Carolyn Porco: flies us to Saturn: TED Talk: Inspiring: Informative: Ideas

[Music] in the next 18 minutes I'm going to take you on a journey and uh it's a journey that you and I have been on for many years now and it began some 50 years ago when humans uh first stepped off our planet and in those 50 years not only did we literally physically step foot set foot on the moon but we have dispatched robotic uh spacecraft to all the planets all eight of them and we have landed on asteroids we have rendevu with comets and at this point in time we have a spacecraft in uh on its way to Pluto the body formerly known as a planet and all these robotic missions are part of a bigger human Journey uh a a voyage to understand uh something to uh to get a sense of our Cosmic place to understand something of our Origins and how Earth our planet and we living on it came to be and of all the places in the solar system that we might go to and search for answers to questions like this there's Saturn and we had been to Saturn before we had been we' visited Saturn in the early 1980s but our investigations of Saturn have become far more in-depth in detail since the Cassini spacecraft traveling across interplanetary space for seven years glided into orbit around Saturn in the summer of 2004 and became at that point the farthest robotic Outpost that Humanity had ever established around the Sun now the Saturn system is a rich planetary system it offers mystery scientific insight and obviously Splendor Beyond compare and the investigation of this system has enormous Cosmic reach in fact just studying the Rings alone we stand to learn a lot about the discs of stars and gas that we call the spiral galaxies and here's a beautiful picture of the Andromeda nebula which is our closest largest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way and then here's a beautiful composite of the whirlpool Galaxy taken by the Hub Space Telescope so the journey back to Saturn is really part of and is also a metaphor for a much larger human Voyage to understand the interconnectedness of everything around us and also how humans fit into that picture and it pains me that I can't tell you all that we have learned with Cassini and uh and all the be can show you all the beautiful pictures that we've taken in the last two and a half years because I simply don't have the time so I'm going to concentrate on two of the most exciting stories that have emerged uh out of this major exploratory Expedition that we are conducting around Saturn uh and have been for the past 2 and a half years Saturn is accompanied by a very large and diverse collection of moons they range in size from a few kilometers across to uh as big across as the US most of the beautiful pictures we've taken of Saturn in fact show Saturn in accompaniment with some of its moons here's Saturn with Deon and then here's Saturn showing the Rings Edge on showing you just how vertically thin they are with the moon Enceladus now two of the 47 moons that Saturn has are standouts and those are Titan and Enceladus Titan is Saturn's largest moon and until Cassini had arrived there was the largest single expanse of unexplored terrain that we had remaining in our solar system and it is a body that has long intrigued people who've watched the planets it uh has a very large uh thick atmosphere um and in fact its surface environment was believed to be more like uh the environment we have here on the earth or at least had in the past than any other body in the solar system it's uh atmosphere is largely molecular nitrogen like you are breathing here in this room except that its atmosphere is suffused with simple organic materials like methane and propane and ethane and these molecules high up in the atmosphere of Titan get broken down and their products join together to make Haze particles this Haze is ubiquitous it's completely Global and enveloping Titan and that's why you cannot see down to the surface in the with our eyes in the visible region of the spectrum but these Haze particles it was surmised before we got there with Cassini over a billions and billions of years gently drifted down to the surface and coated the surface in a thick organic sludge so like the equivalent the Titan equivalent of tar or or oil or what we didn't know what but this is what we suspected and these molecules especially methane and ethane can be uh liquids at the surface temperatures of Titan okay and so it turns out that methane is to tighten what water is to the Earth it can it's a condensible in the atmosphere and so it this recognizing this circumstance uh brought to the four a whole world of bizarre possibilities you can have methane clouds okay and above those clouds you have this hundreds of kilometers of haze which prevent any sunlight from getting to the surface the temperature at the surface is some 350° below 0 fah okay but despite that cold you could have uh rain falling down on the surface of Titan and doing on Titan what rain does on the earth it carves gules it forms rivers and cataracts it can create Canyons it can pool in large basins and craters okay it can wash the sludge off high mountain peaks and Hills down into the lowlands so so stop and