Advances in Space Technology: Everything You Need to Know | Complete Series | FD Engineering

one of the Sentinel Earth observing satellites they occupy low earth orbits that take them over the poles in similar orbits the Swarm satellites monitor changes in the Earth's magnetic field in a much higher orbit the goes weather satellite hovers above the United States it orbits the same rate that the Earth revolves [Music] the New Horizons probe does not orbit anything it was launched on a flyby Mission past Pluto and it continues into the Kuiper belt satellites are expensive designed to operate at extreme temperatures in the vacuum of space they cannot be maintained they must perform faultlessly for years yet every satellite depends on the brute force and precision of a launcher to deliver it to an exact orbit launches are expensive too they have varying capabilities and varying reliability but new developments in rocket technology are changing what can be achieved and how much it will cost [Music] [Music] the days of giant state-owned corporations launching their own satellites are over rocket Builders sell their services to commercial or government clients in October 2014 an Antares rocket built by orbital Sciences was set to Ferry supplies to the International Space Station [Music] the launchers are generally reliable but space is difficult there is still a seven percent failure rate this fundamental step of leaving the Earth's surface relies on a small group of international companies that build heavy lift Rockets the most iconic booster in operation today is the Russian soyuz it's not the biggest or most powerful launcher but its history stretches back to the earliest days of space exploration variants of the soyuz launcher have been in continuous production since 1957 and they have made more than 1 800 trips to orbit since the demise of the Space Shuttle The soyuz Remains the only human rated launcher in operation and both Esa and NASA rely on it to Ferry people to and from the International Space Station descendant of the vostok launcher that sent the first man into space 12th of April 1961 Yuli Gagarin Rose to orbit on vostok 1 designed by sege Corolla the design featuring a central core surrounded by four strap-on boosters was originally conceived as the first nuclear missile but as Soviet Warheads became lighter the launcher was adapted for manned trips to low earth orbit today four variants of the soyuz launcher are in operation and they launch from four different sites many of the simple design features in the soyuz have contributed to its reliability and low cost it was estimated that Russia could launch 20 Expendable soyuz carriers for the cost of one space shuttle launch though the basic layout of the soyuz is still recognizable after 60 years it has evolved the design has seen several generations of engine upgrade with the guidance system continually being refined final assembly at the launch site sees the four distinctive boosters flanking the central core attached first in Russian they're known as carrots each booster and the core have one rocket motor discharging through four main fixed Chambers for guidance the boosters have two additional small swiveling nozzles on their outer edges while the core has four guidance nozzles with the boosters and Central core United the assembly is now lifted onto its specially adapted Railway truck at this stage it weighs just over 20 tons when it's fueled it will be more than 250 tons the four boosters are known as the first stage even though they ignite at the same time as the central core that's known as the second stage [Music] then if the assembly is taking place in Russia or Kazakhstan the third stage and the payload are fitted this is the gamma-ray astronomy satellite mikailo lomonosov being prepared for the first launch from Russia's new cosmodrome at vastochni in Siberia the launcher and satellite are all assembled horizontally a technique that is straightforward and practical at bikaner the original Soviet launch site still leased by Russia from Kazakhstan rollout usually happens at dawn birkener is the only launch site where the soyuz can carry a human payload all of the Soviet Union's history-making flights started from the baikonur cosmodrome the area's sparse population was one of the main reasons the Kazakhstan location is chosen the rocket is delicately moved towards the firing ring where it will be held in place by the four tulip petal arms it takes about one hour to bring the launch vehicle to the vertical as the lifting arm withdraws the four support arms are joined by Fuel and electrical umbilicals and two halves of the service gantry ground staff will have access to every part of the launcher and the cosmonauts will enter their spacecraft via this gantry technicians will spend the next two days checking the rocket and preparing it for launch when fully loaded with fuel its weight will increase by a factor of 15 to 305 metric tons soyuz carrier Rockets also launch from the European Spaceport at Kuru in Guyana and from here the rocket is erected without its payload equatorial location the Earth's spin makes it easier to reach orbit the soil is launched from Kuru can lift considerably heavier payloads to orbit than it could from a Russian launch site however kuru's tropical location has 10 times the annual rainfall of baikonur and a mobile Gantry that protects the rocket is necessary like the other European launchers the satellite is attached to the soyuz while it is vertical five hours prior to launch the fuel is gradually introduced the liquid oxygen boils at minus 182 degrees C and it is constantly replenished at 36 seconds the first umbilical Mast retracts leaving the rocket on internal power soon after the fuel connection swivels away and the Turbo pumps begin feeding Fuel and oxygen to the engines the engines are closely monitored as they are gradually brought up to full thrust this Nerf with that this tag got what the uh liftoff a guidance computer in the third stage maintains the launcher's attitude via the Vernier nozzles around the first and second stage Chambers near the two minute Mark the boosters shut down and are jettisoned at 85 kilometers the payload fairing splits and Falls away five minutes after liftoff and at a height of 169 kilometers the third stage takes over to accelerate the satellite and its upper stage to escape velocity less than 10 minutes after launch the upper stage guides the satellite to its designated orbit while the rest of the launcher falls back to Earth the American Delta IV heavy is designed to orbit massive payloads or to hurl prob probes out of Earth orbit at incredible speeds [Music] when it first flew in 2004 it had the greatest lifting capability available the first and second stages as well as the two boosters are all powered by cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen it can lift more than 28 metric tons to low earth orbit foreign the Delta IV heavy is made by the United launch Alliance a collaboration between Lockheed Martin and Boeing it was designed to meet U.S military requirements it has launched two NASA missions but its other eight launches have been classified reconnaissance satellites Services have not been sold to commercial clients [Music] recently a Delta IV heavy was prepared for perhaps its most significant launch it was mated with the Parker solar probe and its star upper stage the Parker probe will be the first satellite to fly into the sun's Corona and though its launch weight of just 685 kilos may seem puny for such a large launcher Parker must leave the Earth's orbit at near record speed after a brief period in a parking orbit the second stage reignited to break the bonds of Earth's gravity the final kick delivered by the solid fueled upper stage gave the Parker probe the second fastest departure from Earth and with the help of the Sun's gravity it will reach 668 000 kilometers per hour making it the fastest man-made object ever [Music] in 2001 SpaceX founder Elon Musk hatched a scheme to establish a greenhouse on Mars and began trying to buy a Russian launch system the space industry laughed but they're not laughing now because he couldn't buy a rocket he built his own musk new American launchers were too expensive and a little research convinced him he could undercut the established Aerospace Giants in design and manufacture SpaceX focused on Simplicity and reliability with a view to keeping costs down the Falcon 9 rocket and the dragon spacecraft packed in science and supplies for the International Space Station Humanity's homework in 2012 SpaceX flew the first commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station SpaceX designed its own spacecraft the dragon to carry out these resupply missions today SpaceX has completed 11 successful Supply trips to the ISS with seven more booked unlike all the other cargo ships that visit the space station the dragon is capable of returning to Earth [Music] the Falcon 9 the company's Workhorse was criticized because it has nine separate Rocket motors all rocket Engineers argued that there were too many moving Parts with a higher risk of failure [Music] the Merlin engine developed for the original Falcon 1 continues to be refined giving the Falcon 9 a steadily improving lift capacity past the speed of sound it's now subsonic soon it became clear what the multiple engines could achieve without its fuel load the spent first stage falling back through the atmosphere was very light and just one engine could enable a soft Landing if this worked it meant reusable stages would drastically cut the cost of launches [Music] and landing on a remotely controlled barge required so many new techniques space experts were skeptical [Music] a landing leg had collapsed and was redesigned these return trips were routine though Landing capability reduced the maximum payload by 30 percent it also drastically reduced launch fees next came the Falcon heavy essentially three Falcon 9 strapped together in 16 years SpaceX had gone from laughing stock to builder of the world's most powerful launch vehicle 's first flight was to be a pure demonstration its dummy payload was Elon musk's red Tesla Roadster the car would go into orbit around the sun The Plan called for the two boosters to land back at Cape Canaveral the central core would return to a barge at sea potential customers were watching the demonstration closely and crowds who gather along the Florida coast to see a launch now wait to watch boosters returning the car rigged with cameras went into a solar orbit but in the missions one failure the central core missed its barge Air Force will be the Falcon Heavy's first paying customer the entry into the launch market of a company aggressively trying to reduce the cost of access to space is changing the space business today SpaceX Remains the only launch provider that openly publishes the cost of its services the Arion 5 is the European space agency's heavy lift rocket it features a liquid oxygen liquid hydrogen first stage flanked by two solid fuel boosters though the Arion 5 is not the most powerful launcher it holds the record for heaviest payload to geosynchronous transfer orbit the equatorial launch site in Guyana makes orbits of low inclination easier to achieve and is an attractive feature for paying clients the Ariane 5eca is the fifth and final version of the 5 series which will soon be replaced by the Ariane 6. a new version of the Volcan rocket engine is being developed for Ariane 6 which will be cheaper to build and to Launch new facilities are being constructed for the Ariane 6 at the Kuru Spaceport including a new vehicle Assembly Building which will see a change from vertical to horizontal integration but the Ariane 5 still has much to do 18 launches are scheduled before its replacement begins flight testing the stages are fabricated in Europe and across the Atlantic by ship at the launch site the central stage is raised to the vertical slightly more than 30 meters long the core stage is essentially a fuel tank divided into two compartments with a rocket engine at its pace each solid fuel booster arrives on its table in an upright position and pre-loaded with propellant the upper stage that will on this Mission deliver four Galileo navigation satellites to their target orbits is fitted [Music] the satellites clustered about a central dispenser are then attached to the upper stage before the fairing that protects them during the trip up through the atmosphere is lowered into place the Ariane on top of the launch platform begins its Journey at a snail's pace the Ariane 5 is operated by Ariane space who have launched more than half the commercial satellites in operation today Russia's heavy lift proton launcher started its life in 1965. it was originally designed to carry a 100 Megaton thermonuclear weapon to Targets in the U.S it was never deployed as a missile instead evolving into a successful heavy launcher it delivered several modules to the International Space Station and one of its recent high-profile successes was the launch of the first exomars probe but the proton has not been without its problems developed during the Soviet era its manufacturer chronicev was reliant on the Ukraine for key components and when launched from baikonur the Kazakh government was not keen on the extremely toxic hypergolic fuel it used there are claims that acid rain falls after some launches and that parts of Russia and Kazakhstan are being poisoned by the unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine that powers the proton in July 2013 a proton M was set to launch three Russian glonass navigation satellites an investigation found that the rate gyro package had been installed upside down it was not the only recent proton failure and questions about quality control were being asked though the proton still has launched commitments for several years it will be phased out startup company space lab is poised for its first commercial launch their rocket called the electron can deliver light satellites to low earth orbit prices that completely undercut the rest of the market the launcher makes extensive use of carbon fiber in the construction of the tanks and space lab has developed an engine with a radically new fuel cycle named after physicist Ernest Rutherford the engine is largely constructed with 3D printing techniques the liquid oxygen rp1 fueled unit uses brushless electric motors to operate its turbo pumps instead of pre-burning fuel for the same purpose the battery is powering the process at weight but they save on fuel and give Engineers finer control when throttling the engine the launch site on New Zealand's North Island Mahia Peninsula is perfect for the busy schedule that rocket lab envisions with the Advent of microsatellites smaller carriers like the electron are becoming an attractive launcher for a new area of the launch market [Music] arguably the most significant scientific instrument in history has been the Hubble Space Telescope [Music] it has changed our understanding of the universe yet it has posed serious new questions about the nature of matter itself Hubble has confirmed the widespread distribution of black holes and has viewed light from Galaxy's more distant than anything previously seen as well as its scientific discoveries are the stunning images [Music] [Music] in 1609 Galileo built an early telescope and soon turned it to the night sky the telescope was a powerful tool that led to a complete re-evaluation of the Earth's place in the universe [Music] in 1668 Newton invented the reflecting telescope to eliminate the problem of uneven refraction of the different wavelengths of light the reflecting telescope became the design of choice for astronomers and in 1781 William Herschel used an instrument he had built himself to discover the planet Uranus the Newtonian telescope was scaled up to immense proportions and in 1924 it was with the 2.5 meter hooker telescope at the Mount Wilson Observatory that Edwin Hubble realized the Milky Way was not the universe but just one of countless galaxies [Music] but there was still a problem no matter how mathematically perfect a telescope is its images are distorted by the Earth's atmosphere and some wavelengths cannot reach the ground in 1946 astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer proposed a telescope in orbit above the Earth's atmosphere the idea clearly outstripped the technology of the time but by 1966 NASA began launching a series of orbiting astronomical observatories only two were successful but the telescopes in low earth orbit were the first to see the night skies in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum in the 1970s plans were drawn up for a large orbiting telescope part of its brief was for it to be visited regularly by maintenance Crews something that would become possible when the space shuttle went into service the design called for a 2.4 meter primary mirror ground within very fine tolerances because it was required to function well into the ultraviolet Spectrum [Music] originally known as the large Space Telescope it was slated for launch in 1979 but delays in construction led to several postponements and the Challenger disaster led to more delays in 1983 the name Hubble Space Telescope was adopted in honor of the man who confirmed that the Universe was expanding finally in April 1990 Hubble was ready for Launch sound suppression water system has started 13 seconds the minus 10 go for main engine start we are go for main engine start D minus six five four three two one and liftoff of the Space Shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope our window on the universe Hubble has a unique relationship with the space shuttle which would revisit the telescope on five different occasions at this stage nobody understood just how vital these missions would be [Music] Ploy Hubble the Shuttle Discovery set a new altitude record of more than 600 kilometers release of the telescope was routine [Music] methodically checking Hubble's control and communication systems before astronomers working at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore could see Hubble's first images results were disappointing images were blurred the telescope's mirror had been accurately ground but to the wrong shape an incorrectly assembled test instrument had been relied upon during manufacture and nobody had double checked soon a fix was proposed because the error was understood a corrective device could be fitted to the telescope a series of small mirrors would compensate for the primary mirror's defect it was called co-star another of those cumbersome NASA acronyms training astronauts for the job of accurately installing co-star began the high-speed photometer would be scrapped to make room for it in addition to correcting the Optics a number of other modifications were set in train a new wide field planetary camera would be installed the original was obsolete the telescope solar panels would be replaced there would be a new electronics processor extra magnetometers and two gyroscopes would be replaced 9. then we have a go for main engine start and we have liftoff lift off of the Space Shuttle Endeavor on an ambitious mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope finally in December 1993 the mission to repair Hubble began Endeavor three days to catch up with Hubble and it was clear from the beginning that one solar panel was damaged the work on the telescope was considerable and there were five spacewalks scheduled firstly the shuttle's robotic arm grabbed the Hubble so it would remain stable while the work was carried out the work would be shared between two teams of two astronauts over five days the allocated tasks were carried out with the Space Telescope operations control center monitoring the Hubble's performance as each new component came online most of the parts replaced were stowed in the cargo bay for return to Earth the one exception being the damaged solar panel which was set adrift in space or five spacewalks went according to plan with the only major problem being the difficulty involved in closing the telescope's doors today of the mission Hubble was released it would take control as on the ground another month to fully check the telescope's new systems Hubble had been repaired in December 1993 yet it would take close to two months for technicians on the ground to run through a complex series of optical alignments before they could be certain that the telescope was performing correctly when astronomers finally saw results they were stunned at the Quality it was delivering [Music] [Applause] the repair Mission had been successful with the services of a powerful new tool finally at their disposal astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute began addressing a pressing List of Demands for time on Hubble in March 1993 a comet had been discovered orbiting Jupiter its path suggested that it had only recently been captured by Jupiter's gravitation and that it would soon crash into the planet no one had ever seen a collision between bodies within the solar system and opinions differed about how visible the impact would be soon Hubble captured this image of a chain of fragments Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 had been Shattered by Jupiter's gravitation the fragments ranged in size from several hundred meters to several kilometers across over six days in July 1994 Hubble observed the pieces crash into Jupiter's unlit face as the planet revolved the impact region showed a series of black swirls some of the Dark Shadows were as large as the Earth and they persisted in Jupiter's atmosphere for months spectral analysis from Hubble revealed diatomic sulfur and carbon disulfide these had never been seen at Jupiter yet the amounts detected were too great to have come in with the comet they had been stirred up from the planet's interior scientists learned so much from observing these impacts yet the observations almost didn't happen just days before the first impact was due Hubble began acting unpredictably and then went into safe mode it would not execute any of its instructions technicians suspected a memory problem and took measures to switch across the new memory installed on the recent service mission things started to improve until the spacecraft reported it had entered zero gyro some point it appeared that two gyroscopes had failed and the situation had dramatically deteriorated was traced to a counter that had run out of numbers with which took out the issue was understood and quickly resolved the incident underlined just how complex the operations of the Hubble would be and that the ground Engineers still had to learn how to operate the new hardware [Music] though Hubble functions as a telescope it is also a spacecraft that must be controlled with exquisite accuracy unlike other spacecraft it has no thrusters chemical residue from rocket engines would quickly contaminate the Precision Optics to enable it to move Hubble has four reaction control Wheels as they spin the telescope will rotate in the opposite direction each one has a mass of 45 kilograms and they are controlled by the telescope's computer combinations of spin in any three wheels will allow the telescope to point accurately in any direction they are mounted in angled pairs around Hubble's center of gravity in 1997 on the space telescope's second servicing mission one of the reaction control Wheels was replaced it had developed an electrical fault so that Hubble can remain pointed accurately three fine guidance sensors positioned toward the back of the telescope will lock onto any of a series of bright guide Stars Hubble only needs two guidance sensors to point with accuracy they are so sensitive they can detect wobble in the motion of closer Stars the third vital aspect of the telescope's pointing system is its ability to detect the rate and direction of its movement Hubble Is equipped with six gyroscopes that register its orientation these are essential when pointing the telescope in a New Direction gyro spin at nineteen thousand two hundred RPM and they do wear out this is why there are six units even though when designed Hubble only needed three to function properly with new algorithms Hubble can now point with only two Gyros though less accurately work has been done to enable it to work at reduced capacity with only one gyroscope [Music] Hubble can point with an accuracy better than two millionths of one degree this ability to stay fixed on one narrow region of the sky for a very long time LED astronomers to perform a unique observation for 10 days in 1995 they pointed Hubble at a small empty region of the sky near the constellation Ursa Major [Music] to some this was Folly a waste of valuable observation time the results astounded everyone this empty part of the sky was packed with irregular shaped galaxies some were as old as 13 billion years Hubble had looked back in time at the formation of new galaxies in a range of shapes not seen closer to our own Milky Way it became known as the Deep Field survey it was the first of a series of similar explorations of areas of the sky in which nothing had previously been seen animators have added depth to these images by using spectral information known as redshift which indicates a body's distance from Earth [Music] this was a completely new area of astronomy and it was one reason why Hubble had been built but the Space Telescope was already running into design constraints Engineers began work on equipment that would upgrade the telescope's performance in the near infrared part of the spectrum this would be fitted during the next servicing Mission along with updated support equipment such as a solid-state recorder which would replace the original reel-to-reel recorder yet even at this early stage of Hubble's life astronomers were realizing its limitations the distant galaxies it had seen were approaching the extent of its view in the infrared end of the spectrum even with enhancements the telescope could not be kept cold enough to observe the large redshift wavelengths revealing very old very distant objects [Music] plans were drawn up for a new larger telescope known as the Next Generation Space Telescope that could explore the most distant parts of the universe but there was still plenty that Hubble could do better than any other telescope and there appeared no reason that it wouldn't continue being refitted with the latest technology as it became available [Music] early in 1997 the Space Shuttle Discovery visited Hubble for a second servicing Mission astronauts fitted new instruments to improve its reach into the infrared in 1999 Discovery again visited Hubble this Mission had been brought forward as four of the gyroscopes had failed and the telescope had gone into safe mode three two one and left off on space shuttle Columbia to broaden our review of the universe through the Hubble Space Telescope in 2002 Colombia lifted off with a new instrument the advanced camera for surveys it would replace the faint object camera the last of Hubble's original instruments when it departed Hubble was again in Peak condition less than a year later the close of its next mission Columbia burned up during re-entry foam insulation had come loose during launch damaging thermal protection tiles after an exhaustive search for debris and a thorough inquiry it was decided that the shuttle system was aging it would be retired upon completion of the International Space Station all other missions were ruled out [Music] for the Hubble Space Telescope this was a death sentence in the corridors of power Hubble had friends the sheer beauty of images from the telescope gave it a public profile and key Senators began campaigning for one last servicing mission after a new administrator took charge at Nasa a final shuttle flight to Hubble was reinstated work began on what