Billions of Habitable Planets in the Universe - The Story of Our Universe Documentary

object far beyond all the known planets that could reveal new secrets about the birth of the solar system but the mission is risky even being hit by something smaller than a single pellet of rice at 32 000 miles an hour would be catastrophic we would lose the mission the spacecraft that brought us to pluto is now attempting an even more challenging final quest can it succeed there's only one shot and if you make a mistake that could be it pluto and beyond right now on nova [Music] january 1st 2019 it's the arrival of a new year but here at mission ops the mood is tense the team is feeling a little stressed a team of scientists along with their families and friends are waiting in anticipation i'm getting a little bit nervous for the arrival of a signal from a tiny spacecraft on a dangerous mission its name new horizons we are really pressing the limits here new horizons is attempting to fly by a mysterious object far beyond the planets we've come to know a billion miles beyond pluto in the outback of the solar system this is the farthest exploration in the history of humankind and nobody's planning anything like it ever again this is really challenging we're going to a small object that we don't know a lot about in fact one of the biggest baddest space telescopes in our arsenal the hubble can only capture a pixelated image of this tiny speck its official name is 2014 mu69 but the new horizons team also calls it by the latin name ultimately we gave it this nickname ultimate tool that means beyond the farthest frontiers and in fact it really is beyond the known world or part of our solar system that we have explored here objects like ultimatuly have been frozen in time since the solar system formed four and a half billion years ago we believe this object like many others out there are actually planetary embryos and to study those objects will give us a great window into the process of planetary formation [Music] for the new horizons team taking their spacecraft into the unknown is not only a monumental task it's risky an object the size of a p or even smaller would be capable of literally taking out the spacecraft tests have revealed that as the spacecraft travels at 36 000 miles an hour even something as small as a grain of sand could rip a hole right through it at this point in the mission you really have to be prepared for anything but for now all the team can do is wait and hope that years of work will pay off and that the tiny explorer manages to stay on target and survive i love this spacecraft i've put my blood sweat and tears into helping to put this thing together going back to 2002 this just made us feel so proud proud because when it comes to exploring our solar system new horizons is already a pioneer [Music] january 19 2006 new horizons is prepared for launch at cape canaveral horizon spacecraft on a voyage to visit the planet pluto and beyond the spacecraft sets out on a journey to reach not one but two distant targets along the way alice bowman missions operations manager also known as mom will help guide it through a voyage that will last more than a decade we talk about the spacecraft as if it's our child when we launched you know we refer to it as baby when it does something that we don't expect we relate it perhaps to terrible twos or something like that so it it really it becomes part of us 78 days after launch new horizons passes the orbit of the red planet mars just two months later it flies through the asteroid belt in a year it passes by jupiter where it captures spectacular images of a volcanic eruption on the gas giant's moon io it was the first time the time lapse had ever been made of any volcano anywhere in the universe off the earth so it was really unique the spacecraft travels another two and a half billion miles past the orbits of three more giant planets saturn uranus and neptune finally nine years after launch new horizons closes in on its first flyby target pluto and its moons [Music] they have only been observed from billions of miles away our best images nothing more than a blur until in the summer of 2015 it slowly comes into view every day it was getting bigger and bigger and bigger and starting to reveal this world it was an incredible ride the mission is proceeding without a hitch all is working as planned but then on july 4th 2015 just 10 days before the pluto flyby i got a call from the new horizons principal investigator alan stern and i can hear that he was panting he was running down the hallway here at apl he said we lost contact with the spacecraft and i said you've got to be kidding you know this has never happened before you just feel you know that pit in the bottom of your stomach your pulse goes up a little bit could it be you know these millions of miles away you hit something is the spacecraft still in one piece the team races to figure out what's gone wrong it took a little while but we realized exactly what had happened is we had overloaded the computer that's sort of like the worst nightmare um a week before an encounter we knew that we could fix it the question was were we going to be able to do that in enough time alice i swear didn't get any sleep but she said she slept on the floor for a few minutes one night for a couple nights slept there you know just like a child that's sick you want to be there to help it recover along the way the team works round the clock re-uploading instructions to the spacecraft's computer alice bowman our mission operations manager and her team did a fantastic job of putting everything back together again with with only six hours to spare just in time for the flyby [Music] okay we're in love with carrier july 14 2015. three billion miles from earth new horizons should have just flown above pluto's surface taking pictures and gathering data but did it make it stand by for telemetry alice waits to hear back from the spacecraft a sign that has safely completed the flyby new horizons is so far away it takes four and a half hours for that signal to reach earth on pluto one we have a healthy spacecraft we've recorded data of the pluto [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] it system a huge sense of relief and accomplishment i think mostly accomplishment [Music] [Applause] we did it the first up close images come in and they shock the world when the images first came down from new horizons i was stunned excited tired every emotion and feeling you can imagine but really just amazed at what they look like this tiny world with a diameter less than 1500 miles turns out to be incredibly complex with mountains more than a mile high the rocky mountains here are beautiful in the flat irons in the background but instead of rock the mountains on pluto were made of ice and at those temperatures ice is so cold it's like bedrock pluto's most famous feature its heart contains a massive glacier that flows across its surface i certainly did not expect a glacier of nitrogen and methane ices never in a million years did i expect that we're seeing processes some of which look quite familiar from the earth but are happening in a completely alien environment with completely alien materials pluto even has volcanoes made of ice there's something that looks very much like a ice volcano on pluto we didn't see it erupt but it sure looks like a volcano using images and data collected by the spacecraft the team created this simulation of what it would feel like to fly over pluto's surface some of the geologists on our team have taken to calling pluto the new mars because it's every bit as complicated what could be driving such geological diversity on such a tiny world [Music] one theory pluto's surface may change with the seasons pluto doesn't really have uh the the sort of four seasons that we have we have very even seasons we have a hot summer and a cold winter it's about the same length of time in each one because earth is in a circular orbit around