think for for a minute try to imagine what the surface of Titan might look like okay it's dark high noon on Titan is as dark as deep Earth Twilight on the earth it's cold it's Eerie it's Misty it might be raining and you might be standing on the shores of Lake Michigan brimming with paint thinner okay that is the view that we had of the surface of Titan before we got there with Cassini and I can tell you that what we have found on Titan though is not the same in detail is every as fascinating as that story is and for us it has been like a the Cassini people it has been like a juwes Vern Adventure come true as I said it has a thick extensive atmosphere this is a picture of Titan backlit by the sun with the Rings as a beautiful backdrop uh and yet another Moon there I don't even know which one it is it's a very extensive atmosphere we have uh instruments on Cassini which can see down to the surface through this atmosphere and my camera system is one of them and we have taken pictures like this and what you see is bright and dark regions and that's about as far as it got for us it was so mystifying we couldn't make out what we were seeing on Titan when you look closer at um this region you start to see things like sinuous channels we didn't know you see a few round things this we have later found out is in fact a crater but there's very few craters on the surface of Titan meaning it's a very young surface um and there are features that look tectonic they look like they've been pulled apart whenever you see anything linear here on a planet it means there's been a fracture okay like a fault and so that it's been tectonically altered but we couldn't make sense of our images until 6 months after we got into orbit an event occurred that many have regarded as the highlight of cassini's Investigation of Titan and that was the deployment of the haens probe the European built haens probe that Cassini had carried for 7even years across the solar system we deployed it to the atmosphere of Titan it just took 2 and 1 half hours to descend and it landed on the surface and I just want to emphasize how significant an event this is this is a device of human making and it landed in the outer solar system for the first time in human history it is so significant that in my mind this was an event that should have been celebrated with ticker tape parades in every city across the US and Europe and sadly that wasn't the case it was significant for another reason this is an International Mission and this event was celebrated in Europe in Germany and the celebratory presentations were given in English accents and American accents and German accents and French and Italian and Dutch accents it was a moving demonstration of what the words United Nations are supposed to mean a true Union of Nations joined together in a an colossal effort for good and in this case it was a massive undertaking to explore a planet and to come to understand a planetary system that for all of human history had been unreachable and now humans had actually touched it so it was I mean I'm getting boost Goosebumps just talking about it it was a tremendously emotional event um and it's something that I will personally never forget and you shouldn't either [Applause] um but anyway the probe took measurements of the atmosphere on the way down and it also took pamic pictures and I can't tell you what it was like to see the first pictures of Titan surface from the probe and this is what we saw and it was a shocker because it was everything we wanted those other pictures taken from orbit to be it was an unambiguous pattern a geological pattern it's a dendritic drainage pattern that can be formed only by the flow of liquids and you can follow these channels and you can see how they all converge and they converge into this channel here which drains into this region you are looking at a shoreline was this a shoreline of of fluids we didn't know but this is somewhat of a shoreline this picture is taken at 16 km this is the picture taken at 8 kilm okay again the shoreline okay now 16 km 8 km this is roughly an airline altitude if you were going to take an airplane trip across the US you would be flying at these altitudes so this is the picture you would have at the window of titanian Airlines as you fly across the surface of Titan and then finally the probe came to rest on the surface and I'm going to show you ladies and gentlemen the first picture ever taken from the surface of a moon in the outer solar system and here is the Horizon okay these are probably water ice Pebbles [Applause] [Music] yes and obviously it it landed in one of these Flat Dark regions and it didn't sink out of sight so it wasn't fluid that we landed in okay what the probe came down in was basically the Titan equivalent of a mud flat this is an unconsolidated ground that is suffused with liquid methane okay and it's probably the case that this material has washed off the highlands of Titan through these channels that we saw and has drained over billions of years to fill in low-lying basins and that is what Titan uh that is what the hens probe landed in but still there was no sign in our images or even in the hen's images of any large open