would amount to a rebuild of Hubble's operational systems as well as another update of scientific instruments new fine guidance sensors would be fitted all gyroscopes would be replaced and a new set of batteries would replace the originals that Hubble was still using within the Imaging spectrograph a power supply had failed and training began to open up the unit and replace an Electronics board the advanced camera for surveys had also malfunctioned and its repair work was seen as even more detailed because the shuttle now had to operate with a backup and because Atlantis could not reach the International Space Station from Hubble's orbit the shuttle Endeavor was prepared for a rescue mission on the 11th of May 2009 Atlantis sat on NASA's pad 39a ready for Hubble's final servicing mission this was to be the most complex servicing Mission it had to deliver the longest possible life for the orbiting telescope the 14-day operation went according to plan when problems arose they were solved and Hubble was eventually released as the best telescope it had ever been on the ground astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute waited for the first pictures from Hubble's new or sensitive instruments this means the telescope can operate more efficiently needing less observing time than earlier incarnations [Applause] team was quick to release examples of the new generation images in the Eagle Nebula The Pillars of Creation thousands of light years from Earth immense clouds of hydrogen and dust are giving birth to new stars the five galaxies of Stefan's quintet in the Pegasus constellation all of these are colliding [Music] Steen thousand light years from Earth Omega Centauri in the constellation Centaurus is a globular cluster Stars here are so densely packed that on average there is just one tenth of a light year between them [Music] adding to its list of discoveries everyone understands that without further servicing the telescope will eventually die that slow death has already started and it's the gyroscopes that are failing Engineers have been careful operating just three Gyros keeping the other three as spares by mid-2018 three of the units had ceased functioning as the last of the three gyroscopes held in reserve was brought online it misbehaved and all science operations of the telescope were suspended by recycling part of the unit a measure akin to switching it off and back on normal function resumed as further Gyros fail the telescope will use its star trackers to help it Point accurately Hubble is expected to function well into the 2020s by which time a new Space Telescope should be in orbit the Next Generation Space Telescope is now called the James Webb Space Telescope named after NASA's Apollo era administrator the telescope has been completed and is undergoing exhaustive checks before it is launched it has a giant mirror of 18 hexagonal segments that is folded before deployment compared with Hubble it is huge yet the complete spacecraft weighs considerably less than Hubble NASA built the web telescope in collaboration with the European and Canadian space agencies and it will launch on an Ariane 5 from the European Spaceport in Kuru French Guyana sun earth lagrangian point a place 1.5 million kilometers from the night side of the Earth where the telescope can maintain a stable position a large very thin sun shield will protect the James Webb allowing the optical components of the telescope to cool to around 50 degrees Kelvin foreign its operational temperature must be very low to allow it to see deep into the infrared end of the spectrum the mid infrared instrument needs to be colder still a cooler using helium as its refrigerant will enable the sensor to function at just seven degrees Kelvin the web Space Telescope is designed to build on the work of Hubble by seeing further back to the earliest emergence of galaxies stars and exoplanets from the moment a rocket lifts off it is tracked and monitored vital performance characteristics are relayed back to the ground via telemetry at huge distances a probe must be able to communicate on Earth to pick up these signals we use parabolic dishes they range in size from small domestic units for television reception to the Giants of the deep space Network without these almost any space flight would be pointless [Music] thank you [Music] the very first artificial satellite Sputnik was designed with four whip antennas and two radio transmitters Soviet Engineers saw its main function as announcing to the world that it was there it transmitted A continuing series of beeps ham radio operators around the world could detect the signal very few realize that the beeps varied in duration according to the temperature and pressure within the sphere the signals could also be analyzed for Clues to the ionosphere's electron density [Music] all right Roger the clock is operating we're underway soon cosmonauts and astronauts were orbiting the planet when John Glenn made the Mercury program's first orbital flight 18 different tracking and Communications posts were set up along his spacecraft's ground track as well as local staff NASA provided each ground station with its own capsule Communicator a flight engineer and a flight surgeon special tracking ships were deployed to maintain Communications and monitor Telemetry while the spacecraft was crossing the ocean but even so the network had blind spots where the spacecraft Was Out Of Reach [Music] for the Soviets communication was even more difficult during their early space flights there were no tracking ships and their terrestrial stations were all in the Soviet Union when the Soviet Union launched lunik 1 in 1959 it was intended to hit the Moon missed and became the first craft to achieve solar orbit because it required special tracking infrastructure and was not monitored outside Russia many in the United States refused to believe that spacecraft had even been launched at the time the world's largest radio telescope was the Mark 1 installation at jodrell Bank in the UK soon the Russians began sending detailed information about finding their probes to jodrell bank as a means of independently verifying their missions in the early days of the Space Race the Soviet Union had big plans for deep space missions in 1959 construction work began on the pluton facility in the Crimea though the Soviets did not enjoy the financial resources of the United States they were not lacking in Enterprise the pluton receiver consisted of eight dish antennas welded onto pieces from the hulls of two War Surplus submarines they were mounted on a steerable frame made from the truss work of a Railway Bridge to point the dishes with accuracy the designer Evgeni gubenko employed the mechanism from the gun turret of a scrapped battleship the system worked well and remained in service till 1978. it had become clear to the space powers that communication support for low Earth orbiting satellites was very different to that needed for probes traveling into deep space deep space missions require much larger more sensitive dishes with powerful transmission capabilities yet these probes position in the sky changes more due to the Earth's rotation than it does because of the Craft's speed so while the dish has the point with great accuracy it does not have to move very rapidly satellites in low earth orbit pass close so a smaller dish is adequate but it must move rapidly to maintain a precise focus on its Target craft in the United States corporations were taking an interest in a huge new type of satellite researchers were interested in using an orbiting balloon to relay radio signals across continents project Echo launched its first inflatable satellite in 1960. this is President Eisenhower speaking a telephone call from President Eisenhower was relayed from Washington to California by bouncing signals off the balloon which acted as nothing more than a reflector in 1962 U.S phone company at T Built Telstar it was the first electronic relay satellite [Music] launched by NASA in July 1962 Telstar was the first commercially funded satellite [Music] Europeans tuning in to see President Kennedy got baseball and then the presidential press conference I understand that part of today's press conference is being relayed by the Telestar communication satellite then French singer Eve Montour sang a song to the U.S [Music] yeah as far as it went it was a success but telstar's low orbit meant it was only available for 20 minutes every two and a half hours until star's life was cut short as a result of the Cold War both the Soviet Union and the United States have been detonating thermonuclear weapons above the atmosphere to determine whether this was a viable anti-missile strategy [Music] from tests in the Pacific they discovered that an immense pulse of gamma radiation triggered positive ions and recoil electrons that took out electrical systems in Hawaii and New Zealand destroyed at least three satellites and damaged several others among them Telstar in October 1963 U.S President John Kennedy added his signature to a treaty with the Soviet Union Banning nuclear testing in space the first telecommunications satellite that resembled today's technology was intelsat 1 also known as early bird it orbited above the equator at the same rate as the Earth's spin which allowed it to hold a static position it could relay one TV channel or 240 telephone calls [Applause] it was the beginning of the space businesses most profitable industry estimates put satellite telecommunications revenues for 2019 a 2.4 trillion US Dollars geosynchronous orbits make ground stations much simpler without the need to track a Target across the sky today there are at least 240 active satellites in Equatorial orbit at geosynchronous altitudes not all our Communications platforms weather satellites also find this orbit useful having an uninterrupted view of a complete hemisphere [Music] craft must be carefully spaced to avoid collisions and radio frequency interference the international telecommunications Union coordinates the orbital slots and frequency allocations and satellites nearing the end of their useful life must retain enough fuel to boost themselves into a graveyard orbit to prevent overcrowding there is clutter caused by spent upper stages and old satellites foreign group of communication satellites is also stationed in geosynchronous orbit NASA currently operates 10 tracking and data relay satellites tdras originally designed to provide a continuous Communications link for shuttle missions tdris supports many near-earth satellites as well as the International Space Station the Hubble Space Telescope and some military applications similarly Esa has launched two of what will be a group of four data relay platforms to provide a continuous link with near-earth satellites instead of transmitting to ground stations only visible for brief parts of every orbit many satellites now send signals up to a data relay spacecraft that can see it for half of each orbit a network of relay satellites around the globe gives continuous coverage all major space agencies have been experimenting with data Transmissions via lasers but the edrs system is the first commercial application of optical Communications between spacecraft current laser Communications techniques between satellites deliver data at 1.8 gigabits per second 30 times greater than conventional radio links however weather-related problems inhibit reliable laser connections between spacecraft and Earth transmission back to the ground is via microwave radio in the KA band while this is fast it is still slower than the laser data rates but the signal can be split into several streams and sent simultaneously Europe's Copernicus system is a major beneficiary of the near real-time data available via the edrs system Copernicus is an earth observation program relying on a series of Sentinel satellites that send back continuous streams of data about the land the oceans and the atmosphere the Copernicus program is not a limited project it is designed to collect authoritative data about planetary changes over the long term to do this The Sentinel satellites are in low north-south orbits allowing them to see the Earth's entire surface every 24 hours this polar orbit is common to every Earth observing satellite but not every satellite has access to the edrs communication system nor do they generate the vast amounts of high resolution data that requires it most satellites following a polar tract rely on the Polar receiving installations that they pass above every orbit on the Norwegian archipelago of svalbard the svalsat installation has 31 raid ohms to track and download data from satellites in polar orbit to relay the information to the outside world twin Fiber Optic Cables each handling 10 gigabits per second connects falbard to the Norwegian mainland koenigsberg the company that operates the facility for the Norwegian government runs a smaller station in Antarctica there are close to 1 900 operational satellites in Earth orbit with a further 3000 still orbiting as space junk but there are as many as 20 000 fragments from spent boosters and debris from collisions that must be tracked operational satellites are routinely moved when an object approaches on a dangerous course if this picture appears crowded it is about to become a lot more complex the U.S Federal Communications Commission recently gave rocket company SpaceX approval to launch 12 000 new satellites for its starlink broadband internet service current satellite internet services rely upon a very few large Platforms in geosynchronous orbit typical users are in remote locations and while costs are coming down and speeds are improving latency or response time is sluggish starlink model has thousands of small satellites in low earth orbit cross-linked via high-speed lasers the satellites will be able to adjust their orbital path autonomously to avoid collisions the company launched its first batch of test satellites in May 2019 the second group launched in November 2019 consisted of 60 operational satellites for one company to increase the number of functioning spacecraft by a factor of six cost is critical the satellites are being mass produced in a flat pack form with a single solar panel 60 will stack neatly within the fairing of a falcon 9 launch vehicle [Music] I'll link satellite design is pushing the latest technology to its limits links to the ground are via a phased array enabling a steerable beam without the need for moving parts maneuverability comes from a hall effect Thruster using Krypton as its propellant when released from the booster the satellites do not require dispensing Hardware they are pushed away by Springs and apparently haphazard fashion at this stage they can even bump each other and are designed to withstand the impact from the top of the second stage [Music] [Applause] quickly the satellites all intake themselves and begin spreading along their orbital path at this point they can be seen in the pre-dawn or just after sunset research astronomers are not happy about the huge number of satellites soon to be in orbit by 2024 there should be 11 927 starlink satellites orbiting at seven different heights the only satellite constellation remotely similar is the Iridium next system with 66 satellites cross-linked via the KA band they're designed to provide Global cell phone coverage and in 2018 the Iridium company finished the replacement of all its first generation spacecraft the upgrade cost iridium three billion dollars for 200 times more satellites SpaceX has budgeted 10 billion dollars iridium had to pay Tylers elenia to design and build 81 satellites there are spares both in orbit and on the ground and it had to pay SpaceX to launch those satellites in batches of 10. with starlink the company will take advantage of its own drive to reduce expensive launch Services SpaceX builds its own satellites and its own Rockets so it will only pay cost for hardware and delivery recovery of first stage boosters is now routine which takes a large chunk out of launch costs and the protective fairings always regarded as throwaway items are now fitted with steerable parachutes for retrieval and reuse saving a further five million dollars per flight what will give starlink its Edge is its improved latency in most cases the system should give even better latency figures than fiber optic connections on the ground let alone the half second delay built into systems that send signals 35 000 kilometers up to and back from geosynchronous platforms for stock markets reliant on high frequency trading microseconds make a significant difference SpaceX believes people around the world will want the service oneweb and Amazon's project Kuiper have announced plans to develop their own low Earth orbiting Broadband systems but with just the smallest fraction of the starlink constellation in orbit astronomers are starting to worry survey telescopes that use time exposures to map the skies looking for anomalies like approaching asteroids or exploding stars have recorded Dusk and Dawn images marred by starlink satellites researchers from the large synoptic survey telescope currently under construction in the Jillian Andes have run simulations suggesting that as the starlink constellation takes shape certain observation times will be unproductive starlink Venture itself is still a risk satellite businesses like teledesic and skybridge both with big plans went under and SpaceX leader Elon Musk admits that success with starlink is far from a sure thing [Music] locations with very distant exploratory spacecraft are governed by different parameters the New Horizons probe launched in 2006 is equipped with the most advanced digital technology ever to reach deep space while its primary target was the dwarf planet Pluto it passed Jupiter in 2007 for a gravitational boost to its speed at Jupiter a mere 2.3 billion kilometers from Earth it transmitted images at 38 kilobits per second that's slightly slower than an old acoustic telephone modem at these distances signal strength from New Horizons was weak and only the 35 and 70 meter dishes in NASA's deep space Network were useful receivers even so the data rate was slowed to deliver a coherent signal sending commands to the spacecraft is an exacting process all instruction code is Thoroughly reviewed by different teams before being tested on a simulator only then are they sent to the spacecraft because the environment around Pluto was so poorly understood controllers on the ground relied on preliminary images returned by the spacecraft to make a hazard search distant encounter observations commenced seven months before its close pass as New Horizons approached Pluto in 2015 it had at least 16 different science objectives along with spacecraft control and data management procedures all pre-programmed we know last minute Corrections the spacecraft was traveling at more than 49 000 kilometers per hour and signals from Earth took close to four and a half hours to reach the New Horizons probe during the critical close approach there was a 22-hour radio silence because the spacecraft could only make its scheduled observations with its High Gain antenna angled away from the Earth everything was committed to the eight gigabytes of storage in the primary data recorder to retrieve that data took 16 months at a distance of 4.7 billion kilometers the New Horizon data rates were down to two kilobits per second only the 70 meter dishes in NASA's deep space Network could detect the signal and they could not work exclusively with New Horizons New Horizons kept going into the icy debris field known as the Kuiper belt even as it was still transmitting data from its Pluto encounter Engineers on the ground formulated a series of course adjustments that would take it past object mu-69 the first time a probe was targeted at a body unknown when the craft was launched in January 2019 New Horizons encountered the Kuiper belt object arakov formerly known as ultimatouille at a distance of 6.6 billion kilometers data from the spacecraft took 6 hours and seven minutes to reach Earth and the data rate had dropped to 500 bits per second still trickling in finally the most distant probe is Voyager 1. it was launched in 1977 and is now outside the solar system at a distance of 22 billion kilometers the probe transmits data as it is registered and the deep space Network tries to gather at least 16 hours per day of the data stream that comes in at 160 bits per minute this is roughly equivalent to a telegrapher sending Morse code [Music] Mars our planetary neighbor it's very cold and dry and its weak gravity only holds a thin atmosphere as probes started to visit the red planet we gained a more accurate view of the surface and scientists began to wonder Mars had once been much warmer it had rivers and in its early years might have sustained life [Music] a succession of new techniques have been deployed trying to unlock the secrets of the red planet and while our knowledge of the Martian geology its atmosphere and its weather has grown immensely each new Mission to Mars raises more questions than it answers we still don't know if Mars has at some time been a home to life [Music] [Music] in 1877 astronomer Giovanni chaparelli made what he thought was the most accurate map of Mars yet drawn on it he showed canals in the early 20th century American astronomer Percival Lowell was convinced the canals were signs of a civilization existing on the red planet so began the search for Life on Mars in 1962 the Soviet Union sent the first probe the Mars M1 on a flyby Mission it was an audacious project and it failed the first of many failures by both the Soviet Union and the United States [Music] Cold War rivalry provided the motivation for these early missions in 1971 NASA sent Mariner 9 to Mars probe to orbit another planet but scientists discovered that Mars was enveloped in a planetary dust storm on-orbit photography revealed little more than a Red Cloud soon Mariner 9 was joined by two Soviet orbiters both equipped with Landers [Music] the Mars 2 Lander crashed but the Mars Freelander made it to the surface intact it returned one garbled image and then stopped functioning Mars now had three orbiting spacecraft all looking at a Dusty featureless planet the two Soviet probes were identical but the American probe had one key design difference while the Soviet orbiters began photographing the planet following predetermined schedules NASA were able to command Mariner 9 to wait in hope that the dust would eventually settle it took months for the atmosphere to clear but when it did Mariner 9 saw three craters protruding above the Dust they were the tops of giant volcanoes on what was called the fasis plateau soon more complex geological features began to emerge in places the surface was cratered suggesting the tectonic forces that constantly renew the Earth's surface were absent on Mars volcanic activity that built the Solar System's largest volcanoes had stopped billions of years ago [Music] this enabled NASA scientists to compile an accurate global map of Mars and to decide upon Landing sites for the Viking probes that followed in 1976 Viking 1 and 2 were identical orbiters with Landers that both made successful Landings on the surface both returned pictures of the Martian landscape the primary objective of the Viking program was to find signatures of life but researchers now feel the three experiments tasked with carrying out the analysis had limitations as researchers on Earth began looking for traces of life in extreme environments they began to rethink where Life on Mars might survive yet the consensus at the time was that Mars was sterile and the idea of Life on Mars died [Music] after a 20-year Hiatus in Mars research Mars Global surveyor went into orbit in 1996. foreign the pictures it relayed back were clearer than anything yet seen from the red planet although most Mars orbiters had been tasked with mapping the planet's surface this was different the high resolution images that the Mars Global surveyor sent back revealed rivers and even river deltas but the occasional impact crater suggested that nothing has flowed in these systems for billions of years foreign 1997 another probe arrived the Mars Pathfinder was one of a new breed of missions being pushed by NASA's new administrator Under The Guiding philosophy of faster better cheaper the idea was to cut development times cut budgets and although the risk of failure would rise the reduced price tag could mean more missions Pathfinder would land a small Rover on the surface to do this it used radically new airbag technology the technique Drew more from Automotive Safety Systems than from previous space missions The Landing site in Mars Northern Hemisphere known as eres Valles is one of the planet's rockiest areas yet it was thought to be a safe area to land the broad array of different rock types are believed to have been deposited during an ancient flood the new Landing technique worked perfectly and served as a proof of concept that would be used on future missions [Music] Pathfinder consisted of a base station equipped with three solar panels that unfolded like petals there were sensors to measure atmospheric pressure air temperature and wind speed as well as a transmitter to communicate with Earth in addition Pathfinder acted as a base station for the Sojourner Rover that explored the surrounding area was fitted with cameras and an alpha particle x-ray spectrometer it was the first mission to have its own website the Rover returned thousands of images and important detail about the atmosphere and geology and its popularity guaranteed more Mars missions [Music] on the morning of April the 7th 2001 another Mars Orbiter was launched Mars Odyssey was equipped with three primary instruments and it had the ability to act as a relay satellite between future service missions to the red planet and Earth on its arrival at Mars it used a new technique to go into orbit after firing a relatively brief pulse of its engine Mars Odyssey went into a highly elliptical orbit that at its closest approach had it skimming the planets thin upper atmosphere called Aero breaking this technique allowed the craft to circularize its orbit over a period of three months and it saved around 200 kilograms of fuel the probe is still in operation today breaking all records as the longest serving Mars mission in December 2003 a new player arrived at Mars the European Space Agency using a Russian launcher had sent Mars express its first planetary Explorer it was equipped with a landowner known as beagle though all contact was lost with the Lander Mars Express continues to return valuable data the mission has been granted several extensions the latest till 2020. equipped with a high resolution stereo camera the probe returned unique 3D views of the planet's surface the Orbiter determined that the polar ice caps contain a blend of Frozen CO2 and Water Ice in the atmosphere Mars expressed detected first methane and then ammonia both gases deteriorate rapidly in sunlight so there must be sources on Mars continually producing them methane and ammonia can rarely be made inorganically but they're generally associated with life one month after Mars Express went into orbit a NASA Lander arrived at Mars followed three weeks later by a second identical craft they were the Mars exploration Rovers called spirit and opportunity Spirit the first to land was targeted at the gusev crater opportunity would land at the miridiani planum on the opposite side of Mars though they were much heavier than their Pathfinder predecessor they used the same bounce Landing technique both Landings were successful and on target after the craft had righted itself it detached from the Lander and began autonomously unfolding its solar panels and Camera mast while this was happening the team back at the jet