the sun pluto's not it's in this very eccentric orbit around the sun as pluto along with its largest moon sharon gets closer to the sun its surface warms but as it continues on its 248 orbit getting farther and farther from the sun its surface becomes colder so there are these extreme seasons in summer ices on the surface can evaporate in winter they can recondense so when you see it today it is not going to look the same as it looks in a hundred years when it's in the opposite season but there could be another strikingly different reason for pluto's complex surface based on measurements of its density and chemical composition scientists believe it has a rocky core all rock contains radioactive elements which as they decay release heat so there's a continual flow of heat from the interior of pluto to the to the outside but it's a very small amount of heat because pluto is pretty small it doesn't have that much rock in it but we think that even that tiny amount of internal heat is enough to move mountains literally and it may also be enough heat to create something extraordinary beneath pluto's icy crust right now pluto is covered in frozen water and frozen nitrogen and a few other compounds it's quite possible that in the past there was enough heat internal to pluto to melt some of that ice and create a layer of ocean we suspect that pluto has an ocean of liquid water deep in the interior hundreds of miles below the surface it raises what seems like an extraordinary possibility that if you have liquid water and rock deep inside pluto in contact with each other well that's an environment that life could exist in i think one of the most mind-blowing things is to hear the astrobiologists talk about the fact that that could be an abode for life potentially here we have a world whose surface is just 40 degrees above absolute zero it's three billion miles from the sun you would never expect life at those kinds of temperatures whatever's causing the extraordinary geology on pluto's surface will be debated for years to come there are a lot of theories and there are a lot of ideas and we don't know which one is right or if none of them are right we are in this wonderful position of knowing volumes compared to what we knew before but it's maddening because unlike mars which is around the corner and you could fly to very quickly again it's a big undertaking to cross the entire solar system as its historic flyby comes to an end and the tiny spacecraft leaves pluto new horizons looks back to take one last breathtaking image my real favorite favorite picture is one after we flew by pluto and we're looking back and we see the horizon of pluto with the sun lighting the atmosphere from behind you can see layers of haze and shadows of mountains streaming across the surface and that is where you really understand that pluto is a world whenever i see that picture it's as if i'm sitting on the spacecraft looking out the window as pluto goes whizzing by and it more than any other picture that we took puts me there that photograph for me is the crowning achievement we were really there and we really did it and we made our own little contribution not just the science but actually the history that history begins back in 1930 when pluto is discovered by clyde tombau a young farm boy with a passion for astronomy for nearly a century clyde has the honor of being the only american to discover a planet but almost from the get-go many astronomers aren't buying it because when it comes to being a planet size matters when you discover an astronomical object far far away you have no direct way of measuring its mass you don't actually know how massive it is and so people speculated about maybe pluto was one earth mass and then people kept revising their estimate down and down and down until people realized my gosh this thing is really really small it turns out pluto is smaller than earth's moon but size wasn't pluto's only problem so was its location a tiny little planet in the outer solar system just didn't make sense pluto was regarded as a planet but it was always regarded as a kind of a funny planet a weird planet somewhat out of place so the sun sits in the middle the sun is this massive body made of hydrogen it's a million times the mass of the earth at about a hundred times the diameter of the earth and it's orbited by planets which are moving in nearly circular orbits and then at the very edge the outer edge of this system of uh planets we do of pluto and pluto is not really like a terrestrial planet uh because it's got quite a bit of ice in it and pluto is not at all like a giant planet because it's tiny and it's not made of gas it's made of solid material and it also has a very strange orbit with a high electricity and a high inclination tilted up relative to the plane of the solar system beyond pluto uh there was nothing and people actually didn't think about that in general because it's just an empty space and next stop the stars is the solar system's little misfit really alone out there for decades to come astronomers look for another planet beyond pluto but as hard as they look and they look hard no one finds anything until two astronomers david jewett and jane liu take on the challenge the original thought that we had was simply that the outer solar system is weirdly empty david and jane get access to one of the most powerful telescopes on the planet and they start a search that will take a lot longer than either one of them expects while it's easy to see distant stars because they radiate their own light other celestial bodies are much harder to see that's because light has to travel all the way from our sun to the object reflect off its surface and then make the long journey back to earth by then it's barely visible david and jane hope that advances in digital detectors which are far more sensitive to light than film will help them see a whole lot more august 1992 mauna kea observatory hawaii after searching for six years they finally find an object moving in the night sky here is the set of discovery images for the first object so you can see this object drifting from this picture to this one to this one is drifting slowly to the left a tiny object beyond pluto orbiting the sun then they find more and more so the space beyond neptune basically is full of objects that we just didn't know about before because they're too fake david and jane discover an entirely new region of the solar system now known as the kuiper belt it's believed to be home to hundreds of thousands possibly millions of icy objects including pluto the kuiper belt has a thousand times more objects in it than we have in the asteroid belt completely unknown until these first observations the kuiper belt stretches out billions of miles it is just difficult to imagine how expansive this field of icy debris is think of it as a giant doughnut surrounding the planets on average each kuiper belt object separated from the next by a million miles [Music] that's how massive the kuiper belt is the day that the first new kuiper belt object was discovered by dave jewett and jane lou it clicked in everybody who was paying attention's head it's like oh there's a ton of objects out there that's what pluto is part of pluto's part of the kuiper belt it suddenly all makes sense for me pluto was the harbinger of things to come we didn't realize that it's being an oddball was telling us something it was telling us the secret of the third zone of the solar system this really sort of restructures our understanding of how our solar system is built and how we should think about the membership of our solar system [Music] august 2006 prague just a few months after new horizons set out to explore the ninth planet of the solar system an international association of astronomers votes to demote pluto [Music] and the official planet count goes back down to eight while some members of the public are outraged not everyone sees this as a demotion one could argue that pluto actually made