Exploring our Mind-Blowing Universe | BBC Earth Science

[Music] the James web Space Telescope is revealing the universe like never before our planets the furthest galaxies and the strangest phenomena and what you can see is actually material falling into a black hole and that's only in the first few weeks there's going to be a lot more discoveries to come the James web Space Telescope is a product of Decades of hard work from scientists around the world I have been waiting my entire astronomy career for jwst it is absolutely revolutionary compared to what was available it's very very rare in science that you make a big step forward in your measurement capability in the way that jwst has done for astronomy and it's just it just doesn't happen very often in the history of Science and that's really exciting and significant one of the things that makes James Webb so special is its gigantic mirror so that there are various things that make the primary mirror on James web special and incredible I mean the first is the sheer size of the mirror it's the largest one ever launched the web mirror is around 6 and 1 half m in size so if you can imagine that that's bigger than most houses you're walking by it's so large it wouldn't fit in the rocket so they had to devise a way of folding it up so that it would fit inside the um the top of the rocket it's absolutely humongous and that makes a really big difference in terms of the sensitivity of the telescope well it's thousands of times more sensitive than Hubble it's a step forward of factors of a thousand or more factors of several thousand in fact I'm creating myself the bigger the mirror the more light you collect the bigger the collecting area the more sensitive you are and the further you can see the other thing that makes it absolutely incredible is um the the the Precision with which it's been made if the mirror was stretched to be the size of the United States and and you were to measure the size of the biggest bumps and dips on the mirror you're only looking looking at a bump or a dip of order 1 cm in size it's it's absolutely incredible and that's what generates the the near perfect images from the primary mirror but it's not just the mirror that makes the images from James web so incredible it's also the type of light that it detects the James web Space Telescope detects infrared light which is a wavelength of light that we can't see but the unique properties of infrared make it incredible for exploration so with the infrared light you can see the atmospheres of exoplanets there's molecules in Star formation regions things like caffeine and alcohol and water ice the signatures of life around other planets so just a few things then infrared opens up the possibilities for astronomers like Olivia and allows them to capture images that would previously be impossible in the optical range but even within the infrared Spectrum there are multiple different wavelengths on board web there are three instruments that observe near infrared this is closer to the visible Spectrum but the instrument that's garnering the world's attention is the mid infrared instrument on board jwst known as Mir mirie is essential for jwst without it you can't see the cooler phenomena in the universe you can't peer back as into the earlier stages of star formation as you would like so so Mar is an incredibly significant and important instrument the image is um contains far more detail than has ever been done before when we look at it in a new wav of light we find things that we hadn't expected to see and that's a really important part of how you discover things about the universe Miri allows us to see further along the infrared spectrum and this in turn allows us to see through dust cloud and further back in time than ever before that's because as galaxies move away from us the color they emit shifts further into the infrared so the longer the wavelength we can observe the further back in time we can see but despite the capabilities and M it very nearly didn't make it on board James web so mie wasn't initially part of those plans because it seemed technically very complicated and I think people were thinking about the science in a slightly different way and so I started making the case that really we needed to add a mid infrared facility to the telescope Jillian Wright is the European principal investigator for Mir and the director of the UK astronomy Technology Center and was instrumental in pitching to get Mary on board web when when I found out it was confirmed that maray was going to be on board I remember being very happy and also knowing that I was going to be very busy for a large number of years Jillian wasn't wrong construction of James Webb Space Telescope started in 2004 and 17 years of work later on Christmas Day 2021 with Mary securely on board the telescope finally launched and offage lift off from a tropical rainforest to the Edge of Time itself James web begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe I've been looking forward for the web launch for many many years and as it got closer to Christmas day I was extremely nervous I don't think my family enjoyed Christmas morning with me because I had on the TV um the web launch playing and I was I was quite nervous I had my pillows ready in case I needed to hide everything went perfectly it was it was an incredible launch it was a pleasure pleasure to watch so it was a very good Christmas present it was a lovely Christmas present it really was over the next few months the James Webb Space Telescope traveled over 1.5 million km away from Earth to its new home gradually turning on the instruments along the way so then it was getting really exciting cuz we we've been from Christmas day all the way through through until um the late the late spring when Miry finally gets turned on as the instruments are being turned on it's both exciting and and it's nerve-wracking because you you know that there could be things wrong after Decades of work the James web Space Telescope was finally operational and it wasn't long before the images started coming in I knew when web was going to take its first images they were going to be spectacular what had not prepared me was just how spectacular they going they were going to be the first images were just incredible just so beautiful it was amazing and then when the first images came back I was just absolutely astounded at how good everything performed and I've been smiling ever since it's almost emotional the images are spectacular and the only thing more spectacular than the images are the discoveries that lie within them so one of the things I think that's really exciting about the early images is the way they show how Mary really adds information I can see details in there that I knew existed but I never thought I'd be able to see with a scientific instrument some of the first web images released were of the Southern ring nebula this is a planetary nebula which is a star at the very end of its life in the mirror image we see actually a second star so we can see a red star and a white star so these are actually a binary system in