propulsion laboratory waited signals confirming the Craft's safe arrival took 15 minutes to travel back to Earth [Music] many of these people had invested years of their lives in this project and the real Mission had only just commenced both Rovers were designed to operate for 90 Mars days a solar day on Mars is about 40 minutes longer than an Earth Day and to avoid confusion the science team operating The Rovers refer to a Martian day as a soul Mission designers knowing about the dust storms on Mars felt that the solar panels on the two Rovers would eventually be blocked with dirt and stop functioning but it became clear that the winds on Mars were clearing the panels soon NASA announced that opportunity had found evidence confirming liquid water had once flowed on Mars there were pictures from the meridiani plenum of stratified patterns in the Rocks suggesting sedimentation the distribution of chlorine and bromine at the site were Clues to the areas passed as the shore of a Salty Sea foreign NASA announced it would extend the Rover's missions from three to eight months [Music] it would be the first of many such Mission extensions [Music] The Rovers were equipped with an abrasion tool to grind away a portion of a rock surface for a more detailed uncontaminated analysis of geological samples [Music] this was first done by Spirit but a rock named Adirondack at gusev Crater it was a first in planetary geology researchers agonized before using the tool because of the drain it makes on the Rover's energy budget The Rock was made of Olivine pyroxine and magnetite making it very similar to volcanic basalt on Earth [Music] when Spirits right front wheel stopped working Engineers used a duplicate Rover to devise a reversing technique that enabled the Rover to drag its frozen wheel this left a Furrow behind in the soil which presented a new area of research for the science team white or yellow deposits seen within the furrow were various types of salts that only form in the presence of hot water on Earth hot water provides an environment in which microbes can thrive Spirit limped on for another three years before it became stuck in loose sand again the engineers began working with a replica which they placed in an identical situation where nothing was able to free the Rover it was declared a stationary research platform further attempts were made to position the Rover so its solar panels could operate more effectively but even this was not possible the last communication from Spirit was in March 2010 opportunity lasted until June 2018 when dust clogged its solar panels in March 2006 NASA's Mars reconnaissance Orbiter arrived at Mars and began the now routine business of Aero breaking though this procedure took roughly six months the saving and fuel will see the craft functioning at Mars into the 2030s one of the primary functions of the new Orbiter is as a Communications relay station its three meter antenna transmitting in the ultra high frequency band enables very high data rates by November 2013 it had tripled the amount of data sent to Earth by all the other NASA missions combined [Music] its high resolution camera began revealing the surface of Mars in the finest detail these are active falling Dunes in East Copper tease chasma the polar region free of the seasonal dry ice again surrounded by Dunes the southern hemisphere pits in the residual cap of carbon dioxide [Music] the poles of Mars were now attracting Keen interest follow the water had become NASA's catch cry the Phoenix Lander was targeted at the northern polar region to follow up on information from Mars Odyssey suggesting frozen water lay beneath the surface near the poles because imaging had revealed the region to be unvarying a Rover was deemed unnecessary the Lander had been designed to use a parachute to decelerate with rocket thrusters to deliver the craft to the surface unlike NASA's previous three Rovers which had bounced this decision proved controversial as one strand of research suggested the rocket fuel would contaminate the very area that the Lander was tasked with analyzing the craft waited 15 minutes to allow any dust to settle before it deployed its solar panels Phoenix had landed during the early spring in Mars's Northern Hemisphere so the solar panels would receive plenty of light for the planned 90-day mission as well as its camera mask Phoenix was equipped with a meteorological station that recorded the daily weather it featured a wind indicator and pressure and temperature sensors in addition a vertically pointed lidar was able to observe cirrus clouds forming in the region and snow falling in the polar atmosphere [Music] these phenomena had not been observed before the Lander also had a robotic arm that could dig half a meter into the soil and deliver samples to the analyzer a combination of eight high temperature ovens and a mass spectrometer in one excavation the cameras recorded a white substance which gradually disappeared given the temperatures and the time it lasted It could only have been water ice that sublimated after it was exposed the soil was slightly alkaline and the presence of perchlorate which kills bacteria was not good news for those hoping for Martian life Phoenix operated for two months longer than planned before the Gathering winter completely shaded its solar panels [Music] while the planet still had Subterranean deposits of ice there was precious little left at the surface yet it was now understood that many of the red planet's features had been carved by running water samples analyzed from across the planet affirm that water and nothing else had made these changes to the Martian landscape [Music] Mars had once been more like Earth yet it had lost its surface water and most of its atmosphere and the question of life persisted could it have emerged in a warmer wetter past and could it still be present below the surface [Music] the next Mars mission would be NASA's most ambitious yet known as curiosity the car-sized Rover would be powered by a nuclear battery making it immune to the dust problems experienced by spirit and opportunity seven sex curiosity was launched on an atlas 5 from Cape Canaveral in November 2011. why main engines start zero and liftoff in mid-2012 it entered the Martian atmosphere heading for Gale crater the jet propulsion laboratory monitored the entry closely but had no control over events in Mars's thin atmosphere the parachute could only slow the heavy craft to around 320 kilometers per hour nearing the surface the Rover descent stage dropped out of the AeroShell and Rockets kicked in radar was guiding the Lander to the surface and a small camera was recording images of the terrain below the Rover next curiosity was lowered on a tether Beneath The Descent stage this sky crane technique was used to avoid too much swirling dust exposing the Rover to unnecessary Danger everything had worked exactly as it was supposed to and the American Engineers were relieved The Landing had been the most precise ever for curiosity could start work its computer went through a checklist to make certain that all systems were operating correctly it was a day before the Rover deployed its camera Mast and Communications antennas it's thought that Gale crater is three and a half billion years old and that its sediments have been laid down first by water and then by wind NASA now has a sophisticated mobile science laboratory on Mars connected to Earth by the most advanced Communications link courtesy of the Mars reconnaissance Orbiter the Rover's primary objective is to discover if conditions suitable for life ever existed or still exist on Mars it's also Gathering detailed information about the current conditions on the red planet particularly the radiation levels that will have an impact on proposed manned missions Curiosity has analyzed the dust from a number of holes it drilled revealing sulfur nitrogen hydrogen oxygen phosphorus and carbon all elements essential to life in its six years on the surface of Mars Curiosity has traveled around 20 kilometers but the driving is taking its toll it routinely sends back a series of self-portraits mainly for Diagnostic reasons its Wheels have taken severe damage which will undoubtedly lead to design changes for future Rovers its computers are also giving problems but a new suite of missions is slated to arrive at Mars in 2020 that will continue profiling the planet thank you there is one aspect of the Martian environment that has never been investigated but that's about to be addressed the Mars Insight probe has been targeted at the flat Elysium planetia close to the equator to spend two years investigating the planet's interior it made a Flawless Landing in November 2018. after unfurling its solar array it spent weeks selecting a suitable spot to deploy a seismometer onto the surface to monitor Mars quakes it's clear that Mars had a warm wet past but it's cold and very dry now learning about the planet's geological activity will help us know why Mars has changed the inside probe also hammered a thermal sensor into the surface to gather data on heat flow from the planet's core by understanding processes within Mars we can learn how the geological histories of Mars and Earth began to diverge the ringed planet Saturn more than 100 times the mass of Earth its metallic core Lies Beneath 80 000 kilometers of liquid hydrogen and helium it's called a gas giant [Music] Saturn is orbited by at least 62 moons each unique some with complex and dynamic environments our only detailed examination of the saturnian system ended in 2017 when the Cassini probe was intentionally crashed into the planet's dense atmosphere to guard against accidental contamination of the moons foreign [Music] [Music] viewed from Earth Saturn's rings are visible but not in any detail they were thought to be solid until mathematical analysis suggested they were orbiting particles but how did they get there and why was Saturn alone in having rings in the early days of space research Saturn was just too far away conventional Rockets could only just reach Mars in 1964 NASA realized that a space probe launched in 1977 could take advantage of a rare alignment of the outer planets to fly past all the gas giants using gravitational assistance from the planets it would just be possible with the technology of the day an ambitious new Mission began to take shape it was dubbed The Grand Tour [Music] two probes that were far in advance of anything yet attempted would be part of the Mariner series because no spacecraft had been sent Beyond Mars mission planners felt it would be wise to send two rudimentary Advance probes to Jupiter and Saturn to test the deep space environment researchers didn't know if it was even possible to cross the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter in 1972 Pioneer 10 was launched towards Jupiter and the following year a twin Pioneer 11 was sent to Saturn [Music] both craft passed by Jupiter and discovered that the electron radiation there was ten thousand times as strong as at Earth this was a surprise to engineers at Nasa who had to modify the more sophisticated craft they were preparing for The Grand Tour if you wanted the probes being built at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory were part of a program known as Mariner Jupiter Saturn but this was soon changed to the Voyager program [Music] they were launched 16 days apart in late 1977. while Pioneer 10 was heading toward Interstellar space and Pioneer 11 was still two years away from Saturn in 1979 as Pioneer 11 approached the ringed planet it began sending back pictures far clearer than anything seen before a new ring the F ring was observed for the first time the craft flew by Saturn passing beneath the Rings Mission planners were uncertain how broadly the ring particles spread if there was a threat to the spacecraft they were prepared to sacrifice Pioneer 11 to get a clear idea of the environment they would encounter with the following Voyager craft the probe passed the ring safely and continued Beyond Saturn into Interstellar space NASA received its last communication from the Probe on the 24th of November 1995. the following Voyager 1 and 2 probes were very robust designed to survive for a very long journey and with far greater technical capacity than the pioneers in late 1980 Voyager 1 approached Saturn although its high-resolution polarimeter had failed it was still able to see a new ring called the g-ring orbiting 100 000 kilometers above Saturn's Cloud tops for the first time researchers could see how the Rings moved uneven features within the Rings were called spokes they're transient and are thought to be particles lifted by an electrostatic charge [Music] after such a long preparation information was now coming into JPL at such a rapid rate that the planetary scientists were overwhelmed Saturn's moons were of great interest Voyager 1's path had been chosen because it would take it close to Titan the Solar System's second largest moon and the only one to hold an atmosphere but the images were disappointing because the thick atmosphere of methane and nitrogen was impenetrable Voyager 1 now looped up above the solar system on a trajectory that would take it to Interstellar space as it looked back at Saturn it captured one last image from a unique angle it was almost 10 months before Voyager 2 neared Saturn its different path meant that it could continue onto Uranus and then to Neptune its high definition camera was still working and planetary researchers were expecting detailed pictures of the Rings they were not disappointed the varying densities and spacing within the Rings was more complex than anyone had expected the Rings are named for letters of the alphabet in the order that they were discovered it became apparent that the Rings had changed in the time since Voyager 1 had seen them though they stretch from seven thousand to eighty thousand kilometers above Saturn's equator their thickness is on average just 30 meters the spacecraft also returned pictures of the moon Enceladus its cracked uncrated surface was made of ice below which is an ocean ultimately Voyager 2 left Saturn unable to go into orbit It sped on toward Uranus it would be 23 years before another probe visited launched in 1997 Cassini was a collaboration between NASA the European space agency and the Italian space agency it would take more than six years to reach Saturn Cassini was the biggest most complex interplanetary spacecraft yet devised its 12 different instruments each had a dedicated team of research Specialists on Earth to interpret the data it sent back [Music] its High Gain antenna was used for high-speed data relay back to Earth but in what's called a ram maneuver it was sometimes used as a shield to protect the spacecraft from debris impact especially when crossing the plain of Saturn's rings [Music] on the 1st of July 2004 it fired its engine to go into orbit around Saturn [Music] was designed not to fail beside its main engine was a backup in case the primary engine did fail it had 16 monopropellant thrusters eight prime and eight more also as backups in mission control of the jet propulsa laboratory the engineers could not know what was going on the time delay and cassini's disappearance behind Saturn meant that much of the Telemetry was recorded for later replay back to Earth and lasted for 106 minutes Cassini was the first probe to employ a solid-state recorder unlike the earlier Voyager craft that registered data on a mechanical tape recorder cassini's first orbit followed a highly elliptical path that would take it out past the moon Titan this was important for two reasons its gravity would be necessary in modifying cassini's course so Saturn and its other moons could be observed from different perspectives secondly Titan with its dense atmosphere was targeted as an area of major interest for the Cassini team the European Space Agency had built a small craft called highgens attached to the side of Cassini on its second approach to Titan the Huygens probe was released it was equipped with a heat shield a parachute and enough battery power to last for several weeks over a 20-day period Huygens drifted for 4 million kilometers [Music] it would transmit data back to the orbiting Cassini which would later relay it to Earth three days after separation Cassini made a course correction that would prevent it colliding with Titan as Huygens reached Titan's atmosphere Cassini was coming around for its third close approach of the Moon ready to receive signals from the Lander [Music] while it drifted to the surface of Titan pygen sampled the atmosphere and recorded images of the landscape pictures from beneath the clouds revealed low Hills and channels cut by flowing liquid there were few impact craters and those that existed were heavily eroded it was the first landing on a body in the outer solar system images from the surface showed weathered rocks made of Water Ice what surprised everybody was that Titan is a geologically active world where liquid ethane and methane rather than water have carved the features as Cassini continued looping out around Titan it used radar to map the moon's surface confirming the widespread distribution of hydrocarbon Lakes the probe discovered that rain fell on Titan but it was a mixture of liquid ethane and methane the moon has weather and other erosive forces similar to Earth but the chemistry is radically different [Music] a small moon Enceladus Drew attention to itself as the whitest most reflective body in the solar system its surface shows cratering in the north but the South has giant cracks known as tiger stripes [Music] on cassini's first Loop passed Enceladus the magnetometer team noticed an odd deflection of Saturn's magnetic field as though the small Moon had an atmosphere during its second pass the team noticed the same phenomenon they asked for the next Traverse of Enceladus to pass much closer so cassini's course was modified to fly just 175 kilometers above the icy Moon the probe passed through a plume of water vapor emanating from the tiger stripes it contained common salt in all Cassini made 24 swoops past Enceladus with the closest approach flying just 25 kilometers above the surface each one of the probe's instruments gathered different evidence about the Jets of water expelled through the cracks in the moon's South on Mars rovers have been combing the surface looking for traces of life but Enceladus was flaunting remarkable signs gravitational analysis revealed a liquid ocean beneath the ice and infrared detectors saw heat emanating from the cracks foreign as well as salt the science team discovered traces of silica that can only dissolve in hot water hydrogen and organic compounds were also detected we know from Cassini that Enceladus has a global ocean so you have water we also know that there are Organics coming out because they've been directly measured both in the gas and in the particles we also know there's a source of energy the South Pole was hotter than the rest of Enceladus and then we found evidence that deep inside their hydrothermal vents on the sea floor of Enceladus so these hydrothermal vents would Supply the Heat and the nutrients that could possibly support life with a diameter of 500 kilometers Enceladus is just too small to sustain a hot core via radioactive decay gravitational squeezing by Saturn explains some of the heating but the source of the high temperatures detected remains a mystery but not only is there liquid water underneath the surface but there's organic material there's a heat source and you know when when people get excited about the potential for life elsewhere in the solar system they're four things that you need you need a heat Source you need liquid water you need organic material and you need those three things to be stable over some period of time so that life could potentially form Enceladus we've got three we're not sure about the stability over time yet in the earth's deep oceans hydrothermal vents provide the warmth and nutrition to support life they may even have been important for the origins of life planetary biologists are speculating that the environment in the oceans of Enceladus may be the most likely place in the solar system to find some sort of extraterrestrial life it took a while for Cassini to be in a position where backlighting from the Sun allowed the Imaging team to capture pictures of the plumes using a similar technique the Imaging team took this picture with Saturn directly between Cassini and the Sun it reveals Saturn's e-ring the hazy outermost ring that is usually very difficult to see the e-ring is a result of the plumes from Enceladus and is constantly replenished by the salt water eruptions [Music] saying that Saturn has 62 moons is misleading each particle within the ring system could be regarded as a moon there are the inner large moons and the outer large moons there are other Shepherds that shape the Rings there are co-orbitals that exchange orbits and there are even moons that orbit other moons all are unique during the Voyager missions interest in the moons came as something of an afterthought but for Cassini close examination of the moons was planned from the beginning iapetus orbit Saturn Beyond Titan it was first observed in 1671 by Giovanni Cassini he could see it as a DOT of light to the west of Saturn could not see it when it should have been to the east [Music] iapetus has one bright face and one dark one because the Moon is tidally locked to Saturn it is always the dark face that leads as it orbits one Theory suggests that it sweeps up debris that spews from Phoebe a more distant Moon another feature of iapetus has scientists baffled a reach along the Equator stretches more than halfway around the moon it's twice as high as Earth's tallest mountain with iapitose being just 1500 kilometers across the ridge gives iapitus the appearance of a walnut [Music] very accurately directed bursts from cassini's Main engine allowed Mission Engineers to modify the probes looping orbits so Mission Specialists could focus on various moons different areas of the Ring system or different parts of Saturn itself with gravitational assistance from the moons particularly Titan Mission Control were able to conserve fuel the Cassini probe performed so well it received two Mission extensions but the fuel could not last forever planners had scheduled the most hazardous part of cassini's mission for its final year at Saturn late in 2016 Cassini began a series of polar orbits that would take it close to the outer edge of the Rings in what mission Specialists called grazing on the Rings the Craft's Mass spectrometer and its Cosmic dust analyzer would sample particles and gases as it crossed the ring plane in orbit 251 its first pass above Saturn's North Pole it recorded the peculiar hexagonal storm that was first hinted at by the Voyages the storm more than twice the diameter of Earth maintains its hexagonal shape but its color changed with the advance of Summer at its Center is a cyclone shown here in false color with red indicating lower cloud and green higher Cloud winds at its Edge blow at 540 kilometers per hour [Music] one part of cassini's Jewel technique magnetometer had stopped working early in the mission without it the craft had to do role Maneuvers from time to time to calibrate the instrument the spacecraft would make 20 ring-raising orbits with the work of its instruments mapped out to the second as the sun was almost directly behind the Rings Cassini looked for dust clouds something is reducing ring particles to fine powder [Music] Cassini made a number of radio occultation observations with the Rings between the spacecraft and Earth three radio signals of differing wavelengths were transmitted simultaneously allowing the radio science team to build a profile of the Ring particles this false color image of the a-ring the outermost of the large bright Rings shows red for particles larger than five centimeters across green denotes particles smaller than five centimeters with blue for particles smaller than one centimeter the complex gravitational interaction between Saturn its rings and its moons leads to gaps in very particular places before Cassini arrived only 18 moons were known that number has grown to 62. Prometheus acts as a shepherding Moon limiting the inner edge of Saturn's effering along with Pandora which orbits outside the effering the two moons keep the ring narrowly confined [Music] in April 2017 cassini's orbit was changed for the Final Phase of its Mission the probe would now Loop inside the Rings though it would ultimately mean burning up in Saturn's atmosphere the information gathered from such close proximity to Saturn and its rings would give a fuller picture of the gas giant it was decided that intentionally destroying Cassini was preferable to letting it drift without fuel possibly contaminating one of the moons [Music] cassini's sensors began picking up a stream of ring particles raining down upon Saturn a continuous shower of ice and dust particles are dragged toward the planet's equator by gravity or at higher latitudes charged ring particles spiral in along magnetic field lines every second ten thousand kilograms of ring rain falls to the surface at this rate the Rings will be completely gone in 100 million years [Music] Searchers were surprised to discover an electric current flowing between the inner d-ring and the upper atmosphere toward the end of cassini's close passes of Saturn the spacecraft began catching the upper edge of the atmosphere all information had been retrieved from the recorders data now was transmitted directly back to Earth but it relied on the spacecraft's thrusters to stop Cassini from tumbling keeping its High Gain antenna pointed accurately the probe's final work was sampling the atmosphere and measuring the offset of Saturn's magnetic axis [Music] emission control there was no more control the engineers could just monitor the signals sent from Saturn 84 minutes previously signal from the spacecraft is gone within the next 45 seconds so will be the spacecraft it will take years to process the data gained from Cassini as yet there are no future missions to Saturn scheduled the International Space Station is a laboratory that orbits the earth once every 90 minutes it's the most expensive single project ever constructed jointly owned and operated by the United States Russia Europe Japan and Canada the ISS is a Triumph of international collaboration but it didn't start that way and during its planning phase it came close to being dumped [Music] [Music] tonight I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade it was 1984 toward the end of the Cold War when President Ronald Reagan unveiled his plan before the Congress it was soon called space station freedom but details were sketchy and plans kept changing NASA saw a space station as their next logical step the space shuttle had been designed with on-orbit construction as one of its primary functions on a cold morning in January 1986 the space shuttle Challenger was being prepared for its 10th flight and liftoff liftoff of the 25th space shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower the Challenger go and throttle up all Seven astronauts were killed and the shuttle program was suspended just one month later cosmonauts began occupation of Mir the new Soviet space station the Soviet Union had a long-standing interest in extended duration space flights with its solute space stations and with Mir the Russians were gaining valuable experience in microgravity research and on-orbit construction oh as the 80s progressed Mir expanded using modular fabrication techniques they began experimentation with automated docking systems new modules were delivered by the proton launcher with the progress cargo ship used for resupply foreign shuttle Fleet remained grounded while