out better with this change because in its previous instance it was the smallest planet of the solar system it now has become the king of the kuiper belt and so in a sense its status has gone up over the last few decades astronomers have discovered that kuiper belt objects vary in size shape and also in their orbits there are larger objects like pluto these are known as dwarf planets we've discovered that the outer solar system is littered with small planets these are typically rocky and icy objects many have atmospheres many possibly most have moons there's a great variety in terms of their physical properties their colors their compositions many of the things we're used to in the planets we're familiar with but in miniature i think a decent analogy is when you see a chihuahua it's still a dog because it has the characteristics of the canine species just in miniature then there are objects like ultima thule astronomers think these objects have been frozen in time since the birth of our solar system four and a half billion years ago so what we think we're seeing is a fossil structure that's left over from the formation of the solar system it's this tiny remnant of the ancient past that we can visit objects like mu69 retain the pristine conditions of the early solar system this now lets us look at these objects with the idea that an examination of them will help us better understand what the early solar system was like unfortunately our best images of these primordial objects are only single pixels of dim light almost impossible to see if only we could get a spacecraft out to the kuiper belt to take a closer look but of course there's one already out there when we launched the new horizon spacecraft back in 2006 we knew we wanted to fly to an object beyond pluto but we didn't have a particular object that we knew we could reach with our spacecraft so we started doing deep searches of the sky beyond pluto april 2011 while new horizons is traveling through the solar system at the southwest research institute in boulder colorado mark bowie leads the search for new horizons next target but the team faces extraordinary limitations the region their spacecraft can safely reach is extremely small there's certain things we don't have an infinite supply of like fuel and our thrusters we only want to put so many thruster counts on them thrusters make it possible to redirect your spacecraft as you zero in on a target without them there's no way to steer the ship if you use them beyond the lifetime that they were designed for they could have a failure but an aging spacecraft is just one of many challenges where you need to look is probably one of the hardest spots in the sky to look it's right in the middle of the milky way the densest star fields in the entire sky where you would see a million stars brighter than the objects you were looking for and you had to try and sift it out between all those stars they searched for several years and find nothing we were starting to say what's going to happen we have to find an object in 2014. if we don't find one in 2014 we won't know well enough where the object is to redirect the spacecraft to get there the clock is running out it's time for the big guns it's time for hubble from its vantage point far beyond the earth's atmosphere the hubble space telescope has a better chance of spotting faint objects and that makes all the difference after a big effort with the hubble telescope in the summer of 2014 we found an object wow it was truly exhilarating uh yay we've done it this is kind of a first to discover an object while you're in flight and then redirect the spacecraft to fly by it and determine its orbit along the way nailing down ultimatuly's orbit is critical for the success of the mission [Music] think of it like skeet shooting you have to predict where your target will be in the future so we do shooting and targeting in the outer solar system you're going to tell me here how you do shooting and targeting on earth new horizons team member anne verbosher and sharpshooter j.r pierce demonstrate it's not a space vehicle but uh we'll get our point across here [Music] pull if jr aims directly at the target he's going to miss launch i'm initiating the launch sequence pull but if he aims ahead of the target it's a hit again and again and again you need to focus on where your target is going to be not where your target is so this reminds me of when i was a child and watching the apollo launches that fascinated me that they were targeting where the moon was going to be three days after the launch happened that's when the astronauts would arrive to try and land on it so for new horizons the concept is basically the same as it was for apollo but the distances are far greater we have to intercept where it will be years down the road so we have to calculate where it will end up on the exact day and hour and literally minute of the flyby from years in advance images taken by the hubble space telescope help the team track ultimatuly's orbit but they still need to know more they don't know how big it is or even what shape it is ultimately is a completely almost unknown object this is terra incognita it's a new world details we don't know but there may be a way to find out more by observing a rare celestial event an occultation in its simplest form is when something gets in front of something else if you've ever been on a beach and you're just enjoying the nice sunny day and then all of a sudden the sun goes away because somebody just walked in between you and the sun and that shadow passes across your face the same exact thing is happening here except instead of our sun it's a star and if the star is hidden from your view you are in the shadow of the kuiper belt object if you can measure the edge of that shadow it shows the shape and size of the object suppose it's moving 20 miles per second across the sky and the star disappears for one second now you know that it's 20 miles across easy you just have to be in the right place at the right time but how do you get to precisely the right place at the right time there's two pieces of this you need to know where the object is and that's what hubble does for us but you also need to know where the stars are and that's where the gaia mission comes in the gaia space observatory has been creating the most precise three-dimensional star map of our galaxy that has ever been made and we knew that when we had those star positions we had a chance of actually predicting an occultation with mu69 [Music] in the summer of 2017 the new horizons team finds a match the two best places to view this occultation where their telescopes can detect ultimus shadow are in the mountains of argentina and the countryside of south africa much like the solar eclipse that many people saw in 2017 you have to be in the right place at the right time to be in the path of the shadow so we're here let's hit that first 54 people go into two different continents to watch an event that takes two seconds to happen overwhelming the teens set up their telescopes in the middle of nowhere and hope for clear skies we sent 13 telescopes to south africa 12 telescopes to mendoza argentina searching for a blink four billion miles away and sought nothing all of that work and nothing it turns out that their estimations of ultimatuly's orbit are off the star that was supposed to blink continued to shine and everybody was a little depressed about that [Music] a month later they get a second chance to find out whatever they can about ultimate thule's size and shape but to be in the right place at the right time is going to be even harder on july 10 of 2017 there was another occultation observable only over the south pacific ocean and really accessible only to the sophia aircraft the sofia airborne observatory is a specially modified boeing 747 with a telescope on its side what we're doing here with sophia is putting a very large telescope into the occultation path at just the time the shadow is