bodies of fluids where were they it got even more puzzling when we found Dunes okay so this is our movie of the equatorial region of Titan showing these Dunes okay these are Dunes that are 100 meters tall separated by a few kilometers and they go on from Miles and Miles and Miles there's hundreds up to 1, or 1200 miles of Dunes this is the Saharan Desert of Titan okay it's obviously a place which is very dry or you wouldn't get Dunes so again it got puzzling that there were no um bodies of fluids until finally we saw lakes in the polar regions and there is a lake scene in the South Pole region of Titan it's about the size of Lake Ontario and then only a week and a half ago we Flew Over the North Pole of Titan and found again we found a uh feature here the size of the Caspian Sea so it seems that the liquids for some reason we don't understand uh during at least this season are apparently at the polls of uh of Titan and I think you would agree that Titan we have found Titan is an a remarkable mystical place it's exotic it's an alien but yet strangely earthlike and having earthlike geological formations and a tremendous uh geographical diversity and uh is a fascinating World whose only rival in the solar system for complexity and richness is the Earth itself and so now we go on to Enceladus Enceladus is a small moon it's about the tenth the size of Titan and you could see it here next to England just to show you the size this is not meant to be a threat okay and Enceladus is very white it's very bright uh and its surface is obviously wrecked uh with fractures it is a very geologically active body but the motherload of discoveries on Enceladus was found at the South Pole and we're looking at the South Pole here where we found this system of fractures and they're a different color because they're a different composition they are coated these fractures are coated with organic materials moreover this whole entire region okay the South polar region has elevated temperatures it's the hottest place on the planet on the on the body that's as bizarre as finding that the Antarctic on the earth is hotter than the tropics okay and then when we took uh additional pictures we discovered that from these fractures are issuing Jets of fine icy particles extending hundreds of miles into space and when we color code this image to bring out the faint light levels we see that these Jets feed a plume that in fact we see in other images goes thousands of miles into the space above Enceladus my team and I have examined images like this and like this one and have thought about the other results from Cassini and we have arrived at the the conclusion that these Jets may they may be erupting from pockets of liquid water near under the surface of Enceladus so we have possibly liquid water organic materials and excess heat in other words we have possibly stumbled upon the holy grail of modern-day Planetary Exploration or in other words an environment that is potentially suitable for living organisms and I don't think I need to tell you that the discovery of life elsewhere in our solar system whether it be on Enceladus or elsewhere would have enormous cultural and scientific implications because if we could demonstrate that Genesis had occurred not once but twice independently in our solar system then that means by inference it has occurred a staggering number of times throughout the Universe and its 13.7 billion year history um right now Earth is the only planet still that we know is teeming with life it is precious it is unique it is still so far the only home we've ever known and if any of you were alert and coherent during the 1960s and we'd forgive you if you weren't okay you would remember this very famous picture taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968 it was the first time that Earth was imaged from space and it had an enormous impact on our sense of place in the universe and our sense of responsibility for the protection of our own Planet well we on Cassini have taken an equivalent first that no a picture that no human eyes has ever seen before it is a total eclipse of the sun seen from the other side of Saturn and in this impossibly beautiful picture you see the main Rings backlit by the sun you see the refracted image of the Sun and you see this ring created in fact by the exhalations of Enceladus but as if that weren't brilliant enough we can spot in this beautiful image sight of our own planet cradled in the arms of Saturn's rings okay now there is something deeply moving about seeing ourselves from afar and capturing the sight of our little blue ocean planet in the skies of other worlds and that and the perspective of ourselves that we gain from that may be in the end the finest reward that we earn from this journey of discovery that started half a century ago and thank you very [Applause] much all

Channel: TalkDocumentary

Views: 34,963

Keywords: documentary, lecture, talk, ted, ted talk, technology, entertainment, design, life, earth, science, invention, sustainable, innovation, new ideas, Carolyn, Porco, flies us to Saturn, Inspiring:, Informative:, Ideas

Id: 5usqdjsr6Vw

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 23 2012