an exhaustive inquiry was conducted and space station Freedom was stuck on the drawing board in 1989 discontent in Poland spread across the Eastern Bloc leading to the fall of the wall that had divided Germany two years later the Soviet Union itself was dissolved followed by social and economic turmoil Moscow was now the capital of the Russian Federation a one-party democracy the mere crew e0-10 arrived at the space station as Soviet citizens and would return to the ground as Russians the country's new space agency Ross cosmos had had its budget slashed by 80 percent and there was no money to launch two newly completed modules thank you in 1988 NASA had resumed shuttle flights but with the fall of the Soviet Union interest among U.S politicians in space station Freedom was at an all-time low ell discovery NASA now began working with Ross Cosmos in the shuttle mayor program the Russians would benefit from an injection of badly needed funds and the Americans would gain expertise in long duration space flight astronauts learned Russian and began riding to orbit in the soyuz cosmonauts learned English during the program ten cosmonauts flew on the space shuttle and eight Americans served as crew members aboard Mir with the shuttle docking with the Russian space station nine times Ross cosmos had begun work on a replacement mere 2 project completing the functional cargo block and the Dos 8 habitation module but lack of funding forced the agency to shelve the plan NASA convinced the cash-strapped Russian Federation to come in on their project Europe Japan and Canada were also involved in what was now called the International Space Station the functional cargo block was renamed zarya and became the first piece of the International Space Station delivered to orbit in November 1998. Zaria was launched from Kazakhstan with an orbital inclination of around 50 degrees this set the orbit for the International Space Station the space shuttle would deliver the bulk of the modules from here on NASA knew that this orbit would give the shuttle problems launched from Florida the shuttle usually orbited at 30 degrees to reach the steeper inclination with any meaningful payload the shuttle needed more power or it had to lose weight a redesign of the cargo bay delivered some weight savings but the construction missions could only be achieved with a new external tank made from a new lightweight alloy we have a go for main engine start we have main engine start four three two one we have booster ignition and liftoff of the Space Shuttle Endeavor with the first American element of two weeks after the launch of zarya the Space Shuttle Endeavor lifted the unity node to orbit course heading Northeast from the Kennedy Space Center toward a 240 Mile High rendezvous with the zarya control module in preparation the crew connected the unity node to the shuttle's airlock and using the shuttle's robotic arm they United the two modules [Music] crew entered the space station for the first time and stowed equipment but no one would take up residence just yet construction work had just started 18 months before the arrival of the next module Z Vegeta the Russian habitation module it docked automatically with the zarya module in October 2000 the Space Shuttle Discovery arrived with more pieces during four space walks the crew installed a structural truss and Communications equipment [Music] finally in November 2000 the first crew Expedition 1 launched from baikonur Cosmonaut Yuri gagenko was commander of the soyuz spacecraft astronaut Bill Shepard was the commander of the team once they were on the International Space Station and Sergey krikalev the most experienced member of the crew was flight engineer [Music] much of the crew's daily activity was devoted to the unpacking and installation of equipment there are always problems that need to be solved and maintenance to be carried out [Music] in microgravity muscles lose tone one of the first pieces of equipment to be set up was an exercise bike every crew member is required to do two and a half hours of cardio exertion every day like later missions Expedition 1 carried out very little scientific research at this stage the station's primary laboratory module was still on the ground [Music] but that would soon change foreign the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis delivered the laboratory module called destiny it was a radical increase in capability for the space station [Music] the laboratory is equipped with 13 International standard payload racks that can house a variety of different experiment modules but at this stage they were empty with the destiny module and a new much larger solar array the International Space Station was taking shape a precisely organized launch schedule was unfolding and it was expected that the space station would be complete by 2006. in November of 2002 the Space Shuttle Endeavor took off carrying the Expedition 6 crew plus a new piece of the space station superstructure and two tons of supplies returning to the ground no one realized that it will be the last time a cosmonaut would fly on the shuttle and that construction work on the ISS would be suspended for more than two years Columbia Houston Comcheck when the space shuttle Columbia broke up during re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere all remaining shuttles were grounded Columbia Houston UHF Comcheck 81 seconds after launch foam insulation separating from the external tank had damaged the left wing and from that point Colombia was doomed the investigation board had no confidence that the entire space shuttle Fleet could be safely operated for more than a few years calling the shuttle an aging spacecraft with shuttle flights suspended construction work on the International Space Station stopped replacement Crews were cut to two members the Russian progress freighter was the only method of delivering supplies to the ISS and All crew rotations use the soyuz spacecraft what started out as America's space station Freedom was now completely Reliant upon Russian technology it would be more than three years before construction work on the space station recommenced in 2004 U.S President George Bush made a speech to an assembled group of NASA administrators our first goal is to complete the International Space Station by 2010. in 2010 the space shuttle after nearly 30 years of Duty will be retired from service the space shuttle would be restricted to work on the International Space Station where the crew could await rescue if their craft sustained damage scientific work was cut to a minimum with the small Crews preoccupied with station maintenance fabrication work on the modules continued on the ground the Space Shuttle Discovery made the return to flight mission in 2005. before docking with the International Space Station it performed the Rendezvous pitch maneuver allowing the ISS crew to inspect the craft for damage it delivered supplies and equipment and returned safely to the ground Atlantis arrived 14 months later and after a break of almost four years construction work began again in what became known to NASA astronauts as the wall of Eva that extra vehicular activity it took 14 more shuttle assembly flights to bring the ISS to its current configuration if just one of the installation spacewalks was to fail it could threaten the entire project the schedule was relentless because the shuttle's days were numbered training for these assembly missions was intense NASA's neutral buoyancy laboratory was rigged with a mock-up of the ISS so astronauts could experience something akin to weightlessness while they practiced in July 2011 Atlantis flew to the ISS on what was the final Flight of the shuttle Fleet the International Space Station was essentially complete although it continues to be reconfigured and New pieces can still be added it's 16 pressurized modules have a volume equivalent to a five-room house including Laboratories storage spaces and habitation areas [Music] power comes from eight solar array Wings which track the Sun when the ISS enters the Earth's Shadow the solar Wings enter night glider mode where they are angled Edge onto the orbital Direction though the ISS orbits 400 kilometers above the Earth's surface there is enough thin atmosphere at that height to present drag night glider mode reduces this drag and minimizes orbital decay supplies of water oxygen food and Equipment are regularly delivered by unmanned cargo craft most frequent of these has been the Russian progress which is similar in appearance to the soyuz it docks by itself using the automated curves system it can also be docked manually if the need should arise like the soyuz capsule the progress freighter will remain docked long term as well as delivering supplies it can boost the station's orbit or it can transfer fuel for the station's thrusters ultimately filled with garbage it undocks to burn up in the atmosphere the Japanese space agency jaxa currently operates the largest cargo craft that still visits the ISS to top with the space station it approaches in stages until it's close enough to be grabbed by the robotic arm and connected to one of the births on the harmony node it has a pressurized Zone that can be unloaded by hand and there's an unpressurized area accessed by the robotic arm for cargo to be stored on pallets outside with the demise of the Space Shuttle NASA has turned to the private sector to fulfill its resupply commitments the cygnus freighter first visited the ISS in 2014. the SpaceX Dragon cargo craft first delivered supplies to the ISS in 2012. it is different from the other cargo craft in that it can return significant loads back to the ground experimental materials from the ISS can be in an earth-based laboratory within two days of leaving low earth orbit SpaceX is developing a dragon capable of carrying astronauts to low earth orbit the business of the International Space Station is research the study of fluid dynamics and Material Science in a microgravity environment simply cannot be done on the ground and the orbiting platform is the perfect place for Earth observation meteorological studies and astronomy the study of plant development in microgravity is of great interest one of the major areas of study is into the effects of prolonged weightlessness on the human body without the resistance provided by gravity muscles and Bone deteriorate this is partially offset by regular exercise the ISS is equipped with a treadmill a cycle ergometer and a resistive exercise device all are shock mounted so as not to pass vibration across the station the loss of bone mass shows up as raised calcium levels in the blood samples are taken regularly and stored at low temperature for later analysis the extra calcium can lead to kidney stones NASA and jaxa are cooperating in the study of an agent that can prevent these effects most astronauts on long-term missions complain about deterioration in their Vision which can persist for years after a flight distinct changes to the eye have been detected and ultrasound examinations of the eyes are done regularly astronauts and cosmonauts are totally Reliant upon the technology of the ISS and it needs regular maintenance in August 2018 a small but steady drop in air pressure was noticed it was traced to the soyuz ms-9 capsule a two millimeter hole appeared to have been deliberately drilled a nasty rumors about sabotage began to spread Cosmonaut Sergey prokopiev made a recording from the soyuz to show the repairs and to quash stories about poor Morale on the space station as you see everything is calm we're living in harmony as always and all the experiments are going to plan later it was decided that a space walk to cut away some of the external insulation from the soyuz above the hole might deliver more clues about how the hole could have been made because the soyuz capsule is not designed for external maintenance and lacks handrails it was a challenging job for the cosmonauts remember it was difficult slicing through the eight layers of the thermal blanket used to stabilize internal temperatures on the spacecraft from the inside it appeared that the hole had been repaired with glue which gave out after the soyuz adopt with the ISS UE it was thought that analysis of the glue would shed more light on the mystery because the hole was in the habitation module it was no threat to the Craft's safe return the blanket which was left in a mess is also not required during re-entry Moscow Russian cosmonaut Sergey prokopiev European astronaut Alexander guest an American astronaut Serena anyon Chancellor had flown up on this spacecraft and would be returning home on it when maintenance or repair work has to be done outside the ISS on NASA Esa or jaxa modules the crew members with the required expertise have training in the use of the American spacesuit known as the Emu some crew members have training on the Emu and the Russian Orland space suit those with experience in both say that the American suit is more flexible and comfortable yet it is very complex and takes a very long time to put on by contrast the Russian suit is simple to put on and is designed to be easily serviced by cosmonauts even the smallest equipment malfunctioned can be life-threatening when Issa astronaut Luca palmitano was installing cables outside the ISS Water started leaking into his helmet I feel a lot of water on the back of my head but I don't think it speaks from my back are you sweating you working hard um they're sweating that feels like a lot of water Mission Control called him back inside but by the time he had reached the airlock he couldn't see and he couldn't hear his colleagues quickly got him inside and removed his helmet along with more than a liter of water later the empty suit was powered up and the fault was obvious the water was leaking from the suit's cooling system a report blamed Mission Control who assumed that the water was coming from the in suit drinking water bag a crew will typically stay in orbit for around six months the arrival of a new crew means that for three other crew members their stay is coming to an end they board the same soyuz craft in which they traveled to orbit for the return to the surface undocking of the capsule is precisely timed it separates initially by the spring mechanism in the docking interface only at a safe distance from the ISS will the soyuz make the first of its separation Burns to avoid contaminating the space station at a point in the orbit opposite to their intended landing area the retroburn happens slowing the craft for its descent into the atmosphere burn is precisely timed and lasts 4 minutes and 45 seconds at this stage The Descent capsule is still attached to the habitation and instrument modules in Kazakhstan a fleet of ground vehicles are heading for the landing Zone Medical Teams and Recovery Personnel from Ross Cosmos NASA and Esa are also in the air operate the three parts of the soyuz during the heat of re-entry the crew are out of radio contact with the ground in the upper atmosphere the drogue Chute deploys further slowing the capsule then the main chute on the ground the crew are lifted from the capsule they're experiencing gravity for the first time in months and it will take them months to return to normal [Music] they are carried through the snow and will soon return to their homes Jupiter is our Solar System's largest planet it's more than twice the mass of all the other planets combined its swirling atmosphere moves in bands at different latitudes and its Great Red Spot is thought to be a Perpetual storm recently images from a new probe that has flown above Jupiter's poles reveal a completely different planet [Music] [Music] the ancient Romans knew Jupiter as the celestial representation of the king of the Gods in 1610 Galileo using his newly improved telescope saw Jupiter's moons and could see they orbited the planet evidence that not everything revolved around the earth as the church had declared though better telescopes improved our view of Jupiter it was not until 1964 that Gary flandro a graduate student working part-time at NASA's JPL understood there was a way to get a clearer look at Jupiter by plotting the positions of the outer planets he realized that a rare alignment would enable a spacecraft launched in 1977 to visit Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune NASA jumped the opportunity and began work on Twin craft for what was then known as the planetary Grand Tour to limit any surprises two basic spacecraft known as Pioneer 10 and 11 were quickly built they would go ahead of The Grand Tour missions to send back information about the environment Pioneer 10 was launched toward Jupiter in March 1972 it was the first spacecraft to cross the asteroid belt that lay between Mars and Jupiter and because it was the first Probe on a trajectory that would take it out of the solar system it carried a plaque identifying its origin by December 1973 Pioneer 10 was sending back pictures of Jupiter clearer than anything that had been seen before [Music] approaching Jupiter it encountered levels of iron radiation ten thousand times more intense than the radiation belts surrounding Earth as the probe skimmed past the giant planet it gained speed leaving Earth Pioneer 10 was moving at 51 000 kilometers per hour departing Jupiter it had more than doubled its speed this gravitational slingshot effect made The Grand Tour possible The Grand Tour craft recently renamed Voyager 1 and 2 were due to be transferred to Cape Canaveral for launch integration when news of Jupiter's extreme radiation environment came through the electron radiation at Jupiter had generated false commands within pioneer 10. the far more sophisticated voyages this presented problems local supermarkets were stripped of their stocks of kitchen-grade aluminum foil which was then used to Shield critical cables without this last minute alteration electrical pressures of up to 40 000 volts would have been induced in the voyager's subsystems as the craft past Jupiter Voyager 2 was launched in August 1977. its trajectory meant that he could visit Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune system Voyager 1 left 16 days later it's different faster trajectory only allowed flybys of Jupiter and Saturn and various large moons [Music] at the time the Voyager spacecraft were the most sophisticated probes to be launched because they were to operate at huge distances from the Sun solar panels could not be used as a power source they were equipped with radioisotope thermoelectric generators which use the heat from the decay of plutonium-238 to generate power as Voyager 1 approached Jupiter in January 1979 it began sending image sequences that showed a complex and dynamic planet the planet's giant red spot was revealed as a vast rotating storm in 1665 Giovanni Cassini described a permanent Spot on Jupiter which was regularly observed into the 1700s it was not until the late 1800s the Jupiter's spot was described as red and it's uncertain whether the historic observations of Jupiter's spot refer to the same feature or a phenomenon that regularly manifests in Jupiter's atmosphere Voyager 1 made its closest approach early in March 1979. as the probe near Jupiter the activity at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory became intense this was the nature of the voyager's flyby missions though a long quiet Cruise phases between the planets followed by brief periods when the flow of information from the craft overwhelmed researchers [Music] one of the biggest contributions made by the Voyages was the transformation in our understanding of the Galilean moons previously just dots of light Jupiter's four largest moons were each distinct and completely different the first surprise was the inner Moon IO it's a sulfurous yellow in appearance and one particular long duration exposure revealed an odd plume rather than being a cold dead world the gravitational squeezing IO receives from its giant neighbor heats the moon's interior the plume was a volcanic eruption ejecting material hundreds of kilometers above the surface in July 1979 three months after Voyager 1 had moved Beyond Jupiter Voyager 2 made its closest approach it was able to examine different moons more closely than its twin Europa was the next surprise it is highly reflective and has the smoothest surface of any body in the solar system further observation revealed pressure ridges reminiscent of Polar Ice flows on Earth Europa is a frozen world with a vast ocean beneath a thick crust of ice like IO it is heated from within by tidal flexing as Voyager 2 continued towards Saturn planetary researchers were left with large amounts of raw data about Jupiter still to be processed the Voyager missions left us with a basic view of the Jovian system but they had raised more questions than they were able to answer it will be more than 10 years before Jupiter received another visitor from Earth ignition and lift off of Discovery and the Ulysses spacecraft found for the polar regions of the Sun in October 1990 the Space Shuttle Discovery lifted the European Ulysses spacecraft to low earth orbit from there it was boosted on a mission to observe the Sun but first it would pass Jupiter all the planets orbit the Sun in the same direction in roughly the same plane this is called the ecliptic and it developed from the spinning disc of dust and gas that formed our solar system the designers of the Ulysses spacecraft wanted to see the Sun from an orbit above its poles Jupiter's extreme gravitation was used to bend the probe's flight path out of the ecliptic so it could make north-south orbits of the Sun Ulysses was not the only probe to take advantage of Jupiter's gravity both the Cassini probe to Saturn launched in 1997 and the New Horizons probe to Pluto launched in 2006 were able to reduce their flight times by years with Jupiter flybys these probes were able to make meaningful observations while passing the giant planet [Music] in the clean rooms of the jet propulsan laboratory a new probe was taking shape Galileo would be the first spacecraft to go into orbit around Jupiter its 4.8 meter antenna was folded like an umbrella only to be deployed when safely on the way to Jupiter originally scheduled to launch in 1986 it sat in storage for years after the space shuttle Challenger exploded [Music] it launched aboard space shuttle Atlantis in October 1989. three two one we have ignition and liftoff of Atlantis and the Galileo spacecraft Bound for Jupiter new rules governing shuttle launches meant a change in the booster to push Galileo out of Earth orbit the less powerful solid fuel upper stage now stipulated sent Galileo toward Venus for a gravity assist [Music] the new flight path meant Galileo was traveling to a hotter part of the solar system it was decided to keep the heat sensitive antenna furled until after the spacecraft Loop backed past Earth Galileo made two close passes of Earth each time gaining more speed its first pass was in December 1990 more than a year after its launch a further year on when it passed Earth again the High Gain antenna was only partially open after months of trying different techniques to deploy the antenna Mission Engineers concluded that long periods in storage had caused lubricant at the tips of the antenna's ribs to dissipate researchers would rely on Galileo's smaller antenna with data delivered at slower rates during the cruise to Jupiter Galileo encountered several asteroids this is Ida the first asteroid we've learned are with its own Moon dactyl in July 1995 while it was still six months away from its closest encounter with Jupiter Galileo ejected a small probe designed to enter the atmosphere and Sample its chemical composition the probe lasted for an hour in Jupiter's atmosphere the data was relayed to Galileo and recorded for subsequent transmission back to Earth its analysis revealed hardly any water vapor which was unexpected and other elements particularly helium were detected at far lower levels than predicted the probe experienced areas of extreme heat and cold suggesting heat is being released from the planet's interior slightly more than an hour after transmission from the probes East Galileo began its orbit insertion burn its engine had to operate for 49 minutes to put it into a highly elliptical equatorial orbit but this orbit would be altered with another burn at its High Point Mission designers were acutely aware of the high radiation environment and the second burn would lift Galileo above the extreme radiation at its closest approach Galileo's initial orbit eventually delivered a close approach to Ganymede Jupiter's largest moon during this orbit Engineers were trying to understand damage to the spacecraft's vital tape recorder without its High Gain antenna the recorder was essential for slow replay of data recorded during the brief Close Encounters it had been stuck in rewind for 15 hours and tape had been degraded light emitting diodes key elements in the Recorder's control system had acquired radiation defects the second orbit also passed Ganymede Galileo discovered it's the only moon in the solar system with a significant magnetic field it also has an ocean sandwiched between two layers of ice Galileo's orbits would be slightly varied so that it could make close approaches to different Jovian moons but the equatorial orbits needed to reach the moons also took the craft through hot spots in Jupiter's radiation belts with the observations made by the Voyages the moon Europa was of particular interest to the Galileo team data from several instruments agreed that a salty ocean exists beneath europa's surface ice later examination of the Galileo data sets revealed plasma wave and magnetic field information showing that plumes of water vapor were erupting from cracks in the surface Europa has more water than Earth which makes it a possible home to life IO was already known to have volcanic activity Galileo saw tides in the moon's solid surface of more than 100 meters the temperature is generated by this gravitational Distortion of i o make its numerous volcanoes hotter than anything found on Earth during its eight years at Jupiter Galileo completed 35 orbits filling out our limited picture of the Jovian system this was never an easy mission Galileo was a robust spacecraft but the radiation environment stressed all the subsystems and Engineers were constantly having to find workarounds for the frequent breakdowns Galileo suffered instruments showed increased noise when near Jupiter and current leakages caused by radiation led to several resets of the onboard computer with crucial loss of data software changes enabled the computer to recognize these resets and to recover by itself information learned would lead to changes in the way the next Jupiter spacecraft was designed five four three two one ignition and liftoff of the atlas V with Juno on a trek to Jupiter in August 2011 Juno began a journey to Jupiter that would last almost five years its Mission parameters would be very different to Galileo's it would ignore the moons and focus exclusively on Jupiter Plateau spacecraft design saw crucial Electronics shielded within a thick titanium Vault and rather than a plutonium power source Juno would rely on solar panels the sun's intensity at Jupiter is roughly five percent of what it is at Earth so the panels are huge a shortage in stocks of plutonium-238 led to the change in power sources [Music] Juno followed a looping orbit that took it Beyond Mars before swooping back to Earth for a gravitational boost that added 14 000 kilometers per hour to its velocity sending it on to Jupiter Juno approached Jupiter on a path that took it above the planet's North Pole it was destined for a north-south orbit this would see it pass beneath the severious sections of the planet's radiation belts that extend out from Jupiter's equator four