there the reality is there's so many details what are the winds doing we had to worry about a turbulent zone that we might have to fly around the moment of truth arrives they wait for the star to blink out are they in the right place at the right time again they see nothing so everybody's kind of depressed again okay we've done it a second time and we got nothing after two misses reality sets in we thought we struck out twice okay what's gonna happen next but they get another chance and the next occultation in patagonia was only seven days later on july 17. so we really had to shift gears quickly and get ready to to do this next ground-based effort the stellar occultations that we have been attempting are the most challenging stellar occultations ever attempted in history because ultima is so much further away than anything else and it's tiny the night of the occultation winds were were pretty bad these telescopes we use are are really great however they are very wind sensitive we wanted to shield that telescope from every possible vibration and that meant we had to do whatever it took to get the data and observe the star without it jiggling around all over the place for that they need a few volunteers if you just started out with we're from nasa people just come out of the woodwork we had two people show up a father and his daughter they brought a spare battery perfect so we put them to work together for 45 minutes they block the wind with a truck some plywood and a tarp did they catch it we spent hours after people came back with the data to see whether we got it or not [Music] does the star blink or have they failed again [Music] we finally had success and saw the star blink out this is what we came for this is it oh my god that's what it's all about six months where the world frames the stars unbelievable in fact five telescopes capture the blink each from a different perspective when pieced together their data suggests that ultimate is about 20 miles long but its shape is more complex than anyone expected immediately i could tell this is not just some simple spherical object that we're looking at it's a much more complicated shape [Music] they come up with three possibilities one is you have two circular objects that are close to each other but they're orbiting each other or it could be just some lumpy potato shaped thing [Music] and then the third is what we call a contact binary two balls stuck together and we think it could happen for kuiper belt objects we don't know we've never seen one of these things before but when new horizons finally brings ultimatuly into focus the results could be profound this elusive object could revolutionize our understanding of how the planets in our solar system formed if the solar system is an intricate and complicated castle then mu-69 is a brick and you don't know how this castle was made until you understand what the brick looks like four and a half billion years ago the planets in our solar system formed from a massive disk of gas and dust scientists have detected the beginning of this process in striking images of distant solar systems like this one known as hl tauri a young star about 450 light years from earth we have these beautiful observations of discs of gas and dust around other stars so we know that planet formation starts from small dust grains in our own solar system scientists theorize that through a process called accretion gas and dust stuck together a lot like those clumps of dust and dirt that collect under your bed dust bunnies held together by a powerful force static electricity so you can think of planet formation the initial stages very similar to just letting your dust bunnies under your bed grow for millions of years into bigger and bigger objects if you don't vacuum those dust bunnies will just keep getting bigger but for the seeds of planets to grow they need more they need the power of gravity after objects reach a certain threshold in their mass they can grow more rapidly than they could before because they have substantial gravity but there's a catch there's a gap between making something this big and making something the size of a planet how does an object grow from the size of a marble to the size of a planet in the last decade a new theory has emerged a stream of marbles will come along and as it's moving around the sun and some of them will clump and you'll suddenly get a huge amount of clumping action and that's called pebble accretion and one of the things we can do by looking ultimate thule is look to see whether it was formed by pebble accretion if we see lots of bb to marble-sized pieces on the surface of mu-69 and go aha this is a loose collection of pebbles [Music] and pebble creation argues for things that are elongated or potato shaped which is what we seem to see for ultimatum from our ground-based occultation we're interested scientifically how planets formed although in our hearts we're also interested about where we came from how we got here what were the elements and the outer solar system objects like ultimatuly are the raw materials and so we're getting a chance to look back at these well-preserved raw materials to see really what was the starting point what were the ingredients that went in to the magic recipe that makes life [Music] october 4th 2018 89 days before flyby new horizons is 30 million miles from ultimatuly and closing fred peltier and a group of vigilant navigators are tracking ultima's orbit to ensure their spacecraft won't miss the mark on new year's eve they rely on images like this taken by new horizons long range telescope named laurie but at this distance tracking tiny ultima among a dense field of stars is no easy task it's a very crowded star field these are all stars and altima is in the center right there so what we do is we have a catalog of the star field that we use to remove the stars we end up with this image that highlights our target ultimate theory here next they zoom in to take a closer look and discover their estimate of ultimate thule's orbit is off the yellow cross represents where we thought ultimate thule would be before we took the picture and the the blue greenish one represents well where it actually is so as you can see you were a little bit off and the difference here doesn't seem too much on this scale but it's actually 600 miles from the target because this object is so very very small it's possible that if we are a little bit off we could just miss seeing the object and we certainly don't want to do that there's only one shot and if you make a mistake that could be it for the next few weeks the navigators will carefully follow ultima's path examine every pixel of every frame to help guide new horizons to its target on new year's if their calculations are right the spacecraft will fly just 2200 miles above ultima's surface this is a comparison of about 30 days out what pluto looked like and what ultimately looks like right now so you're asking me what the challenges are of this mission this image is worth a thousand words [Music] the size of ultimate julie is it's a small dot still and and it'll be the case until a few days before the flyby that makes it very different from pluto as the weeks go by new horizon sends back more images of the distant dot december 29th 2018. three days away from the flyby and the anticipation is certainly building we thought we'd know a lot more by now i think everyone would have said you'll know how fast it's rotating and get an idea of what the shape is like but so far answers remain tantalizingly out of reach it is holding its secrets to the last possible minute i mean we keep saying well we're gonna know eventually right um but right now it's still a mystery as the flyby approaches preparations continue all night this evening i'll be sleeping in my office so i brought my little backpacking tent in i'll have time for sleep later things have been happening so fast don't ask us what day it is most of us cannot remember whether it's monday