at least superficially with earth we're now pretty certain that we see lengths and seas of liquid methane there's a whole range of geophysical processes going on that's shaping the surface of Titan we've learnt an enormous amount about the atmosphere for stratosphere we have a troposphere we have weather we have weather on Titan I think it shows our sphere of influence if you like our sphere of knowledge expanding beyond the earth our machines have put their foot on the surface of Titan we've shown that we can do it it's part of that process of exploration that I think we've always done it's it's part of what defines us as human beings Oh to get closer to the mission to Titan and explore the Stars yourself with the open University's virtual planisphere go to BBC door Kudo UK / Titan and follow the links to the Open University stay with us Maggie and Chris on a Martian mystery the sky at night next on bbc4 then a Ken Loach classic the film that made his name is 1966 masterpiece Cathy come home in half an hour

Channel: Dinco422

Views: 3,362,423

Rating: 4.6868572 out of 5

Keywords: destination titan, titan documentary, new titan documentary, destination titan documentary, moon titan documentary, titan moon, moon titan, saturn documentary, saturn, saturns moons, saturn moon documentary, new saturn documentary, planet, saturn planet, planet moon, planet moons, planet documentary, space documentary, space, cassini, cassini documentary, huygens, huygens documentary, huygens space, huygens space probe, huygens probe, huygens probe documentary, cassini probe

Id: uE5POhMnN78

Length: 58min 54sec (3534 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 29 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/FellowEnt]

Awesome. Brian Eno soundtrack was so fitting at the end

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It4WxQ6dnn0