days before its closest approach Mission Control sent a command that initiated the Craft's autopilot on July the 4th 2016 Juno began an engine burn that would insert it into a 53-day orbit [Music] 48 minutes later Mission Control at JPL received tones verifying that Juno had started its deceleration maneuver it was a tense 35-minute wait from the systems Engineers before confirmation came through that Juno had performed exactly as intended foreign [Music] [Applause] scientists and Engineers it was a relief that things were going to plan Juno is equipped with a suite of instruments capable of penetrating Jupiter's thick cloud the polar orbit allows Juno to compile a three-dimensional map of the upper atmosphere building a picture of the entire planet as it rotates the images of Jupiter from this New Perspective appeared to come from a different planet researchers were stunned it was planned that Juno would only make two 53-day orbits and then change to a series of 14-day orbits that would speed up the sampling rate the spacecraft's main engine is fueled by hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide which ignite spontaneously when mixed the propellant and oxidizer are forced out by a bladder of expanding helium as Juno was finishing its second orbit the helium valves were not responding correctly so it was decided to maintain the original orbit emission extension has been granted to allow for the longer orbits Juno continues to follow within a day of the helium valve problem Juno went into safe mode all instruments went offline and data was lost it appeared to be similar to the difficulties experienced by Galileo but Engineers traced the issue to a data transfer problem from one specific instrument and the spacecraft remains healthy Jupiter's axis is tilted at only three degrees making even an oblique view of the poles near impossible until Juno arrived when viewed in the infrared researchers saw a complex arrangement of storms at both the poles at the North Pole a central Vortex is surrounded by eight anticyclones at the South Pole five anti-cyclones surround the central storm scientists do not understand why the storms all rotating in the same direction do not obliterate each other [Music] on its seventh close pass of Jupiter Juno flew directly over the giant red spot its microwave radiometer was able to map the heat distributions at varying levels down to 350 kilometers the red spot is a giant storm and Juno was able to see much higher temperatures at the deepest levels they could penetrate with no geographic features as on Earth there is nothing on Jupiter against which storms can dissipate a great red spot remains firmly 22 degrees below the equator yet it appears to have drifted around the planet at least 10 times since reliable observations began Jupiter's magnetosphere is huge it traps charged particles in bands stretching out to vast distances this gives sensitive Electronics on orbiting spacecraft like Juno big problems it was assumed that Jupiter's magnetosphere was generated like Earth's by Dynamo action the convective movement of an electrically conductive fluid deep within so far results from Juno suggest that this is not the case the lumpy nature of Jupiter's magnetic field points to an atmospheric Source the giant auroras at the poles also seem to come from a different mechanism than here on Earth by focusing on the composition of the gas giant researchers are hoping to gather clues about conditions at the formation of the solar system while the Earth has been continuously Changed by tectonic forces it is thought that Jupiter remains very similar in composition to the cloud of gas and dust from which the solar system was formed [Music] at the end of its Mission Juno will be sent on a collision course with Jupiter to avoid any possible contamination of the delicate moons the next mission to the Jovian system will focus on Europa as the most likely place after Earth to Harbor some form of life known as Europa Clipper it's scheduled to launch in 2022 like Juno it will be solar powered and its elliptical orbit of Jupiter will see it fly over Europa every two weeks [Music] early concepts for the mission called for the inclusion of a Lander but this idea was soon rejected as premature because more needs to be learned about the surface of the icy Moon thank you for europa's ice crust is thought to be at least 19 kilometers thick accurate measurements need to be made if thin areas can be found then future missions may be able to access the ocean that Lies Beneath concepts for under ice explorers are in development and we can expect other missions to focus on other moons [Music] as the largest planet Jupiter's influence on the rest of the solar system is profound it has more than twice the mass of every other planet combined all other planet's orbits are affected by Jupiter's gravitation [Music] learn about Jupiter for a human to work in space he or she must have a spacesuit it protects the astronaut from the vacuum the beyond the atmosphere supplying oxygen as well as insulation from the extremes of heat and cold spacesuit has to have means of communication with the outside world and it must enable freedom of movement the modern space suit is the result of a long and Complex Evolution [Music] thank you [Music] long before humans had traveled to space aviators wanted to fly at Heights that could not support life in 1932 Auguste picar flew above 16 000 meters in a helium-filled balloon to stay alive Pika ascended in an aluminum pressure vessel fed with compressed air [Music] Spanish Aviator Emilio herreras came up with a different solution his stratospheric suit never flew it was an idea ahead of its time [Music] in the United States Aviator Wiley Post had supercharged his plane the Winnie may it could fly at 15 000 meters where the jet streams blow knew he could save fuel and fly faster at that height so with the help of Tire maker BF Goodrich he devised the first serviceable pressure suit all right at this time even military aircraft were flying at much lower altitudes where the use of a simple oxygen mask was enough to ensure a pilot efficiency however as jet power was introduced operation ceilings lifted at high altitudes low ambient air pressure meant the oxygen mask would lift off the face when oxygen was fed to the pilot but pressures high enough to sustain life when bombers like the B-36 began long duration Missions at high altitudes they adopted pressurized crew compartments yet the pressure suit with a fully enclosed helmet was necessary as sudden cabin depressurization could be lethal in the 1950s partial pressure suits became common they had inflatable capstans that stopped blood draining to the legs under heavy g-forces avoiding blackouts air Crews hated them but figures showed they functioned more effectively when wearing them in 1955 a unique American spy plane made its first flight the following year the U2 began reconnaissance missions over the Soviet Union flying at 21 000 meters it was beyond the range of Soviet radar and neither jet fighters nor missiles could reach it pilots flying the U2 wore a new partial pressure suit the MC3 rather than save a pilot's life in case of sudden depressurization this suit was designed to be under pressure throughout the mission without it the Pilot's blood would boil as missile technology developed it appeared that human beings would be dispensed with as a weak link not able to cope with conditions imposed by the technology U.S Air Force had different ideas they felt that a pilot could make better decisions than a guidance system and they began a research program using Hypersonic aircraft to learn about the problems associated with ultra high speed ultra high altitude operations the culmination of this program was represented by the X-15 a rocket-powered aircraft that could fly to the edge of the atmosphere [Music] because of its limited fuel load the X-15 was launched from beneath the B-52 bomber at an altitude of 15 000 meters the cabin of the X-15 was pressurized with nitrogen to reduce the risk of Fire for the pilot a new full pressure flight suit known as the xmc-2 was developed 2 was pressurized with nitrogen a neck Dam excluded the nitrogen from the helmet which was fed with oxygen for life support this suit was the processor of NASA's most important space suits foreign set the speed record for a powered aircraft at well above 7 000 kilometers per hour and the altitude record at just over 107 000 meters the first real space suit was worn by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961 aboard vostok won he became the first man to orbit the Earth his suit the sk-1 was to protect against capsule depressurization and to sustain him during ejection from his craft the vostok cosmonauts had to parachute to the ground because their capsules landed too heavily [Music] since 1959 the newly formed U.S space agency NASA had been working towards launching an American into space seven test pilots had been selected as the Mercury program's first group of astronauts attempt would be a short hop as the only booster available at the time the Redstone lacked the power to reach orbit an important part of the preparation involved the development of a spacesuit [Music] as a starting point NASA looked at the xmc2 used for X-15 flights and the Navy's Aviation pressure suit the mark IV both were full pressure suits [Music] NASA decided that the mark IV suit worn here by Alan Shepard was lighter and could be more easily modified for space flight the boot leather and the suits gray outer covering would be replaced by aluminized nylon for greater thermal control and the helmet's rubber diaphragm surrounding the face was eliminated with oxygen now entering via a hose at the waist to help cool the suit [Music] for all six manned Mercury missions the mark IV suit performed well but the demands placed upon it were modest like most pressure suits at the time it served as a backup in the event of cabin pressure failure because this never happened on the Mercury flights this suit was only ever pressurized at launch in the early 1960s the Soviet Union space program was achieving an impressive list of firsts for the United States this was a source of national embarrassment in 1961 the new President John Kennedy had boldly proclaimed that America should land a man on the moon before the end of the decade and NASA was flooded with funds this was the beginning of the space race I don't think we ought to waste any money but I think we ought to do the job and this will be done in the decade of the sixth the Mercury program was terminated early in favor of a more complex series of missions with the aim of solving problems associated with sending a man to the Moon the Gemini program made use of a new two-man capsule boosted to orbit atop a modified nuclear missile Gemini required a new suit with new capabilities NASA now understood future missions would have to last much longer suits would have to be more comfortable and astronauts would have to leave their spacecraft in the vacuum of space Gemini controllers were planning the first spacewalk the Less open the Soviet Union they were also preparing for a spacewalk Cosmonaut Alexei leonov was practicing with an inflatable canvas airlock in temporary weightlessness in an aircraft in a parabolic flight path [Music] he was wearing a new spacesuit the berkut designed to function outside his voscon spacecraft [Music] the airlock was needed because the new Vos God still did not have solid-state Electronics its thermionic valves needed air cooling so the capsule could not be evacuated [Music] in March 1965 Alexei leonov left the airlock on voice God 2 to float freely in space it was another first for the Soviet Union soon his birkud spacesuit began ballooning to such an extent that leonov could not reach his camera's shutter release positioned on his leg it was not until after the fall of the Soviet Union that the full story became known the berkut space suit had expanded so much that leonov could not get back inside only by venting his spacesuit could the Cosmonaut regain entry to the vosgod capsule [Music] back at Nasa they heard that leonov's spacewalk had been a resounding success but they felt the Gemini program was catching up in June 1965 astronauts Jim mcdivitt and Ed White were preparing for the world's second spacewalk [Music] Gemini 4's launch went smoothly and on the third orbit Ed White left the capsule [Music] although they didn't know it the greater sophistication of the Gemini craft made this spacewalk much simpler than Alexi leonov's just two months earlier [Music] it was easy to depressurize the entire capsule so no airlock was needed and Ed White's spacesuit was fed through an umbilical connected to the spacecraft learnov carried his own oxygen in a backpack that made re-entry to the Vos God capsule that much harder [Music] within the structure of the Gemini suit was a mesh that prevented the ballooning problem experienced during the Russian Space Walk [Music] the first American Space Walk went so well that NASA assumed working in space presented few obstacles whites Joyride in space gave no indication of the difficulties that lay ahead [Music] the Gemini program had a number of goals and in December 1965 Gemini 6A and Gemini 7 achieved two of them Rendezvous and long duration flight the crew of Gemini 7 remained in orbit for 14 days Mission planners knew that staying in a spacesuit for two weeks would be a challenge so a new version of the g3c space suit called the g5c was worn by the Gemini 7 astronauts it replaced the pressure helmet with a zippered Hood and Frank Borman and Jim Lovell became the first people to remove their spacesuits in flight new technologies were being pioneered in the Gemini spacecraft and problems with the new systems often meant Gemini flights were only partially successful the capsule had to be capable of far more complex Maneuvers than its predecessor and longer duration missions required fuel cell technology for electric power March 1966 Gemini 8 had successfully Rendezvous and then docked with a Target vehicle but a Thruster problem sent the linked craft into a spin the mission was immediately terminated the scheduled spacewalk did not take place and the craft landed in the Pacific half a world away from the planned landing area three months later Gemini 9 could not dock because its Target Vehicles fairing had not been jettisoned the scheduled spacewalk went disastrously wrong when Gene cernan inflated his suit he did not want to bend foreign exhaustion and a fogging space helmet saw cernan called back inside he was overheating training for a spacewalk was limited to brief periods of weightlessness in an aircraft all being suspended in a special jig that moved via an air suspension system across a smooth floor neither provided anything like the real thing Engineers had realized that the current generation of spacesuit worked well sitting in a spacecraft but when doing strenuous work its air cooling system was inadequate new designs were already in train [Music] the next two Gemini flights both failed to demonstrate that an astronaut in a space suit could do meaningful work in space [Music] before the final Gemini flight a new training simulation was tried a mock-up of the Gemini craft docked to an agena Target vehicle was built in the McDonough School indoor pool an approximation of the true weightless environment it allowed astronaut Buzz Aldrin to train for extended periods handholds were fitted to the outside of the spacecraft and the extra vehicular work assignments on Gemini 12 were a complete success it gave NASA planners the confidence to move to the Apollo program and the final stages in America's progress to its moon landing oh by 1966 it was apparent that Apollo was well behind schedule the first manned Flight of the program had been delayed by almost a year because of Developmental problems with the Apollo spacecraft NASA was rushing to meet the 1969 moon landing deadline set by President Kennedy and privately some in the astronaut Corps felt that the hurry was not good for the development of a new capsule [Music] NASA had flagged changes to later models of the spacecraft but the early block 1 version would still carry a crew in the first manned mission to test systems in Earth orbit a new spacesuit was being developed for use on the later Moon missions but it would not be ready for Apollo 1 whose astronauts Gus Grissom Ed White and Roger Chaffee would wear a slightly different version of the Gemini gc4 suit All-American spacecraft had been pressurized with pure oxygen this had weight saving benefits and by exclusion of nitrogen found in natural air the danger of bubbles forming in the bloodstream during rapid decompression was eliminated though the pure oxygen environment presented a fire danger nobody had thought to check the real risks in January 1967 less than a month before the scheduled launch date the Apollo 1 Crew were in their capsule under simulated launch conditions with the craft being tested under its own power a spark triggered a fire and in seconds the crew were dead the inquiry into the fire found the astronauts had died of asphyxiation from carbon monoxide both the spacesuits and the cabin made extensive use of combustible materials the program to continue everything would have to be redesigned Research into the problems associated with a spacesuit that could be used on the moon had been going on since 1962. the new suit had to be rugged designers were still not sure what the lunar surface would present all previous suits had been fed with oxygen and power from an external source the moon suit had to be self-contained and the backpack supplying life support presented problems [Music] dimensions and weight were determined by extensive testing and designers of the life support battery and communication systems worked within strict parameters after the Apollo 1 tragedy flammable components had been removed and an outer layer of beta cloth of woven silica fiber coated with Teflon was added many different ways of simulating the moon's 1 6 gravity were trialled finally the a7l suit emerged beneath the outer layer a tight-fitting suit with elbow wrist and knee joints of a bellows-like structure that maintained equal volume when bent allowed freedom of movement absent in previous suits beneath the pressure suit a light open weave layer was networked with fine tubes circulating cooling water this carried away excess body heat that earlier air-cooled suits are not coped with the pressure suit and the outer protective layer were joined together with the inner cooling garment remaining separate [Music] on Earth the whole suit weighed 35 kilograms with the backpack a further 60 kilograms as the a7l that went to the Moon with the first three successful Apollo lunar missions and it performed flawlessly it continued to evolve as subsequent missions became more demanding the moon suit was robust and Apollo Astronauts had complete confidence in it no lunar Mission ever had a problem with the spacesuit [Music] s with the arrival of the Space Shuttle NASA was expecting to do serious work in orbit and it needed a new spacesuit the extra vehicular Mobility unit or emu is a direct descendant of the Apollo a7l its main difference is the rigid upper torso because they are used in a weightless environment the new suits could be heavier than the Apollo suit which operated in lunar gravity emu is not custom tailored for each user components are made in a range of sizes and are interchangeable parts are intended to have a useful life of around 15 years [Music] with the shuttle NASA envisioned servicing satellites in low earth orbit but first it had to learn how to do simple tasks new technologies were combined with the spacesuit in 1984 astronaut Bruce McCandless using the manned maneuvering unit flew independently beside the space shuttle Challenger after four hours he returned safely the mmu was used for satellite recovery on two subsequent occasions with mixed results after the Challenger disaster NASA reviewed all aspects of safety and the mmu was retired as too risky a simpler technique emerged with foot restraints on the shuttle's robotic arm astronauts could be moved accurately to a site and have a stable work platform in 1990 the Hubble Space Telescope was launched unlike other satellites Hubble was designed to be visited by the space shuttle for regular maintenance and upgrades over a 16-year span there were five servicing missions to the telescope the first being to fix an error in its manufacture each servicing mission called for long and complex spacewalks the Evas were all thoroughly rehearsed in NASA's neutral buoyancy Laboratory the astronauts are weighted so that they neither rise nor sink and all the large components that they handle are similarly neutral astronauts still have the perception of up and down in neutral buoyancy unlike in weightlessness in 1998 work commenced on the International Space Station a collaboration between the U.S Russia Europe Japan and Canada this was the type of project for which the space shuttle had been designed and the expertise that NASA's astronaut Corps had gained was to be put to use for on-orbit construction as the space station grew the Emu spacesuit was refined increased battery capacity was added so that small heaters in the gloves could keep astronauts fingers warm during passages through the Earth's shadow a new safety system was added to the Emu suits called safer the simplified maneuvering system is designed for emergencies in the rare event that a spacewalker becomes untethered from the space station it was first tested in 1994 but it has never been used for an actual emergency with the completion of the ISS in 2011 the space shuttle was retired this meant sole access to the orbiting laboratory was via the Russian soyuz spacecraft cosmonauts and astronauts where the Russian so-called flight suit during trips to and from orbit for maintenance and repair sorties outside the ISS crew will wear either the Emu or the Russian or land space suit many of the Europeans on board have training in the use of both the Orland spacesuit is very practical designed to be serviced on the space station it has a rigid torso with the helmet and visor joined to the suit and access is Vara rear hatch cosmonauts wear a water-cooled undergarment similar to the American suit [Music] unlike the American suit the all land can be put on in just five minutes in the MKS the latest version of the Orlan a cosmonaut can safely remain outside for seven hours [Music] and finally NASA is working on a new generation suit to meet its future needs called the pxs for Prototype exploration suit it also features a rear entry hatch the pxs has a more advanced life support system and is lighter different version called the Z2 is being developed for use on the surface of Mars it allows a greater range of movement and its life support system will take less time to recharge although neither suit has yet been used in conjunction with its life support backpack some of our Solar System's planets have been visited by scientific probes less frequently than others [Music] the outer gas giants Uranus and Neptune are so distant they're hard to reach Uranus is 20 times further from the Sun than Earth while Neptune is 30 times further [Music] both have only been seen at close range by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft Mercury is so close to the Sun that any probe sent in its direction must take a circuitous path to offset the sun's immense gravitational influence the Mariner 10 probe flew past mercury in 1973 and the messenger probe went into orbit around mercury in 2011. Venus presents different problems though it's our closest planetary neighbor and easier for spacecraft to reach dense Cloud hides its features and its surface has hellish conditions the Russian veneera craft have landed but in the hostile environment they could only survive for minutes [Music] roughly twice every Century the planet Venus passes between the Earth and the Sun called the transit of Venus it was closely observed in 1769. astronomers realized that careful timing of Venus's passage across the face of the sun would allow them to calculate the distance to the sun which in turn would unlock far more accurate methods of navigation [Music] in 1961 the Soviet Union launched Venera 1 the first Venus probe past Venus as intended but Mission Control had lost contact with it [Music] the following year NASA launched Marina one to Venus a coding error led to control problems with the launcher he struck command it was destroyed minutes after liftoff battery blew up because convenient launch opportunities only occur in 18-month Cycles NASA had a second probe ready to Launch Mariner 2 was essentially a ranger spacecraft designed to go to the Moon these were the early days of the Space Race and the United States was desperate to catch up with the Soviet Union lead times were short and the Jet propulsional laboratory did not have time to complete its original design [Music] in August 1962 Mariner 2 was launched the ranger spacecraft launched toward the moon had all failed Mariner 2 on its way to Venus was functioning but its Transmissions were weak and due to a launch anomaly it was off course after a week instructions for a complex course correction were transmitted to the spacecraft about an hour later Mariner executed the maneuver which involved a roll turn followed by a pitch turn and finally a main engine burn it worked well but several days later the craft lost lock on the Sun and the Earth its two attitude reference points it corrected itself before Ground Control could diagnose the problem next the signal strength increased to its normal level but a short in a solar panel left it low on power at this time although both America and the Soviet Union had been sending probes toward the planets nothing had succeeded Mariner 2 lost several Telemetry sensors and it began to overheat it continued limping toward Venus but some of the spacecraft's problems were solving themselves Mariner 2 was now close enough to the Sun that it could function effectively on just one solar panel past slightly less than 35 000 kilometers above Venus's Cloud tops it could detect no planetary magnetic field and it recorded temperatures across the planet approaching 500 degrees Kelvin clearly landing on the surface would present problems but America wanted to focus on their first real success in space finally doing something that the Soviets had not Mariner 2 was the first successful interplanetary probe and in California the home of JPL they celebrated [Music] the next major advances in the exploration of Venus were made by the Soviet Union the objective of the Venera series was to land on the surface of Venus designed as understood that not only were the surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead but that the atmospheric pressure was many times that of Earth the Landers they built looked more like diving Bells than spacecraft in June 1967 Venera 4 was launched the vehicle consisted of a carrier craft with instruments used during the cruise phase to Venus and a spherical Landing module that could communicate independently after entering to the atmosphere Venera 4's parachute opened sent back data for 93 minutes but stopped 28 kilometers above the surface yet its Electronics hadn't been overwhelmed by the heat it had simply run out of power extrapolations from its final measurements showed a surface temperature of 500 degrees Celsius and a pressure of 75 atmospheres far higher than anyone expected the Venera program strengthened its Landers and fitted smaller parachutes to reduce descent time launched in January 1969 Venera 5 and 6 learned more about the chemical makeup of the atmosphere but neither remained functioning at the surface the Venera series continued refining