tuesday or whatever we know how many days it is to fly by 10 9 8 january 1st 2019 12 33 a.m as the world rings in the new year the new horizons team celebrates the moment of the spacecraft's closest approach to ultimatuly but it will be hours before anyone knows if the flyby is successful ultimatuly is so far away that it takes six hours to send a signal from the spacecraft to earth which is crazy it's a really long time to wait later that morning team members family and friends wait anxiously for new horizons signal to finish crossing 4 billion miles of space and reach earth go ahead rf well the green screens will tell you and rf is in fantastic shape copy that rf is green the signal comes in but alice bowman new horizons mom waits for confirmation that each system on the spacecraft is working copy thermal is reporting green status most crucially she wants to hear if the digital recorders are full of precious data go ahead sandyh cndh is nominal our ssr pointers are right where we predicted what that means is that the solid state recorder the pointers are where they should be that tells me that we observed something something filled that camera we have a healthy spacecraft we've just accomplished the most distant flyby of our solar system [Applause] [Music] that night the first close-up image of this distant object comes in well what we saw today blows out of the water anything we've seen the first image was two or three pixels across yesterday you could see kind of two lobes and today's image we see it for what it really is basically two spheres stuck together like this really is two things that formed as two different objects it's confirmation of what we saw in the occultation the shape that was predicted from that was almost exactly correct it's the kind of thing we were looking to see is planetary formation frozen in time and here it is right in front of us it's just wonderful we got what we came for i think it's tending to substantiate the ideas that these objects form as as clumps as pebble accretion i think it's so far looking like a really nice confirmation of those theories i just was staring at it with tears in my eyes because we've been working for so long to do this and it worked and i just couldn't get over that yet i still haven't got over that absolutely amazing to see that this is exploration at its purest when you think about it it's remarkable we didn't know this object even existed when we were building the spacecraft going into the unknown is fundamentally important for the human spirit from every aspect from scientific to artistic to just wondering where we came from and why we're here it will take 20 months for new horizons to send back all the data and images collected of ultima tooling and with many years of power left on the spacecraft the team hopes it will continue to explore the far regions of the solar system but already this tiny probe and the humans who built and guided it on its journey have made gigantic discoveries taking us to new worlds making the unknown known and bringing the impossibly distant finally within reach [Music] the exploration continues on nova's website where you can watch this and other nova programs see expert interviews interactives video extras and more follow nova on facebook and twitter and find us online at pbs.org nova [Music] we also now know that saturn is orbited by over 60 natural satellites the largest of saturn satellites is a moon called titan it is enveloped in a thick atmosphere one filled with orange haze [Music] in 2005 a nasa probe penetrated the veil of mystery and sent back the first images of the surface the terrain looked amazingly familiar [Music] black lines branched out over the surface they looked just like rivers and numerous lakes were discovered this was the first time any celestial object had been found with liquid on its surface [Music] the more the probe investigated the more earth-like titan seemed to be it was at this point that scientists began to suspect that life might be present maybe in the seas uh more interesting things happen maybe you get self-replicating chemical systems much like those that are the first steps towards living systems uh that were deep in our own history so titan gives us a whole new set of possibilities there's the possibility that maybe there is life on titan that has somehow found a way to make use of all of these building blocks that the atmosphere is making for it however the temperature on titan is minus 180 degrees celsius could life really exist there well how do we know it's too cold imagine you're living on titan and you're looking at the earth you'd say oh there's a liquid there's organics there's energy but it's too hot titan has both an atmosphere and liquids could life exist there [Music] this planetary body very similar to earth saturn's moon titan [Music] imagine the journey from earth to titan if you could travel at the speed of light you'd pass mars about four minutes into the voyage at the 30-minute mark or so you would pass the giant ball of gases known as jupiter then some 70 minutes after departure you would finally arrive at saturn surrounded by those beautiful rings like jupiter saturn is a large gaseous planet finally you'd reach titan with a diameter of 5 000 kilometers titan is about three-fourths the size of mars it's a moon the size of a planet fully cloaked in that orange haze titan's true appearance was not known until the 21st century [Music] 1997 saw the launch of the cassini-huygens mission the cassini orbiter equipped with cameras and other instruments and carrying the huygens probe was sent to investigate saturn and its moves especially titans in 2004 seven years after liftoff cassini-huygens reached the vicinity of saturn 1.4 billion kilometers from the sun cassini then proceeded to enter into orbit around the planet and its satellites and to commence scientific observations it took this image of titan for the first time titan's true features began to show from under that thick haze the day was approaching when we would finally be able to see the surface of saturn's giant moon in december 2004 the huygens probe separated from cassini and coasted to titan the target landing site was near titan's equator what that site would be like no one knew [Music] titan's atmosphere is a thousand kilometers thick the probe entered it [Music] huygens deployed a parachute and drifted down jettisoning its heat shield [Music] this image taken from a height of 152 kilometers was huygens first view of titan which was still obstructed by haze [Music] huygens was shooting still images as it descended its microphone also captured the sound of the wind rushing by [Music] this was the first sound recording ever made of an alien environment these images of titan's surface were taken by huygens from 16 000 kilometers up black veins like the branchings of a river are visible [Music] it does look as though they are flowing to the mouth of a river now from 8 000 meters above titan it looks just like the sort of coastline we're used to seeing on earth finally the landing [Music] this is an image taken by huygens just after landing what look like rocks and pebbles strewn about over a flat plain are actually chunks of ice the surface temperature is minus 180 degrees celsius atmospheric pressure is a little higher than earth's 1.5 bars the horizon seems blurred by mist this is exactly like some rocky desert landscape on earth high above the cassini orbiter continued its observations [Music] in the equatorial region where the huygens probe landed cassini discovered a strange pattern [Music] some sort of regular striping further observations found similar striations covering some 20 percent of titan's surface ralph lorenz has dedicated himself to investigating this strange striped pattern he is trying to solve the mystery of titan's stripes by comparing them to patterns he finds on earth this is the mojave desert in the western united states lorenz believes titans stripes are like the peaks and