the technology and making incremental improvements to Mission duration adding to the knowledge about Venus foreign [Music] 1975 Venera 9 was launched it was a new design consisting of an Orbiter Lander combination with the Orbiter able to act as a relay station for signals transmitted from the surface four months after launch the Orbiter and the Lander encased in a spherical shell separated it entered the atmosphere two days later while the mothercraft became the first probe to go into orbit around Venus photographing parts of the surface in ultraviolet the new Lander had a ring Shield that could replace a parachute during the latter stages of The Descent through the dense atmosphere [Music] Venera 9 transmitted the first black and white pictures from the surface though a design fault meant a second camera could not eject its lens cap [Music] three days later and two thousand kilometers away a twin craft Venera 10 Landed It took pictures too but the same design fault left a lens cap stuck in place both Landers had been pre-cooled while still in space and circulating cooling fluid kept the craft operating on the blistering surface for more than an hour in 1983 two more Venera craft arrived at Venus equipped with synthetic aperture radar they made the first serious attempt to map the surface beneath the cloud layer [Music] over eight months they mapped from the North Pole down to 30 degrees north [Music] 10 9 8 7 6. NASA had taken a minor role in the early exploration of Venus but in 1989 the space shuttle Atlantis lifted off carrying the Magellan probe Magellan was bound for Venus like the Venera craft before it Magellan would use radar to map the surface of the planet it was the first interplanetary spacecraft launched from the space shuttle following a cruise of 15 months Magellan arrived at Venus and entered an elliptical orbit to keep costs down the probe had been built from an agglomeration of spare parts left over from previous NASA missions after some software problems it began mapping the images it relayed remained the highest resolution pictures we have of the surface of Venus pictures of low volcanic blisters emerged and lava channels were evidence of an extremely active surface the thick atmosphere has prevented all but the largest meteors reaching venusian ground and few impact craters were visible yet evidence of plate tectonics that sculpts the Earth's surface was not obvious [Music] after mapping Venus Magellan changed its orbit and plotted the planet's gravitational anomalies on Venus localized changes in gravity correspond to surface features on Earth this is not the case a new naked picture of Venus emerged the surface appears to have been completely remade around half a billion years ago yet while volcanoes and lava channels are common features on Venus Magellan could not find evidence that volcanic activity still happens on the planet in 2006 the European space agency's Venus Express went into orbit around Venus its focus was the long-term analysis of the planet's atmosphere during its eight-year Mission it registered a sharp rise in the atmosphere's sulfur dioxide this could be due to changes in Wind patterns but it could also be a sign of volcanic activity researchers also saw increases in infrared radiation coming from three different volcanic locations more circumstantial evidence of current volcanic activity finally the infrared team saw short-term temperature changes that fluctuated over just a few days it appears that volcanoes may still be active on Venus [Music] the mission ended in 2015 with a series of swoops into the upper atmosphere that verified unexpected ripples in the mesosphere very little in the way of Venus exploration has happened since Venus Express though elaborate plans exist for future missions to Venus nothing at this stage has been funded yet many missions still pass close to Venus to use its gravitation to alter their flight paths in 1974 Mariner 10 was the first spacecraft ever to use the gravitational slingshot effect on its way to Mercury [Music] Italian mathematician Giuseppe Colombo devised the maneuver as a way to save fuel and to fly past Mercury not once but several times the technique is now commonplace ten days after launch Mariner 10 executed instructions for a routine course correction this appeared to go well but after the burn when the craft attempted to reorient itself there was a problem Mariner 10 knew where it was pointing because its tracking sensor could lock onto the star canopus but a flake of paint that had come from the spacecraft was confusing the system an automated backup procedure found canopus again but flaking paint was an issue for the rest of the mission to reach Mercury a spacecraft must approach the Sun and its immense gravity presents a problem voyages to outer planets are constantly slowed by solar gravity but with the inner planets a spacecraft constantly accelerates Mariner 10 used Venus's gravity to reduce its speed and it approached Mercury at an acute angle Mariner 10 did not have enough fuel to go into orbit around Mercury but its sun-centered path allowed the probe to make three close passes its first pass revealed a moon-like planet with a heavily cratered surface though Mercury is the smallest planet it's the most dense it has a large iron-rich core prominent escarpments were seen here Discovery scarp cuts through two craters it falls three kilometers it's thought that these Cliffs are the result of cooling and shrinking of the core Mariner 10 continued to suffer technical problems its tape recorder kept sticking there were restrictions in the rates of data transmission and limited attitude control meant flight Engineers were using solar pressure on the High Gain antenna and solar panels to compensate yet the mission continued Mariner 10 could only map about 45 of Mercury's surface as the same hemisphere faced the Sun during each of its passes Mariner 10 discovered a very thin atmosphere primarily of helium several months after its third and final pass of mercury it ran out of fuel it still orbits the sun main engine start two one and it was more than 30 years before the next mission to Mercury in 2004 messenger was launched it was designed to go into orbit around Mercury which presented a number of design constraints it featured a large woven ceramic sun shield but it did not have a dish antenna it would rely on a phased array that could be electronically pointed after a year in space messenger was back at Earth using its gravitation to modify its orbit even though it was not a large spacecraft it had a powerful engine for course Corrections and orbit insertion continued on to pass Venus twice to lose speed as it drew closer to the Sun three and a half years after launch messenger approached Mercury but this was not the end of its Journey the probe made two more passes of mercury before finally going into orbit after almost seven years in space Mission Engineers had the extra problem of always requiring the probe sunshield to be pointed toward the Sun because it was in orbit messenger was able to complete the mapping started by Mariner 10. the planet's dominant feature is the caloris basin it's an ancient crater more than 1 500 kilometers across Mariner 10 saw some of the area but the rest had been in darkness this map of the Southern polar region uses color to represent illumination because Mercury's axis is not tilted sunlight cannot penetrate deep craters near the poles it was in these areas that messenger discovered substantial amounts of Water Ice messenger received several Mission extensions but in 2015 it crashed into Mercury after running out of fuel a new mission is already on its way to Mercury depi Colombo named after the designer of Mariner 10's trajectory it's a joint effort between jaxa the Japanese space agency and the European Space Agency seven years to reach Mercury the Voyager 2 spacecraft is the only probe to have made close approaches to the two outer ice giants Uranus and Neptune launched in 1977 with its twin Voyager 1. it was able to take advantage of a rare alignment of the four outer planets enabling it to make close observations of each one in 1986 Voyager approached Uranus in the distant past it must have been hit by another massive body that knocked its axis sideways Uranus has an East and a West Pole and for half its orbit one side sees continual sun while the other remains in darkness it has rings which follow its north-south equator [Music] Voyager 2 discovered 11 new moons and a misaligned magnetic field images that the Voyager captured showed Uranus as a bland featureless planet but this was because of its particular season with images from the Hubble Space Telescope we now know that at certain times clouds and planetary weather appear in the atmosphere Uranus's largest moon Miranda was observed in detail for the first time so chaotic is its surface that researchers thought that it must have been blown apart by some Cosmic impact with the fragments reforming now it's thought that tectonic forces initiated by the gravitation of Uranus are responsible for the moon's jumbled appearance [Music] as Voyager 2 left Uranus backlighting from the Sun revealed two new Rings encircling the planet [Music] the spacecraft was now heading toward Neptune the Solar System's last planet in the three years it would take to get there ground Engineers began preparing for Unique challenges [Music] Neptune is 30 times further from the Sun than the Earth and the light intensity is one thousandth what it is here [Music] for photography time exposures would be necessary yet Voyager 2 was traveling so fast that images would spear without special preparation [Music] Engineers calculated just how much the craft would have to swivel while exposures were made to compensate for the probe's movement [Music] in June 1989 Voyager 2 began returning distant images of Neptune across the world people had realized that the data sent back to Earth by this spacecraft was Transforming Our understanding of the solar system [Music] [Applause] before the internet age researchers are the jet propulsion laboratory clustered around TV sets to watch as data and images came in line by line [Music] the more conventional Planet than Uranus its axial tilt is 30 degrees and it revolves in the same direction as Earth while Neptune is slightly heavier than its fellow ice giant Uranus it has a slightly smaller diameter and though it is further from the Sun than its neighbor Neptune emits more heat than Uranus the planet has an internal heat source that drives more Dynamic weather patterns Voyager 2 measured wind speeds at Neptune in excess of 2 000 kilometers per hour the fastest in the solar system there were cirrus clouds in the atmosphere and the probe recorded pictures of a Great Dark Spot similar to Jupiter's Great Red Spot it was an anti-cyclone in the southern hemisphere as large as the Earth [Music] in 1994 when Hubble tried to find the same feature it had disappeared but a new dark spot was forming in the northern hemisphere Voyager 2's last observations within the solar system were of Neptune's largest moon Triton unlike all other moons in the solar system Triton has a retrograde orbit indicating that it was not formed at the same time as the planet but that it had been captured as Voyager 2 moved beyond the planets its cameras were Switched Off to save power both voyagers continue away from the solar system measuring the influence of the solar wind this Remains the only mission to the ice giants on January the 19th 2006 an atlas V was launched [Music] it was a very powerful rocket with an unusually small payload New Horizons left Earth orbit faster than any other probe it was headed for the Kuiper belt at the outer edge of the solar system in particular Pluto in a little more than a year New Horizons reached Jupiter where it received a gravitational assist that cut three years from its flight time to Pluto after it passed Jupiter the spacecraft went into hibernation simply sending an allswell transmission once a week it took New Horizons more than nine years to reach Pluto since it had departed Pluto had lost its status as a planet with the discovery of more objects of similar size in the Kuiper Belt It was decided that to be a planet a body had to clear its orbit Pluto's features surprised everyone here was a living planet shaped by tectonic forces but instead of rock the mountains were made of ice and Frozen methane and Pluto has a thin atmosphere mainly of nitrogen probe continued on over Karen Pluto's largest moon its icy surface has deep canyons and some evidence suggests that it has ice volcanoes Karen is about half the size of Pluto and the two orbit each other from Pluto Karen would appear Motionless In The Sky as the New Horizons probe sped away from Pluto into deep space it began the slow process of transmitting its recorded data back to the Earth at these distances it takes signals four and a half hours to reach Earth with data coming in at one kilobit per second took 469 days for all the Pluto information to be received back on Earth [Music] early in 2019 New Horizons passed trans-neptunian object Ultima Tooley and with a mission extension it continues exploring the outer reaches of the solar system [Music] our son is a star like billions of others throughout the Universe it's a giant nuclear furnace at the center of our planetary system and although life on Earth is completely Reliant upon the sun we also need our planet's magnetic field and atmosphere to protect us from extremes of solar radiation regularly the sun ejects huge blasts of solar plasma and on earth a direct hit by a coronal mass ejection will play Havoc with power grids Communications and satellites [Music] thank you 1859 was a year of extreme solar activity during September of that year astronomer Richard Carrington was sketching sunspots when he observed an intensely bright event less than 18 hours later auroras were seen around the world they extended to low latitudes where the phenomenon is rarely seen Telegraph operators across Europe and North America reported malfunctions including electric shocks and sparking wires this was the first time that solar storms had been linked with auroras and electrical and magnetic disturbances here on Earth and it became known as the Carrington effect since the 1700s a periodic fluctuation had been observed in the number of sunspots but a deeper insight into the sun's Behavior would not emerge until 1958. James Van Allen was the chief scientist for America's first satellite Explorer one it was equipped with a cosmic ray detector the launch was successful but the orbit achieved was highly elliptical with an apogee far greater than expected as its altitude changed variation in the detector's reading suggested that charged particles were trapped in bands around the Earth these became known as the Van Allen belts it was a discovery with far-reaching implications the energetic charged particles that make up the Van Allen belts emanate from the Sun and are trapped by the Earth's magnetic field they fluctuate with solar activity and they present a risk to spacecraft that have to pass through them the previous year physicist Eugene Parker working at the University of Chicago had predicted that a constant stream of charged particles would flow from the Sun he called it the solar wind the astronomical Community was reluctant to accept this idea [Music] soon his theory was Vindicated as early Russian and American spacecraft began detecting a constant stream of charged particles solarwind explained why a comet's tale always points away from the Sun Parker's supersonic solar wind Theory predicted a variable stream of plasma charged particles permeating the solar system the Earth's magnetic field deflects most of the solar wind preserving the Earth's atmosphere in 1995 the solar and heliospheric Observatory was launched Soho monitors the Sun from a point where the Gravity from Earth and from the Sun exert equal force keeping the probe in a stable orbit Soho gives us a clear picture of the solar wind it's Lasko instrument obscures the central disk of the Sun revealing the corona the sun's atmosphere the planets are also clearly visible the horizontal lines flanking them are due to their brightness overwhelming the camera's sensor Soho's extreme ultraviolet Imaging telescope was able to see waves traveling out from solar flares causing snow-like interference in the image sensor solar radiation in the extreme ultraviolet varies from minute to minute and over the sun's 11-year solar cycle solar activity generates tides in the Earth's atmosphere which increase with altitude this in turn adds the drag felt by low orbiting satellites communication systems can also be affected in particular GPS services constantly monitoring the sun's behavior is important and in 2010 NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory it orbits the earth geosynchronously at an inclination of 28 degrees which gives it a constant view of the Sun the sdo observes in a number of different wavelengths that correspond to different temperatures each one revealing varying activities from the surface to the Corona and to the flaring regions the sun is not solid rather than rotating its swirls at the equator it spins once every 25 days at the poles it takes 38 days it's in a plasma State extremely hot matter made up of loose electrons and ions plasmas are excellent conductors of electricity and the movement of the sun generates a tangle of magnetic field lines the surface of the Sun known as the Photosphere has a temperature of around 6000 degrees Kelvin and is best viewed in the visible part of the spectrum here sunspots appear as dark regions where magnetic flux impedes convection these are about the size of the Earth beyond the visible spectrum magnetic Loops at the same areas become visible the lower levels of the sun's atmosphere the chromosphere see gravity yielding to the dynamic thermal and magnetic forces with temperatures increasing to 8 000 degrees Kelvin ascending further through the solar atmosphere a narrow band called the transition region sees temperatures rise to more than 500 000 degrees Kelvin in the corona seen here during an eclipse it rises to a million degrees Kelvin why this happens is not understood the atmosphere is where the solar weather is generated solar flares appear as bright flashes bursts of electromagnetic radiation from radio waves to gamma rays solar flares from some other stars are much larger than those from our sun and sometimes smaller Stars known as red dwarfs display extreme solar flares [Music] the Swift gamma-ray Observatory is designed for rapidly locating brief bursts of gamma rays and x-rays in April 2014 Swift saw a solar flare emanating from dgcvn its initial blast was 10 000 times stronger than any Flare from the Sun it was the first of seven flares that continued for two weeks dgcvn is a red dwarf about one-third the size of the sun and it rotates twice as fast as the sun this enables it to generate a much stronger magnetic field it's thought that the strength of the star's magnetic field is related to the intensity of the flares it emits coronal mass ejections are different they are vast clouds of plasma blasted from the sun's outer layers they travel with the solar wind while they are often linked with solar flares researchers have not been able to establish a direct relationship observing the sun in different wavelengths yields very accurate temperature readings and the dramatic rise in temperatures moving away from the surface had to scientists completely baffled 1990 a new spacecraft was launched off of Discovery and the Ulysses spacecraft Bound for the polar regions of the Sun foreign the Ulysses probe was bound for the Sun but had to go the long way solar researchers wanted to have a different view of our star the solar system coalesced from a vast cloud of gas and dust as it collapsed it began to spin forming a disk all the planets orbit along the plane of this disk called the ecliptic Ulysses would look at the poles the parts of the Sun that could not be seen from our terrestrial viewpoint Ulysses traveled via Jupiter using the giant planet's strong gravitation to change its course it approached on a path that took it over the planet's North Pole this bent the probe's trajectory beneath the ecliptic so that he could see the Sun from a polar orbit Ulysses we learned that the sun's magnetic field reverses every 11 years and that the solar wind from the more Dynamic South Pole was faster than from equatorial regions yet the South Pole had no clear location the only thing clear about the sun was that it keeps changing now heliophysicists wanted to be able to see the face of the Sun that was not seen from Earth II rocket with stereo giving us a three-dimensional look at the physics of our sun the twin stereo probes were launched in 2006. they were in slightly different orbits one leading the Earth and moving slightly faster the other trailing the Earth and moving slower each year the two crafts separated by 44 degrees giving each an increasingly different view of the Sun cause the sun rotates sunspots can develop out of sight as sunspots are key indicators of solar weather it's important to know just what is about to spin into view the stereo probes now observe the sun in 360 degrees this makes it much easier to plot the direction of coronal mass ejections though these happen with reasonable frequency most will miss the Earth if they hit they create havoc in electrical systems and trigger substorms in the planet's magnetosphere information provided by the stereo satellites is being used for the protection of power grids and satellites through regular space weather bulletins 1960s observers have been aware that auroras would sometimes brighten suddenly with movement within the auroral curtains increasing these were short-term phenomena quite distinct from solar storms that result in auroral activity lasting days as communication satellites in geosynchronous orbits became more sophisticated they registered sudden localized falls in the Earth's magnetic field that seemed to coincide with what were now being called substance three two one we have ignition and liftoff of a Delta II rocket carrying Themis NASA's revolutionary journey to study the Northern Lights the femis constellation of satellites was designed to monitor the behavior of the Earth's magnetosphere [Music] the aim was to measure fluctuations within the Earth's magnetic field and relate any variations to changes detected in the auroras from ground stations in the North American Arctic [Music] each satellite was equipped with an array of Booms to measure the strength and direction of electrical and magnetic fields after several months they maneuvered into elliptical orbits of varying eccentricity with each reaching a high point above the night side of the Earth the Earth's magnetic field deflects most of the plasma from the Sun at times of high solar activity some of the charged particles will spiral into the poles on Earth's day side the night side field lines are stretched to Breaking Point called magnetic reconnection when the plasma suddenly rebounds along the field lines into the polar regions in February 2008 two of the probes detected a reconnection event and 96 seconds later the ground stations registered a sudden brightening of the Aurora the giant Loops bursting from the sun's surface are known as flux ropes they are one of the most basic configurations in plasma the glowing plasma follows helical magnetic field lines twisting around the central core femi satellites discovered that flux ropes can extend all the way from the Sun to the Earth's upper atmosphere carrying currents as high as 650 000 amps heliophysicists remained baffled by the behavior of the sun's atmosphere so a new probe was constructed known as Iris it was small and simple it consisted of a telescope an Imaging spectrograph and ancillary support equipment it was cheap to build and cheap to Launch Iris was placed in a polar orbit of the earth that gave it an uninterrupted view of the Sun it was able to look at the edge of the chromosphere where the plasma began its steep increase in temperature its images were far more detailed than had been delivered by any other probe and it could discern rapid changes the waving Jets of plasma called spicules were revealed in great clarity there are roughly 10 million specules across the sun's surface at any given moment they can grow to 10 000 kilometers yet they collapse in 5 or 10 minutes researchers have made computer models of the spicules that behave in the same way as the images from Iris it is thought that they form through the interaction of charged and neutral particles with the Tangled magnetic fields it seems magnetism must play an important role in the heating of the solar Corona and in the high-speed ejection of plasma but the mechanism is still not understood there are at least 20 different satellites currently monitoring the sun's Behavior most are at orbit around the Earth while it is important to get beyond the Earth's atmosphere to analyze the solar wind it has not been possible to get really close to the Sun [Music] heliophysicists know the particles of the solar wind change not long after they leave the corona if these particles could be sampled close to the Sun it would reveal what part of the solar atmosphere was responsible for their extreme heat and their ultra high speed until recently it was not possible to build a craft capable of withstanding the temperatures in regions that scientists wish to explore the team behind the messenger probe to Mercury solved some of these problems with a woven ceramic sun shield which had to face the Sun at all times around 2010 work began on solar probe plus designed to pass the sun just 6 million kilometers above its surface a number of different systems have to work in concert to enable the probe to gather data inside the sun's atmosphere a carbon composite solar shield surfaced with highly reflective alumina will shade the rest of the craft from temperature extremes as the sun is a wide band radio Source the probe is out of contact during its close approaches and must function autonomously in 2017 the probe was renamed the Parker solar probe after Eugene Parker the physicist who had first identified the solar wind it was the first spacecraft to be named after a living person on a mission like this in the new territory you're going to be in for some surprises maybe not big ones maybe only little ones but you're going to find that your point of view will have to change to conform with the data why is the solar Corona the outer atmosphere of the Sun a million or two degrees when the sun itself is only 5600 it isn't because of sunshine that's for sure again we don't know until we make the flight and have a mirror or two to think about the data the Parker probe's launch weight is less than 700 kilograms which is quite modest yet its launch vehicle the Delta IV heavy is one of the most powerful boosters available minus 15. in the pre-dawn hours of August 12 2018. The Final Countdown was proceeding Eugene Parker was at Cape Canaveral to watch the launch [Music] the probe was headed for 26 highly elliptical solar orbits over seven years during its Mission it will make seven close passes of Venus slowing each time to sweep closer and closer to the Sun after separation from its upper stage the probe first deployed its solar panels fold back near the sun with a cooling system enabling them to survive the magnetometer Boom unfolded at the rear of the craft and then the field antennae to measure electric and magnetic fields and waves snapped into place though the Parker probe leaves Earth at high speed it uses Venus's gravity to slow down allowing it to approach the Sun at the appropriate angle however as it falls toward the sun it will accelerate to 720 000 kilometers per hour on its outward Loops it will lose speed but as the mission progresses the Parker probe will make closer passes at higher speeds [Music] it made its first close approach of Venus after just 52 days one month later Parker approached the Sun for 11 days it was out of contact with Mission Control quietly recording data while carefully keeping its sun shield pointed directly at the Sun though the heat in this region is Extreme the particle density is not the sun shield will reach around 1500 degrees Kelvin and the protected Electronics of the spacecraft will be at room temperature as the probe Loops away from the sun it's able to re-establish radio contact and play back the stored data this is the first image from inside the sun's Corona taken during Parker's first pass it shows a coronal streamer the bright spot is the planet Mercury the dark spots are image correction artifacts the Parker probe second and third passes were at much the same distance and speed as the first but subsequent passes will be both lower and faster as it continues to use Venus to modify its orbit in 2024 the Parker solar probe will visit Venus for the last time and its final five passes of the sun will come down to 6.2 million kilometers from the surface by this time we should have a clearer understanding of the processes that heat the solar wind and expel it at such high speeds but whatever we learn about our sun it will raise new questions [Music] clearer understanding of the sun has led to design changes in satellites and revised management practices of power grids and communication systems but with new proposals to send humans back to the moon or on planetary expeditions we will need to understand more about the potentially hostile solar weather that flows from the Star we call our sun [Music] there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy The Milky Way or maybe there are 200 billion or maybe 400 billion no one really knows in the universe there are 100 billion galaxies and as technology improves that number could increase to 200 billion galaxies certain at the start of the 20th century there was only one Galaxy our own [Music] clearly over the past hundred years our knowledge of the universe has expanded but there's still a long way to go [Music] thank you after more than 40 years Voyager 1 has left the influence of the solar wind and is heading for Interstellar space most of its instruments have been switched off and its nuclear battery is running low it will be many thousands of years before it reaches anything other than Interstellar debris by then the craft will be long dead Cosmic distances are so vast that sending a probe to investigate anything beyond our solar system is not practical the only realistic way we have of exploring the universe beyond our neighborhood is by examining the light that reaches us [Music] telescope is the main tool we have for this investigation and for centuries astronomers have been building ever larger instruments to see deeper into the cosmos foreign conventional telescope design reached its limit past eight meters in diameter the curved primary mirror becomes so heavy that it will sag as it is aimed at different targets its precise curve is distorted by the effects of gravity in addition any extra resolution gained by the larger mirror is not delivered because of atmospheric distortion [Music] one way to solve both these problems is to put a telescope in space the Hubble Space Telescope is the best known example while the absence of atmospheric Distortion was a breakthrough producing very sharp images both operational and maintenance costs are considerable and there are launch constraints on the size of a telescope that can be delivered to orbit [Music] [Applause] but Engineers have developed a new generation of earth-based telescopes with segmented mirrors that overcome the limits to size and can nullify much of the Distortion caused by the atmosphere the twin Keck telescopes on Mauna care in Hawaii were early adopters of this technique both have 10 meter mirrors each in 36 hexagonal segments sensors monitor the mirror's shape and actuators behind each segment continually correct for any distortions to the Curve the system is called active Optics a similar system that works at a more rapid rate monitors the stability of a bright guide star or an artificial guide star generated by a laser the Adaptive optic system reads wavefront changes in the atmosphere then adjusts The Mirror's shape to minimize any distortion this image of Jupiter using Adaptive Optics Rivals those captured by an orbiting telescope observatories are located at high altitude where the air is dry and there is no light pollution from nearby cities the European Southern Observatory has clusters of telescopes at several sites high in Chiles at Akama desert at paranal four identical large telescopes each have 8.2 meter mirrors they can combine their light using interferometry in addition four auxiliary 1.8 meter telescopes can link into the cluster collectively they are the very large telescope interferometer or vlti visible light is just a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum ESO has another facility Northeast of paranal on the chagnantor plateau here an array of 66 radio dishes observe in millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths they are linked and also function as an interferometer observing in the microwave part of the spectrum is particularly useful as these frequencies penetrate gas and dust clouds that remain opaque to higher energy signals the more widely the telescopes are separated the better the angular resolution they can deliver this property LED radio astronomers around the globe on a unique collaboration if radio telescopes around the world could link up perhaps they could see the unseeable general relativity predicted bodies so massive with such strong gravitation that not even light could escape from them they were called black holes and at first they were regarded as a mathematical anomaly but evidence mounted suggesting that black holes were more than just a theoretical curiosity Center of some galaxies light far more intense than could be expected from Stars has been detected massive bodies such as young Stars attract diffuse matter which begins swirling and flattens into what's called an accretion disk just as planets orbit Stars it's now accepted that galaxies orbit supermassive black holes the very bright light comes from the accretion disk surrounding the black hole MATA in the accretion disk is accelerated to incredible speeds generating intense Heat along the axis of rotation Jets of ionized material are ejected at close to the speed of light [Music] computer modeling indicated that the vast energy generated by a black hole's interaction with material in the accretion disk could be detected the silhouette is the Event Horizon the boundary Beyond which light cannot Escape if you want to make a test of the fundamental theories of the universe you want to go to the most extreme Laboratories in the universe and a black hole is that astrophysicists knew that by linking widely separated radio telescopes the resolving power of the combined instruments would increase dramatically the first attempt at Imaging the black hole at the center of our own Galaxy was made in 2006 using instruments in Arizona and Hawaii it was not successful but researchers learned a lot realizing more telescopes were required by 2009 an international collaboration between eight different telescopes had coalesced they aimed to capture an image of the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87. so for this experiment it was clear that we need expertise from completely different areas and so we needed someone with imaging capabilities we needed someone with numerical relativity capabilities and in my case we need someone who can try to find this additional information via pulsars and so just being part of this team means you work completely differently the project was named the Event Horizon telescope instruments in North and South America Europe Hawaii and even in Antarctica would unite to form a telescope with a virtual diameter equal to the Earth none of these facilities was designed to work as part of such a large array and the technical difficulties facing the team were immense signals from all the sites would have to be processed at a central location yet the distances that separated them were so great that the direct line linking them was Impractical data transfer would take place via computer hard drives that were moved from the place of acquisition to two locations the Max Planck Institute in Bonn and the MIT Haystack observatory in Massachusetts foreign Horizon telescope collaboration is a collaboration of more than 200 scientists with different backgrounds they all come from different parts of the world they have different experiences different set of skills these are Engineers observers theoreticians and they all work together not only to image The Event Horizon of a black hole but also to understand what we're seeing theoreticians already understood that while a black hole could only ever appear as a silhouette its influence upon light emanating from surrounding matter would be dramatic by using mathematical simulation NASA came up with a moving image of what they thought the EHT project would reveal viewed from above the swirling accretion disk appears without Distortion the smooth Inner Circle is the photon ring light in orbit just outside the Event Horizon when viewed from the side the black hole's gravitation bends light from the accretion disk so it can be seen from several angles at the same time but no one really knew what they would see for decades evidence had accumulated that a black hole at the center of Galaxy m87 was consuming huge amounts of material unusually high emissions across the electromagnetic spectrum were detected in this region and images from the Hubble Space Telescope revealed a huge jet of matter extending out light years in April 2017 the EHT was scheduled to make a series of coordinated observations of the heart of the m87 Galaxy each Observatory had been equipped with its own atomic clock as all data had to be meticulously time stamped good weather had to happen simultaneously at each site and ago no-go decision was made several hours before each observation April the 5th 6th and 7th had good conditions with data being collected observations were suspended on the 8th and 9th due to strong winds at the sites in Mexico and Arizona with the final night's observations made on the 10th and 11th of April [Music] we have this terrible period of waiting where we don't know if it's all worked we send all of our data together and only when it's truly combined do we know if it's worked and then the even harder part begins of analyzing that data and being very very careful doing all the checks and balances to know that we got it right during the observation period five petabytes that's 5 000 terabytes of data was recorded the hard drives upon which it was stored weighed half a ton they were transported to correlators in Westford Massachusetts and a bond in Germany while this was relatively simple from most sites limited access to the South Pole telescope delayed its data for several months interpreting Radio Data as a picture relies upon the black hole's gravitation bending passing electromagnetic waves EHT will only be able to see the individual points from rays that are bent toward the Earth it is the correlation of all these points that builds them into a recognizable image foreign [Music] actually allows us to not only know they exist and not only know an event horizon exist it also allows us to test some of the very basic predictions of the theory of general relativity of Albert Einstein which really describes space and time in its completeness and that has never been tested before in April 2019 The Event Horizon telescope team released their image of the active center of the m87 Galaxy at its heart was the silhouette of one of the largest black holes we know it's roughly 38 billion kilometers across the diameter of our solar system its mass is 6.6 billion times greater than our sun after predictions flowing from the general theory of relativity more than 100 years ago the world finally has proof that black holes do exist but this is not the end for the EHT team expanding the number of telescopes in the network will enhance resolution and there are plans to investigate the black hole at the center of our own Galaxy foreign the future of this project is amazing right we have done something extraordinary we've made the first picture of a black hole but now we want to do even more now we want to make the first movie now we want to understand how space time rotates around the black hole we'll do that by putting more telescopes around the world to make our virtual lens even better investigation into black holes is not restricted to radio astronomy the new technology telescope at La CIA in Chile the first instrument equipped with active Optics began long-term observation of the Stars at the center of our own Galaxy in 1992. the NTT observed in the infrared part of the spectrum because only that light was able to penetrate the heavy clouds of gas and dust shrouding the central regions of the Milky Way a team from the Max Planck Institute plotted the positions of the Stars building up an image of the way they moved they began using the larger telescopes of the European Southern Observatory at paranal when they came online over 16 years they mapped the paths of 28 Stars well you see the Milky Way Center is one of the most important Laboratories we have to study in very great detail what's happening in centers of galaxies in much more detail than we can ever hope to do in in all other galaxies yet here we are we can study whether there's a central black hole what happens around it and so forth oh very general issues which you would like to explore and which you cannot really study that much in detail in other Galactic nuclei results show that the stars are orbiting an invisible point which must be our own Galaxy's black hole analysis of their highly eccentric paths suggest the Milky Way's black hole is slightly greater than four million times the mass of our sun of particular interest is the star S2 which is in a 16-year orbit of the black hole its elliptical path was due to take it to its closest pass and its highest speed in April 2018. we want to use it as a tool to test for the general relativity the theory of Einstein is actually wrong or right general relativity predicts that the black hole's influence would distort s2's light toward the infrared as it reached three percent of the speed of light which happened yet another Vindication for Einstein this test is important to researchers because general relativity predicts that time stops inside a black hole's Event Horizon and they want to know if the laws of physics break down approaching these extremes since Copernicus proposed that the planets orbited the sun astronomers have speculated about planets orbiting other stars advances in telescope technology allowed researchers to see dips in the brightness of stars that could only be caused by a transiting planet these fluctuations in intensity gave astronomers clues about the planet's size and its orbit monitor the spectral ships in a star's light caused by a consistent change in its position again only explicable by an orbiting planet using these systems telescopes around the world began cataloging exoplanets but the methods used were biased toward finding large planets similar in size to Jupiter that had an easily detectable influence on their star and of all the planetary systems out there researchers could only use these methods for planetary systems that were Edge on to the Earth even so the number of exoplanets we knew about continued to grow there were surprises in 2012 a French team discovered an orphan Planet wandering across our galaxy it had no star it was detected by its emissions in the infrared it's difficult to predict the orphan planet's size but it certainly still at the very least several times the mass of Jupiter naturally researchers were Keen to see earth-sized planets planets that could possibly nurture life when a new and highly accurate spectrometer called Harps was installed at esos La Sia three and a half meter telescope this became possible among its discoveries are two planets orbiting gliesa 667c about 20 light years from Earth the star is a red dwarf about one-third the mass of our sun of particular interest is glisa 667c c a planet about five times the mass of the Earth and at a distance from its star that puts it in the habitable zone statements about conditions on gliesa 667cc have such a large margin of error that much more work needs to be done before it could be declared a possible venue for Life as We Know It another star 40 light years away has a greater range of possibilities trappist-1 is an Ultra Cool Red Dwarf star orbited by seven planets all of them close to Earth in size to date this is the largest number of exoplanets detected orbiting an individual star at least three of the planets are considered in the habitable zone many different observatories have been Gathering data about the trappist-1 system but we still know so little about what kind of environments the different planets might have however the coming generation of telescopes should be able to analyze the atmospheres of the trappists planets so they will remain a region of close study into the future [Laughter] [Music] at the moment around 3800 exoplanets have been cataloged and that number continues to grow in 2018 the satellite test was launched to search for more exoplanets to have a clear view of both the northern and southern Skies Tess was placed in a 14-day orbit around the Earth at a 40 degree angle to the plane of the moon's orbit it will systematically map 26 segments of the sky recording fluctuations in the brightness of nearby stars that reveal exoplanets during its close passes of the Earth the planet Hunter downlinks its data to sites across the United States ground-based observatories will then follow up leads in a more detailed way this type of collaboration between orbiting and terrestrial telescopes is becoming common [Music] an interesting Discovery came from The Young Star beta pictoris fluctuations in its light did not bear the rhythmic signature of an orbiting planet further investigation by the European Southern Observatory revealed three comets orbiting the young star beta pictoris is only around 20 million years old and still displays a protoplanetary ring of dust in Tess's first year of operations at least 29 new exoplanets were confirmed with a further 1000 objects of Interest listed in publicly accessible databases during its two-year life Tess will image two hundred thousand celestial bodies including a thousand of the closest red dwarf stars and there will soon be a new planet hunter in orbit the wide field infrared survey telescope W first will use a different technique known as gravitational micro lensing to detect much smaller exoplanets as one star passes in front of another its gravitation distorts the distant star's light by monitoring the light over time a spike in what should be a regular curve reveals an exoplanet orbiting the lensing star but that's not wfirst's only objective there's a gap in knowledge that some cosmologists find embarrassing when quantifying the speed at which galaxies rotate and the amount of mass they contain there's a baffling mismatch our laws of physics say that spinning galaxies do not contain enough matter and therefore enough gravitation to prevent them from flying apart and yet they don't astrophysicists came up with the Dark Matter hypothesis this is not just matter that doesn't glow it is matter that interacts with nothing else the only influence it has is via gravitation Halos of Dark Matter surrounding galaxies is the current method to explain why they move the way they do estimates say there is five times more Dark Matter than matter yet no one can explain it [Music] another fascinating anomaly is that early galaxies galaxies whose light has taken more than 10 billion years to reach us rotate at a slower rate the influence of dark matter is not as pronounced new generations of telescope are being built to help researchers answer some fundamental questions about the laws governing the universe but it seems that cosmology has reached a stage where it is just discovering how little we know about what lies beyond the solar system the Earth is our home our natural environment results from complex relations between the Sun the oceans and the atmosphere the polar ice and the tropical heat represent the extremes of our planet's climate in reality this is a very narrow temperature band completely different from any other planet we've observed the stability of the Earth's environment has allowed life to emerge and life has changed the planet as far as we know the Earth is the only planet in the universe to have given rise to life [Music] [Music] the Orion Nebula is a vast cloud of gas and dust in the Orion constellation it's a place where new stars are being created as part of the nebula condenses it separates into clumps as each Clump contracts under its own gravitation it begins to swirl flattening into a disc they're called protoplanetary discs or propolits in the center of a propolid as the molecules are squeezed together a fusion reaction begins and a star ignites some proclids occurring close to an established star shine brightly under the influence of their neighbor while this makes them easier to observe the glowing gas and dust is being Stripped Away by the Stellar winds from the adjacent star dark propellates only observable as Silhouettes maintain their surrounding ring of gas and dust as the system matures this Stellar debris will form a planetary system the Hubble Space Telescope has recorded numerous examples of this process enough for astronomers to understand that the formation of planets is commonplace [Music] this is how our own Sun started its life 4.6 billion years ago but the planets would take longer to emerge small grains within the disk began accreting forming planetesimals the larger a clump became the stronger its gravitational attraction in turn leading to more rapid growth an early version of Jupiter would have been the first to coalesce completely clearing its orbit around a core of heavy metal and rock Jupiter's atmosphere mainly of hydrogen was compressed by its strong gravitation any solid surface lay beneath thousands of kilometers of liquid gas our observations of exoplanets have revealed jupiter-sized gas giants orbiting close to their Stars astronomers believe the young Jupiter would have begun a track toward the sun dragging asteroids and comets in with it but Jupiter's inward path reversed as it was pushed into an orbital resonance with the emerging Saturn not all of the objects forming in the early solar system stayed orbiting the Sun smaller objects passing a planet would be deflected by the stronger gravitation or even captured becoming a moon it is thought that there were up to 20 smaller planets orbiting in the inner solar system from which the four remaining terrestrial planets were formed at this time collisions in the developing planetary system were common and evidence from the Apollo moon rocks suggest an impact between the early Earth and an ancestor of our moon was important in our planet's evolution the Earth has a larger than expected iron core and gravitational analysis of the Moon suggests its core is lighter than expected a collision between the bodies would explain the moon's loss of much of its heavy material to the more massive Earth [Music] Act was a glancing blow that set the Earth rapidly spinning with a five-hour day the Moon that we know coalesced from the molten debris Although our moon is not the largest in the solar system it is closer in Mass to its parent Planet than any other Moon the stabilizing effect that the moon has upon the Earth's rotation is significant over long periods the Earth's axis will vary by as much as one degree without the moon's influence this variation could be as much as 85 degrees with drastic implications for the climate stability the debris in the early solar system was cleared by the planets in a period called The Heavy bombardment the emerging Earth was peppered with asteroids and comets delivering water necessary for life while tectonic forces erased the bombardment scars from Earth the moon which endured the same travails is still covered with craters when chaos in the developing solar system settled down the young Earth was in a unique position the Earth's distance from the Sun was just right for the abundance of water on the planet to exist in liquid form as the moon had drifted away the planet's rapid rotation had slowed and the sun's heat was evenly shared across the surface the Earth's large metallic core combined with the planet's rotation meant that a magnetic field stretched out around the planet deflecting the charged solar wind and protecting the surface from extremes of solar radiation in a hostile Universe the Earth was a uniquely benign environment foreign the geological record shows that around 2.7 billion years ago oxygen began occurring in the atmosphere the vast iron ore regions of Western Australia were formed as iron in the oceans reacted with the new abundance of oxygen to form iron oxide simple plant life was using the sunlight and carbon dioxide to live and It produced highly reactive oxygen as a waste product this enabled more complex life to emerge building an intricate web of interrelated plants and animals completely transforming the planet [Music] the change in the atmosphere had other dramatic consequences oxygen stripped much of the highly insulating gases from the air drastically cooling the earth a sequence of ice ages began though there is an abundance of evidence showing planetary glaciation punctuated by warm periods the factors triggering these Cycles are complex fold lines are Clues to the movement of continents leading to diversions of ocean currents effect of volcanic activity on the atmosphere changes in the direction of the Earth's axis with regard to our planet's elliptical orbit around the sun all contributors to long-term fluctuations in the earth's climate analysis of ice cores deposited in the Antarctic or Greenland is an accurate way to see how the composition of the atmosphere has changed over the previous eight hundred thousand years bubbles of air caught between snowflakes before being rigidly trapped as the snow becomes ice can be accurately sampled one thing is clear carbon dioxide reaches a peak of around 270 parts per million during The warm periods and drops to approximately 170 parts per million when glaciation is at its greatest but from this data it's hard to know if extra CO2 causes the warming or the warming leads to extra CO2 foreign Dave Keeling working for the Scripps Institute began recording accurate levels of atmospheric CO2 at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii it was the beginning of a unique record known as the Keeling curves [Music] keeling's graph revealed a seasonal variation corresponding to spring and summer in the northern hemisphere where land mass and plant cover is greater during the northern spring and into the summer CO2 levels dropped because of the increase in photosynthesis by the 1970s a disturbing Trend had emerged CO2 levels were in a steady rise at first there was uncertainty about the implications extra CO2 could trap more Heat leading to a warming effect known as the greenhouse effect but some scientists were worried that aerosol pollution could attenuate levels of sunlight reaching the planet resulting in a cooling environment as the