troughs of desert sand dunes there are indeed real similarities it's remarkable somehow that despite the different gravity the thicker atmosphere and the different material that the sand is made of somehow the the landscape ends up looking almost exactly the same as many places on earth by comparing the the shape of the dune and the interaction with the rest of the environment we can get a an understanding of uh how these structures formed and for example different shapes of dunes form in different wind patterns so the goal is to solve the mystery of titan stripes by investigating terrestrial desert dunes lorenzo's first step is to send up a kite with the camera for an aerial overview he's looking for a place that has a striped pattern like titans next he mounts a dune buggy equipped with gps he wants to measure the heights of dunes and the angles of their slopes [Music] the shapes of sand dunes change by the minute [Music] lorenz plants a state with a streamer attached in fact he plants a whole line of them along this slope this will show what sort of wind creates this type of dune the wind is blowing from screen left across a gentle slope then it swirls around as if to carve out that slope to the right [Music] so it's become clear that here the wind flows from the milder slope over and down the sharper slope lorenz believes that the stripes on titan are also wind sculpted sand dunes a closer look at that image of titan's stripes shows ridges with milder and sharper slopes similar to those in the mojave desert so lorenz conjectures that the wind on titan must have been blowing from left to right the winds blowing on titan's dunes however are thought to be weaker than the winds on earth the reason for that is that titan's gravitational force is only one-seventh of earth's a relatively small action can produce a big result so on titan effects similar to those seen on earth are being produced by mild winds titan is still an active world where geologically speaking uh processes are still happening and the fact that we can see sand dunes for example suggest that uh the winds that move the sand around are still active that we're seeing a dynamic planet much like the earth there was another unexpected aspect to those images taken by huygens closely at those chunks of ice on the ground they are reminiscent of stones turned over and over by rivers on earth sharp edges are worn down they're rounded like pebbles so there may well be liquid on titan this discovery attracted attention and astonishment [Music] meanwhile the cassini orbiter made a surprising discovery of its own black spots and blotches were visible near titan's north pole [Music] radar observations show them to be lengths filled with some liquid they number in the hundreds and some of them are huge this is the first time liquid has been found on the surface of any celestial body other than earth [Music] the lakes are dotted with eyelids and fed by rivers but with a surface temperature of -180 degrees any water on titan would have frozen what liquid could it be in these lakes and rivers this is it [Music] liquid methane on earth it's normally a vapor but at extremely low temperatures it condenses into a liquid methane melts at minus 182 degrees celsius it boils at minus 161 degrees in the 20 degree range between those two extremes it exists in a liquid state the temperatures on titan's surface are just right for liquid methane methane is composed of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms it's the simplest hydrocarbon and it constitutes the bulk of the liquid in titan's lengths a portion of the liquid is ethane another hydrocarbon with similar characteristics [Music] scientists at the jet propulsion laboratory are trying to determine how titan's methane lakes were created by conducting experiments here on earth christoph soton is an expert on bodies of ice found in the solar system [Music] this device is called the titan chamber with internal air pressure at 1.5 bars and a temperature of minus 180 degrees celsius it reproduces tightens environmental conditions inside is placed a disc of ice standing in for the terrain on titan they then released droplets of liquid methane onto the surface of the ice [Music] the methane disappears immediately absorbed by the ice like water being swallowed up by a thirsty earth so the big surprise something you know we did not expect is that when the the methane falls on the ice well actually the methane got sucked into into the eyes it gets absorbed it doesn't run on on the ice [Music] however if methane continues to drip onto the ice eventually it begins to pool on the surface [Music] this suggests that wherever there are lakes on titan the surrounding ice must be saturated with methane during its landing on titan huygens measured the concentration of methane that concentration gradually rose the closer the probe got to the surface then the moment it landed there was a sharp increase it is thought that this was due to the heat from huygens vaporizing the methane that permeates the ice [Music] on titan liquid methane acts in ways similar to water on earth [Music] in june 2012 for example cassini observed a strange phenomenon near titan's south pole an oddly shaped mass seemed to be squirming about in the atmosphere it was a cloud swirling a cloud made up of methane [Music] on earth water is recycled as water vapor and rain one of the factors prompting this is seasonal change on titan the same sort of mechanism seems to be at work titan is tilted on its axis some 26 degrees off vertical the earth has a 23.4 degree tilt it's another point of similarity along with its parent planet saturn not shown here titan takes 30 earth years to orbit the sun the tilt of its axis gives birth to different seasons at this location titan's northern hemisphere experiences the long days of summer the northern hemisphere is warmed producing rising atmospheric currents liquid methane on titan's surface evaporates and is carried southward near the south pole it is winter the methane gas is cooled condensing into a liquid or even solid state it can form clouds like that huge swirling cloud cassini spot when it's winter in the northern hemisphere the cycle reverses now the methane cloud forms near the north pole underneath that cloud methane rain begins to fall since methane is more viscous than water its raindrops are larger with diameters of about a centimeter but as titan's gravity is weaker than earth's the droplets fall more slowly about one meter per second like a soft snow on earth they soak the icy ground on titan and form legs wind blows rain falls when people could finally see titan close up they were astonished at how much it resembles earth [Music] in 2007 the cassini orbiter spotted something truly peculiar on titan's surface a land formation some 70 kilometers across in the shape of a flower what could it be perspective can be gained by combining images taken from two different points of view a three-dimensional image of the topography emerges that strange formation turns out to be a rugged mountain featuring a 1500 meter high peak there's also a chasm that looks like it might be a volcanic crater from that one can infer a formally active volcano [Music] that volcano has been an object of particular interest to jonathan lunine an expert on titan's internal structure he says that the volcano did not spew lava rather it pumped up a mixture of ammonia and water one thing to remember is that when water is mixed with ammonia it can stay liquid down to very low temperatures down in fact to minus 100 celsius but at that point within a few degrees of that point the liquid is actually very viscous it's almost like basalt and so if that is what is flowing out on the surface we would see very thick flows [Music] lunine believes that under the ice beneath the volcano there's an ocean he came to this conclusion due to changes in titan's shape [Music] titan completes its elliptical orbit around saturn once every 16 days during that