decades passed different pieces of evidence were collected drill cores from the ocean floor revealed that ice ages had been triggered by milankovic Cycles the variations between Earth's Tilt and its elliptical orbit though these effects were minor the correlation was obvious if such a small nudge could alter the climate perhaps changes in CO2 could as well scientists were realizing just how poorly they understood planet Earth [Music] Canaveral carrying a robot weatherman into orbit for America at the beginning of the Space Age scientists were Keen to make weather observations from orbit launched in 1960 tyros 1 was the first weather satellite it was equipped with two TV cameras regularly transmitting images of global Cloud patterns it provided meteorologists with a unique View and it was followed by improved versions because these early satellites were in highly inclined low earth orbits the data gathered covered the whole planet and it was shared across the world [Music] 1873 Nations had been cooperating on weather prediction via the international meteorological organization which in 1951 became the World Meteorological organization an arm of the United Nations headquartered in Geneva [Music] with a UN resolution calling for international cooperation in the peaceful uses of outer space weather satellites of different nations were soon being coordinated for the benefit of all mankind in 1964 the nimbers program began series of seven satellites included a more sophisticated set of sensors [Music] Nimbus was a test bed for new technologies and it gathered data about different areas along with Cloud patterns was information about the atmosphere and sea ice [Music] this was the pre-digital age and all electronic image data was burnt to and stored on 70 millimeter film little thought was given to establishing an archive for future reference [Music] program was an early example of Earth observation rather than just a group of weather satellites a meteorologists started seeing the planet as a complex and interconnected system today a fleet of satellites is in operation monitoring the atmosphere the oceans the ice the land and the biosphere it is now understood that ice particularly sea ice plays an important role in the earth's climate system Polar Ice slowly flows to the coasts where it melts providing a source of cold water that drives the ocean currents responsible for the transfer of heat from the equatorial regions to the poles these currents also move nutrition which is important for the survival of life global winds also circulate water via clouds keeping the land moist and able to support vegetation plant life in both the oceans and the atmosphere removes CO2 from the air and replenishes the atmospheric oxygen both the ice known as the cryosphere and the clouds reflect a proportion of the sun's energy back out into space the extent of the ice and cloud cover are important factors in the Earth's energy budget as ice melts it exposes Ocean or Rock which absorbs more solar energy similarly cloud cover or the absence of it will have an effect upon the land or sea beneath vegetation is also an important climate Factor as land plants pump huge amounts of water vapor into the atmosphere but things are changing Humanity simply through weight of numbers is influencing key elements of the planet's climate system in 50 years the Earth's human population has risen from just over 3.5 billion to 7.7 billion today more people need more resources and while there have been Revolutions in agriculture and in technology the Earth's reserves are not Limitless in 1979 Europe began launching spacecraft and while the new Earth observation satellites were revealing changes scientists were reluctant to reach conclusions about long-term trends they understood that there was a certain amount of variability in the planet's climate cycle and though climate science knew about the steady rise in atmospheric CO2 revealed by the Keeling curve researchers were looking for additional solid evidence that change caused by human activity was happening since 1913 spectroscopy had revealed that a layer of ozone in the stratosphere blocked harmful UV sunlight from reaching the ground in 1974 Mario Molina a postdoctoral fellow working on hot atom chemistry published a paper suggesting that the family of industrial chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs could damage the ozone layer in the 1980s meteorologists working in Antarctica found the evidence the polar vortex above the southern continent concentrates the CFCs in the stratosphere mother of pearl clouds in the polar Skies contain ice crystals which in combination with ultraviolet split chlorine from the CFC molecule each chlorine atom can break down over 100 000 ozone molecules a large area centered over Antarctica showed almost no ozone became known as the hole in the ozone layer the United Nations began talks aimed at limiting the production of CFCs and in 1989 an international treaty known as the Montreal protocol capped the production of CFCs and ultimately resulted in a 10-year phase out of CFC production all countries signed the agreement and the Montreal protocol is seen as a model of international cooperation in the 1980s an upward Trend in global temperature averages was becoming clear and a scientific consensus emerged that the burning of fossil fuels was altering the balance of gases in the atmosphere most of our planet's fresh water is locked in the polar ice caps 61 percent of this ice covers the Antarctic continent in the north Greenland is also covered by an ice sheet there is no land mass at the North Pole but a large area of sea ice grows and shrinks with the seasons seasonal sea ice also fringes Greenland and Antarctica ice shelves are a third manifestation of polar ice these are thick layers of ice that extend into the ocean from the mouths of glaciers periodically icebergs will break away from these regions these areas are important to the circulation of global winds and ocean currents and since 2002 NASA has tracked the prevalence of water in general and ice in particular via the grace satellites which were recently replaced by a similar pair of Grace follow on satellites [Music] the two follow the same orbit and minute changes in the earth's gravitational field will cause them to change speed with a variation in the distance between them this data is accurately measured allowing researchers to record changes due to variations in groundwater or in ice thickness during the life of the first Grace Mission Greenland lost 285 gigatons of ice per year on average Antarctica lost 137 gigatons per year from 2005 to 2016 sea levels Rose by 3.7 centimeters due to Melting ice sheets and to expansion of sea water sea levels have been monitored from space since 1992. initially with the topics Poseidon satellite and more recently with the Jason series of satellites Jason 3 uses a Precision radar altimeter to measure Regional and Global variation in sea levels in the 20 years to 2014 the average rise was six centimeters but the increase is not uniform the red areas show the greatest rise with white representing no change and blue signifying a decrease the unevenness of the sea surface is due to a complex interaction between ocean currents the Earth's Spin and the Topography of the ocean floor all these factors must be accounted for to arrive at a baseline against which to measure changes blue areas in the Atlantic show a shift in the Gulf Stream the kamag region of Southern France is a low-lying area at the Delta of the Rhone river in the 1980s a sea wall was built to prevent the encroaching Mediterranean over the last 30 years the coastline here has been pushed back by several hundred meters scientists are convinced that a warming global climate is responsible and that our alliance on the burning of fossil fuels has led to an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which traps Heat 93 percent of this heat has been taken up by the oceans data from the Argo network of ocean boys shows an average warming of 0.9 of a degree celsius since the 1950s while this may not sound like much meteorologists understand how sea surface temperatures Drive hurricanes and Cyclones and early predictions of storms of Greater magnitude are being realized long-standing weather records are being broken and broken again in 2017 NASA NOAA and the UK Met Office all agreed that 2016 had been the hottest year on record globally 16 of the 17 hottest years have all occurred since the year 2000. [Music] both NASA and Esa have been monitoring the distribution and concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1992. this visualization from data collected in 2006 shows the yearly fluctuations of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide While most CO2 emanates from the populist northern hemisphere seasonal fires in Africa Australia and South America generate much of the carbon monoxide prolonged droughts and more severe forest fires are another aspect accompanying increased levels of atmospheric CO2 that are currently unfolding such events inject a huge pulse of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere magnifying the problem the European space agency's Copernicus program with its Sentinel Earth observation satellites has committed to making information about the changing climate freely available to policy makers businesses and research institutions Joseph ashbacher is issa's director of Earth observation programs what you see here on this graph is the CO2 concentrations of the atmosphere over the last eight hundred thousand years and you see that these values are going up and down in different phases you see on the the blue lines here are indicating ice ages and the Orange Lines here indicating periods between ice ages or periods where it's much warmer but you also see that over the last 800 000 years the value was always below 300 parts per million and suddenly since the last century it goes up very steep towards 400 parts per million or even Beyond distinguish delegates the recent climate Summit cop 25 held in Madrid made little progress toward an international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions while some businesses and economies will have to adjust that task only gets more difficult as time passes and far greater adjustments will be forced upon everyone the Earth is the only place we know that Harbor's life but the stability that has enabled this Web of Life is fragile plants and animals interact for Mutual benefit our benign environment results from the complex and varied creatures with which we share the planet important that will after our home the space industry is at a turning point [Music] NASA's space launch system is about to fly with it the new Orion spacecraft a collaboration between NASA and Esa will Target the Moon a landing is scheduled for 2024. as far as the United States is concerned low earth orbit is now the province of Corporations with Boeing and SpaceX competing to break Russia's Stranglehold on manned trips to the International Space Station new technology is cutting costs and increasing launch frequency with complex satellites being so small they can be deployed in new ways [Music] several companies are working towards space tourism Virgin Galactic says its promised trips beyond the atmosphere should start happening soon [Music] thank you [Music] since the retirement of the shuttle in 2011 space science has shifted Focus to research carried out on the International Space Station and to robotic missions in deep space during this period all manned flights have been to and from the ISS with the only viable spacecraft being the Russian soyuz this has cost both NASA and Esa billions in launch fees Russia Europe and Japan major Partners in the ISS developed their own cargo craft to resupply the space station but NASA tended for private companies to take on these responsibilities rising star in the launch business SpaceX was contracted to develop a cargo craft that would launch on its Falcon 9 rocket 3. one zero and launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as NASA turns to the private sector to resupply the International Space Station a second Aerospace business orbital Sciences Corporation now orbital ATK signed a contract for similar hardware and services NASA is developing its own launch system and the Orion spacecraft but it's designed for Missions far more ambitious than resupplying the ISS America's activity in low earth orbit is being reallocated to the commercial sector and NASA is helping with technology transfers agency administrators want two completely different systems giving the space agency what they call dissimilar redundancy when the space shuttle twice suffered catastrophic failures NASA was stuck on the ground for years while exhaustive investigations were made the redundancy approach will prevent this paralysis in 2014 NASA signed contracts with Boeing and SpaceX to develop and test human rated spacecraft to Ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station it was a continuation of the dissimilar redundancy approach the space agency has set performance criteria for the new craft and crew training but is taking a hands-off approach regarding how the companies meet the requirements moving spacecraft is called the Starliner it has space for Seven astronauts and will be capable of being used 10 times NASA requires any human rated spacecraft to meet higher standards of safety and reliability than a cargo craft and new capsules must demonstrate via a series of test flights that they meet certification one crucial part of the new spacecraft is the launch Escape system it's the equivalent of a fighter Pilot's ejector seat around both Boeing and SpaceX have opted for a new method of capsule mounted Rockets to push the craft clear in an emergency in contrast to the more traditional escape tower above the agency's new Orion spacecraft the trial of Boeing's Escape system worked well with the exception that only two of the three parachutes deployed but the problem is understood the Starliner could continue to the next uncrewed launch to orbit one of the novel features of Boeing's capsule is its ability to return to dry land like Russia's Soul use craft airbags stowed behind the heat shield inflate prior to Landing without the need to deploy ships for an ocean recovery there will be considerable savings though the capsule can fly on the Delta IV the Falcon 9 and the yet to be flown Vulcan initial testing of the spacecraft has been with the atlas 5 Launcher the atlas ground support infrastructure has been modified to accommodate the Starliner with the addition of a crew access arm the Starliner made its first unmanned test flight in December 2019. its destination was the ISS the launch was perfect and four and a half minutes after liftoff the first stage separated next the Boost protect covers and the aeroskirt were jettisoned and the Centaur upper stage burned for a further seven minutes following the course parameters perfectly after separation the capsule was in a sub-orbital trajectory selected because it allowed a safe path back to the ground in case of a malfunction during the Boost phase [Music] to achieve the correct orbit the craft was required to fire its four attitude and orbital maneuvering thrusters 31 minutes after liftoff however the starliner's sequence clock was incorrect and the orbit insertion burn did not happen Ground Control was able to salvage parts of the mission but the craft was not able to reach the International Space Station this setback will delay the starliner's first mission carrying astronauts spacex's crew Dragon capsule is a refinement of the cargo craft that first flew in 2010 from the beginning the Dragon capsule has had a heat shield enabling to return safely to the ground no other ISS cargo Crafters had this ability in addition the dragon also has a window this should have been a clue to spacex's long-term plans for the craft in 2014 after the contract for a human rated craft was signed SpaceX began work on the Dragon 2. like its Boeing equivalent the Dragon 2 sits above a service module that can carry unpressurized cargo and includes a heat exchange unit and a coating of solar cells that does away with the moving Parts involved in extendable solar wings the Dragon 2 can accommodate Seven astronauts though NASA has said it will generally only send four people at a time control interface is Vara touch screen [Music] Cape canaveral's launch complex 39a has been equipped with a crew access arm and in March 2019 in a flight known as demo 1 the unmanned craft made its first space flight the dragon carried a dummy astronaut wired with sensors to Monitor g-forces and a small delivery of equipment for the ISS the launch and the phasing Maneuvers to align its orbit with the ISS were all correctly executed the automated docking procedure went smoothly and the dragon stayed connected to the space station for five days decoupling from the ISS went as expected and observers on the ground were delighted with the capsule's behavior throughout the mission every aspect of the Dragon 2's performance was monitored [Music] the Craft's return to Earth was faultless and the recovered capsule would be reused for the one remaining uncrewed flight test SpaceX planned to use new capsules for manned flights and then recycle the craft for cargo use confident planners at SpaceX and NASA were looking toward the first crude flight the final certification test was an in-flight simulation of a boost of failure that would monitor the dragon's launch Escape system but before that the crafts super Draco engines used in Mission aborts needed retesting this was considered routine and had been carried out many times Elite video revealed an explosion that had destroyed the capsule the problem was not engine failure but a faulty valve the flight test of the Dragon 2's Escape system eventually happened early in 2020 but just as with the Boeing capsule which was also well behind schedule the explosion and the inquiry that followed were another unwelcome delay [Music] oh around the point of Maximum Dynamic pressure the core stages engines were cut and the Escape system triggered automatically shortly after aerodynamic stresses on the tumbling boost are caused it to explode the certification test was a success and the dragon 2's next flight will carry astronauts foreign but there is another spacecraft in development that's worth mentioning the Sierra Nevada corporation's Dream Chaser it's a lifting body craft designed to ride to orbit on an atlas V but return to the ground via a commercial Landing Strip so far the Dream Chasers only flights have been Glide tests [Music] as a cargo ship the Dream Chaser can return a 1750 kilogram load to the surface as a crude vehicle it is designed to take from two to Seven astronauts [Music] the European space agency has shown interest in the craft with the possibility of launching European astronauts atop a French Ariane the craft will use the buy propellants methane and hydrogen tetroxide for on-orbit Maneuvers doing away with a highly toxic hydrazine foreign shuttle landed it had to be at a restricted Runway where suited ground staff purged the craft of residual hydrazine [Music] originally in the running for a NASA contract for ferrying astronauts to the ISS it missed out because Sierra Nevada could not comply with NASA's 2017 deadline for crude missions the favored contractors Boeing and SpaceX both failed to meet that same deadline but the Dream Chaser has a contract for cargo missions to the ISS and an Expendable cargo module known as shooting star is being developed the company still plans a human rated version of The Dream Chaser but it's unclear when the craft will fly [Applause] oh foreign Cape canaveral's launch complex 17 was the starting point for many historic Delta II missions since the demise of the Space Shuttle NASA infrastructure from the earliest days of space flight has been eliminated since the heady days of the Space Race NASA's budget has been steadily trending downward and various launch sites have been given over to the private sector while NASA has been overseeing the commercial craft that will continue to serve as the research work carried out on the ISS its sharpest Focus has been on the new Orion spacecraft and the giant space launch system that will boost it to orbit after its establishment in 1958 the agency's challenge had been to master space technology and then to reach the moon but since then the exploration side of NASA's Charter has been achieved by robotic missions now a new plan called Artemis will return to the Moon it relies upon the Orion spacecraft and the SLS the space launch system will be the most powerful rocket yet built and although the design features the latest Technologies most of its components are derived from the space shuttle the block 1 version which will send an unmanned Orion spacecraft to orbit the Moon features a central core that owes much to the shuttle's external tank at the base of the central core are four rs-25 engines the shuttle had three of these engines and NASA still has 16 left over from the shuttle program although the engines remain the same their Control Systems have been redesigned each one has been exhaustively tested and when the original batch have been utilized an upgraded version the rs-25d will be available flanking the central core of the space launch system are two solid fuel boosters again a refinement of shuttle technology but with each booster having five instead of four segments the new design has been rigorously tested the boosters will only burn for the first two minutes of flight each consuming six tons of propellant every second and providing more than 75 percent of the Rocket's thrust unlike the shuttles boosters these will not be reusable the upper stage for the block 1 configuration of the space launch system is called the interim cryogenic propulsion stage the icps it's a stop Gap modification of the Delta cryogenic second stage used with the Delta 3 and 4 launchers 2014 a Delta IV fitted with this upper stage lifted an Orion spacecraft to its first orbital test the Orion with a dummy service module was boosted to height approaching 5800 kilometers allowing it a high speed return to Earth similar to a lunar mission foreign the much larger exploration upper stage was to replace the icps for the first crude Mission atop a block 1B launcher but design changes have led to delays and the eus now won't fly till the 4th Orion mission the Orion spacecraft itself will comfortably accommodate four astronauts for 21 days with the crew breathing air at atmospheric pressure the craft is intended for Missions beyond Earth orbit it's designed to integrate with larger modular structures such as habitation modules specialist landing craft or the planned lunar Gateway instrumentation and the control interface are primarily via a touch screen the digital control enables weight saving through the absence of wires and switches the Orion service module is the European space agency's contribution to the craft it's derived from the automated transfer vehicle which delivered cargo to the ISS oxygen and nitrogen cylinders in the service module Supply Air there's a water storage tank and Wastewater is not dumped but recycled a four-wing solar array generates 11 kilowatts for battery charging and powering the electrical subsystems for propulsion and maneuvering the service module is equipped with a version of the same system used by the space shuttle but like so many aspects of this spacecraft the system can be easily replaced when alternate models under consideration become available the third important piece of the Orion craft is the launch abort system mounted above the capsule three different types of solid fuel rocket are designed to fire at the first hint of a malfunction in the launcher one ignition the system was tested in July 2019 above a Minotaur booster a highly modified Peacekeeper missile Engineers were delighted with its performance launch infrastructure is being upgraded for the SLS and there's increased activity in preparation for the first test of the big new rocket there were celebrations as the core stage left the michoud assembly facility but it hasn't gone to Cape Canaveral not yet it was taken by barge to the stennis test facility in Mississippi where the stage will be powered up for a series of tests known as the Green Run test campaign the date or even the year for the first launch has been put back a number of times although it could be as early as 2020 NASA's exploration initiative received a jolt in 2019 when U.S vice president Pence the chairman of the National Space Council called for NASA's exploration initiative to be accelerated it is the stated policy of this Administration and the United States of America to return American astronauts to the Moon within the next five years the vows come the time for us to make the next giant leap and return American astronauts to the Moon establish a permanent base there and develop the Technologies to take American astronauts to Mars and Beyond the existing plan had called for a moon landing no earlier than 2028. the month after the vice president's speech NASA announced the Artemis program Artemis being the sister of Apollo [Music] late in 2019 companies were called to Tender for a lunar lander and for a lunar space station known as the lunar Gateway the timeline calls for Artemis 1 an uncrewed Orion craft to enter a series of looping orbits of the Moon in 2020 astronauts are in training for Artemis 2 due to launch in 2022 the current proposal will see a crew of four sent to a retrograde orbit of the moon in a flight that could last as long as 21 days the powerful exploration upper stage will not be ready for this flight and its proposed trajectory has been modified to accommodate the limited capacity of the interim cryogenic upper stage during this time the Artemis plan calls for commercial launch services to make a series of uncrewed flights to position elements of the lunar Gateway and lunar lander in orbit around the Moon a contract has been signed with maxar Technologies for a power and propulsion element some see this phase of the Artemis program as a weak link because the U.S Congress has been reluctant to authorize additional funds [Music] there are no concrete blueprints for a lunar lander yet and some have suggested that the 2024 deadline is being pushed too enthusiastically Artemis 3 will see a male and a female astronaut land near the lunar South Pole where ice exists within permanently shaded craters long-term goals for NASA's space exploration initiative include the development of technologies that will enable a landing on the surface of Mars finally a different form of spacecraft will soon be taking passengers [Music] [Applause] Virgin Galactic will start taking pay-in customers to space in 2020. the thing about the company's spaceship's Enterprise and unity is reusable and virgin is building two additional spacecraft [Music] passengers will experience weightlessness for about six minutes [Music] virgin is also entering the satellite business with a launcher service using a 747 called Cosmic girl acting as an air launch Mothership [Music]

Channel: Free Documentary - Engineering

Views: 807,249

Keywords: free documentary, free documentary engineering, engineering, engineering documentary, tech, tech documentary, constructions, constructions documentary, technology documentary, light speed, future technology documentary, space, space documentary, space technology, space engineering, space documentaries, space engineers, space exploration documentary, space exploration, space travel, space technology 2022, space technology documentary, space technology 2023, tech documentary 2023

Id: 68PlPkeOwng

Length: 327min 15sec (19635 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023