time it regularly feels the changing effect of saturn's gravity in short it experiences tidal forces at its farthest point from saturn titan is almost perfectly spherical [Music] but at its closest point where saturn's gravitational pull is the strongest titan grows fatter [Music] its diameter alters by as much as 10 meters lunin says that titan can transform so dramatically because internally it is not made entirely of solid rock lunin's observations suggest the following picture of titan's structure [Music] the outer crust of ice is some 50 to 100 kilometers thick the center is comprised of two types of bedrock in between the ice and the rock however is a layer of liquid water the bedrock generates heat says lunid permitting the water to remain in a liquid state this ocean layer is some 300 kilometers deep ammonia present in titan since its origin has also dissolved into the water it is thanks to this ocean layer that titan can change shape so flexibly the interior is warm enough that really only liquid water is a suitable stable material in that region so we're pretty sure from the gravity experiment the titan has a liquid water layer under its surface according to lanine the tidal forces caused by saturn in turn stimulate volcanic activity tidal forces cause friction along the boundary between the ice and the subsurface ocean the water heated in this way melts some of the icy crust it builds up like terrestrial magma and eventually forces its way up above the surface this ammonia-laden water flows out from titan's volcanoes like lava luneen believes such volcanoes are proof of an underground ocean beneath titan's icy shell a whole new world lies hidden [Music] saturn has over 60 moons among them are enceladus ice covered like titan and hyperion pock marked with craters mimas has this huge crater [Music] those are just a few of saturn's moons but they all have practically no atmosphere only titan boasts an atmosphere that extends as far as 1 000 kilometers into space actual measurements reveal that this atmosphere is 98 nitrogen the rest is largely methane why is titan the only one of saturn's moons with a thick atmosphere solving that mystery through experimentation on earth has been a preoccupation of yasuhito sekine sekine believes that titan's atmosphere was generated by an extraordinary mechanism [Music] the mechanism collisions with small celestial objects sekine is trying to reproduce that effect using a laser [Music] when titan was first formed its icy landmass contained about one percent ammonia so inside a vacuum chamber a disk of ammonia water ice stands in for the young titan the laser beam enters from the left of your screen it strikes a projectile which then impacts the ammonia disk [Music] that was the laser shot [Music] gases released by the impact are measured [Music] one is nitrogen released by the disintegration of the ammonia [Music] titan's thick atmosphere contains large amounts of nitrogen [Music] according to sekine's calculations based on his experiments repeated impacts by small celestial objects could have produced just such an atmosphere titan [Music] [Music] for example enceladus one of saturn's other moons is merely 500 kilometers across that is one-tenth of titan's diameter saturn's other satellites are also small with weak gravitational fields so even if they've been similarly impacted they haven't been able to hold on to any atmosphere [Music] but did titan in fact experience repeated bombardment by small celestial objects how leveson uses computers to calculate the history of the solar system he has advanced the revolutionary theory that some four billion years ago the entire solar system was shaken by a massive event [Music] levison argues that when the solar system was forming 4.6 billion years ago uranus and neptune were closer to the sun than they are now [Music] he inputs the location and size of the planets and also of the small celestial objects that lie further out then the simulation begins at first the basic situation did not change much but some 600 million years later uranus and neptune were suddenly flung to the outer realms of the solar system then out okay and that caused the giant planets to slowly spread it was infinitesimal you wouldn't have noticed it but the orbits were slowly changing and that continued until jupiter and saturn got to the point where jupiter was going around the sun exactly twice every time saturn went around once and that configuration is what set the whole instability off okay so you went almost overnight from a time when okay there was a little bit going on but not much to this very violent period where all hell breaks loose the smaller celestial objects shown here in green had formed a ring at the outer edge of the solar system but then the gravitational force of uranus and neptune violently scattered these objects the result was that in the period from 4 billion to 3.9 billion years ago the planets of the solar system encountered a barrage of small celestial objects during this period titan also was hit repeatedly developing a nitrogen-rich atmosphere that made it a very special moon 1977 saw the launch of voyager 1 its mission to explore and observe the outer planets from jupiter to neptune [Music] this was its view of titan [Music] it was a close look but still the moon was shrouded in a thick orange haze however even then one scientist maintained that the haze held the secret to sparking life below bichon carrey has been trying to penetrate the mystery of titan's haze since the early 1970s he participated in the voyager mission he has focused on the haze as being itself a source of life carray introduces a nitrogen methane mix into a sealed flask to simulate titan's atmosphere the flask is fitted with electrodes now karade discharges them this is meant to reproduce the effect of lightning or other energy surges on titan's atmosphere [Music] it's about 10 hours since the start of the experiment a reddish-brown substance has become visible inside the flask carre claims that this is the very same substance as the haze enveloping titan [Music] so what happened inside that glass vessel [Music] first off the electrical surges split apart the molecules of nitrogen and the methane their atoms recombine with carbon and other atoms in all sorts of ways forming a variety of new organic compounds [Music] analysis showed that some 200 types of organic compounds had been created in this experiment [Music] organic compounds are the materials out of which our own bodies are made they are the building blocks of life it was thanks to carray's work that titan came to be considered one of the celestial objects on which life might exist [Music] the cassini orbiter's close-up observations of titan have come some 30 years after carray's experiments will they confirm that titan's hazy atmosphere has in fact given rise to organics the inms is a device that measures molecular mass cassini has used it to determine the composition of titan's atmosphere cassini's data were streamed back to earth where they were analyzed by hunter waite and his colleagues wait led the team that designed the inms instrument package carried aboard cassini waits lab was able to reproduce and confirm cassini's data by utilizing the same inms system they could then analyze accurately whatever molecules or compounds the instrument had detected [Music] the results were astonishing rendered in the form of a chart each of the different molecules identified by cassini is represented by its own colored area [Music] various organic substances were created in titan's atmosphere ranging from ones with a single carbon atom to more complex ones with six or seven carbon atoms when cassini sent back data we found out that the upper atmosphere was much more relevant than we ever thought that most of the chemistry seemed to be going on in the upper atmosphere that very large molecules were being created in the upper atmosphere way beyond our expectations titan is one of the uh best organic factories in the solar system in ultraviolet and cosmic rays titan's upper atmosphere is continually engaged in converting nitrogen and methane into a rich array of organic compounds [Music] as these compounds collect in the lower atmosphere they produce titan's famous orange haze [Music] they are precipitated with methane rain onto the surface as well [Music] it's been four billion years since titan's atmosphere was formed during that time it is estimated the organic settling onto the surface have created a layer dozens of meters thick the dunes discovered near titan's equator are thought to be a large deposit of these organics now on titan the sand is made we think from organic material and we think that material comes down and gets built up into sand-sized particles that are then accumulated by the wind to form fumes much like these amidst this accumulation of organics on titan's surface are substances of vital importance to the emergence of life [Music] that finding was made by a young researcher with a specialty in organic chemistry sarah hurst hearst has undertaken a minute examination of the organic compounds discovered in titan's atmosphere she's written her own computer program to do that based on cassini's observational data she faithfully simulates the composition of titan's atmosphere and produces the same organics next she uses her computer program to determine the molecular structure of every compound these peaks right here are the masses of the ions in the mass spectrum data and then it's the number of carbon nitrogen oxygen and hydrogen in each of those peaks and so then what the code does is it goes through and compares this information to a list that i've given it of all of the amino acids and nucleobases that we're looking at so here we have at 136 we have the molecular formula of adenine which is five carbons that matches it has five nitrogens it matches no oxygen and then five hydrogens so we know from this that we have the molecular formula of adenine in the sample genetic information for all life on earth is encoded in dna adenine is one of its four major components or nucleobases and all four have been produced in hearst's experiments [Music] if these nucleobases combine in such a way that they create dna then a huge step forward will have been taken towards life itself with this discovery speculation mounted that titan might actually be capable of harboring life [Music] life on titan it may in fact already exist if it does what would it look like the search is on for the answer [Music] trinidad and tobago form an island country in the southern caribbean they have a population of about 1.3 million they also have one of the most unusual lakes in the world it's called pitch lake it contains not water but naturally occurring asphalt it bubbles up from an oil field that lies underneath creating a lake of asphalt that's 40 hectares in area and 80 meters deep strangely enough pitch lake is the site of field work being done by astrobiologist dirk schultz mccook he thinks that titan is the best candidate for the location of extraterrestrial life he's come here to try to envision what life forms on titan might be like asphalt like methane is a hydrocarbon comprised entirely of carbon and hydrogen you wouldn't think this was a substance that harbors life but schultz mccook says it actually does contain microorganisms well this is uh one of the few environments where it's similar to saturn's moon titan where we know that we have hydrocarbon lakes on the surface obviously titan is very cold so it's still different than from over here but we do have the liquid methane and ethane which are also hydrocarbons and if we can find out what kind of organisms are living here in the asphalt lake and how they adapt to living in the hydrocarbons we think we can get some ideas to how life could operate on a moon like titan asphalt contains almost no water did you say that there is microbloma yes there's microbial organisms in that liquid asphalt in this thing yeah like maybe one two millions genetic analysis identified some 600 new types of microorganisms living in the asphalt most are archaebacteria related to the primordial microorganisms that live in extreme environments [Music] so for them actually it's a great environment it's a great food source and basically never running out food source because it's getting supplied from deep down there on earth there are microorganisms that can use asphalt for sustenance instead of water schulze mccook is convinced that in titan's lakes there must be life forms that exploit methane in a similar way [Music] another scientist chris mckay holds that the methane lakes on titan contain creatures so unlike earth creatures that they exceed our wildest imaginations think of fish living in water and ask them to imagine a bird which lives in air they probably can't conceive of an organism that is so much denser than the medium in which it lives fish moved through water by floating so they would imagine a bird must float in the air we humans live in an environment called earth we produce energy by causing oxygen and organic matter to interact that is our lifestyle but mckay is arguing that on titan life forms would be based on a titan lifestyle that makes use of what's available on titan [Music] titan's atmosphere contains minuscule amounts of hydrogen and acetylene mckay thinks that there may be life forms on titan that exist by deriving energy from the interaction of those two substances in a methane environment mckay says that life could very well already exist on titan [Music] so instead of being small and round i would guess that a single celled organism of titan might be big and flat like a sheet of paper to maximize its contact with the nutrients in this thin soup so it's living in an environment where there's not a lot of food so it's got to access the food with big area and maybe on this area it has active molecules so it's like a big flat sheet of paper with little traps on it to get to collect food to that life form that will be the normal environment it was not until the 21st century that titan's thick veil was lifted now that we're getting a closer look what new discoveries await so titan gives us a whole new set of possibilities and there are for sure uh perhaps hundreds maybe millions of worlds like titan around other stars do those have life or titan maybe can give us some clues if life is found on titan humanity's view of the universe will surely change the best place for me in terms of finding another type of life would be titan because if we find it on titan then we know that it really is two it's not the same as us when we go to mars we may find life on mars but we won't be sure that it's not the same life as earth so my best hope would be we find life on titan because then i know that we found two completely different types of life then i can go on to some other science problem there is only one body in space that we know of other than earth that has a thick atmosphere and lakes titan if life is found on titan it will instantly increase the possibility that life exists in many other places in the universe as well we may not be alone in the universe we may have many comrades the quest to find out for sure continues clues to solving that great mystery lie hidden on titan so [Music] this so so um uh so foreign you good so thank you um foreign so this do so c so so what so so so so so you you okay you yes so so if this so so so so so so two so so so so so foreign so uh okay if yes this you 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Channel: The Universe & Space

Views: 1,524,859

Keywords: knowledge, Science, The Universe, Space, Solar System, Astronomy, documentary, cosmos, planets, stars, planetary, how the universe works, Secrets of the Universe, Formation, Earth, Space Discovery Documentary, how the universe works formation and evolution

Id: rQ0szNDQUXk

Length: 191min 7sec (11467 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 14 2022