and that's the very first time we've seen this binary compion in the southern Ring Nebula this is an image of Stefan's quintet five galaxies that are interacting with each other and what you can see in this galaxy up here is actually material falling into a black ho hole in an active Galactic nuclei you can see the material in the galaxy is actually orbiting and falling into the Galaxy itself this is 13 times further than what we've been able to see before in the infrared I mean jwst has already found the furthest galaxies we've ever seen the highest red shift ones the closest and that's only in the first few weeks of operation and that's really exciting and I think it's an indication that there's going to be a lot more discoveries to come with web we've designed it to answer many of the questions we already know about the universe but as with all new telescopes there's a realm of new discoveries the Mysteries that will arise I think they're really exciting new questions to answer the questions we don't know how to ask just now and I think that's really exciting to see something that nobody not only has nobody ever seen it before but nobody expected to see it I feel very privileged to be part of this I'm proud to be part of jwst it's been an amazing journey and a fantastic privilege really to be part of it I I think it's just incredible I had a I helped make that instrument and and when I see these images I'm just full of [Music] smiles very first data we got from Paro Pro for maybe 15 minutes we were thinking there is something wrong with the instrument only to realize that now the instrument is working perfectly and actually what we are seeing is physics it's physics that we have not seen before the sun is the most important Celestial body in space at least to us here on Earth it drives weather ocean currents Seasons the climate and without the sun's heat and light life on Earth would not exist but we don't understand it as well as you might think that's where Park solar probe comes in NASA's first ever mission to touch the sun it's a voyage of Discovery it's a groundbreaking Mission it is steeped in history this is Nicola Fox the director of heliophysics at Nasa so the concept of Parker solar probe has been around for over 60 years and so you know it's been the most high priority science for us to do but it was always so challenging technically and then you know finally the technology catches up with the scientist dreams and we're able to really achieve the mission but nothing about parasola probe was easy not only has the probe traveled nearly 90 million miles closer to the Sun than Earth but it's had to withstand temperatures of over, 1400° keeping it cool is a job of thermal engineer Betsy Kon how hard could it be so the task of Designing a heat shield for something that's going to the sun is immense anytime you're trying to do something that has never been done before um while it is really exciting it is also very stressful one of the things when you're designing something for space uh as an engineer is you actually want to keep things quite simple the Parker heat shield is about 4 and 1/2 in thick yeah just 4 and 1/2 in is protecting this probe from thousands of degrees C the Parker heat shield is about 4 and 1/2 in thick um and on both sides there is a material called carbon carbon it's a lot like the graphite epoxy that you might find in your golf clubs or and tennis racket and then in between is carbon foam and so that together as a basically just a big sandwich uh is what protects the probe from the Sun as a Parker solar probe approaches the Sun and it's in its last approach and closest approach the front side of the heat shield will be at, 1400° C but the probe itself the spacecraft where all the electronics are will be at room temperature like in the 20s de cus and so it's almost like it doesn't even know it's at the sun and it can do this amazing science so thanks to Betsy and a team par solo probe will be traveling closer to the Sun than anything before but remain around the same temperature as the average swimming pool there's one more detail that made this historic moment extra nerve-wracking for the scientist the Parker solar probe is fully automated meaning that once the little probe was fired into space there'd be nothing the scientists could do to control it except there are these little sensors that are the farthest things uh that stick out behind the heat shield uh called solar limb sensors and they're designed that if they light up the spacecraft knows that it's going off a little track uh off track a little bit and it needs to write itself and so it will write itself without any commanding from Earth we don't have that kind of uh time to actually write itself it has to do all that on its own so all they could do was Hope on the 12th of August 2018 after over 60 years of planning Parker Sola probe finally launched every single member of the Parker solar probe team you know you know when we watched the launch really felt like we were losing a member of the team I worked on Parker solar probe for 10 years and at launch I cried I like it was it was a very emotional moment and I still when I see the launch videos I still get emotional about it there was separation anxiety there's the feeling that this this this you know thing that you've worked on for so long um is going to leave and not come back and really she is the part of the team that's actually doing the exploration parka solar probe has had one extra helper out in space though Venus rather than flying in a straight line towards the sun Parker solar probe uses the gravity of Venus as a giant slingshot catapulting it into closer and closer orbits of the Sun the first Venus flyby I think was the really key one for everybody once that maneuver was done um we were we were go for the Sun at that point the First Solar pan pass was um really emotional but amazing of course when it was actually in the Solar pass then that's Terror we can't actually talk to the probe while it's going in so until the spacecraft came back out from the other side of the Sun and everything was healthy when you get that uh green Beacon that everything is looking good after a solar pass it it is just an amazing feeling my God we've done it so after having launched Parker towards the sun on its eighth flyby in April of 2021 parka Sola probe finally entered the atmosphere of the sun it reminds me of um uh 1969 every time I see the movie when Neil Armstrong touches the surface of the Moon that's one small step for man that was Monumental in a way it's a parallel with to Parker solar probe when you fly through the solar Corona for the very first time nobody has done that before it was so so exciting and also so uh humbling to have launched this Mission throw it basically toward the Sun and returns you some data that you never seen the like like of it before just eye opening nor rui has been working on parka Sola probe for over 14 years and in case you're wondering if he still enjoyed it it's better by the day but the thing that's been exciting no more than anything before is the incredible discoveries coming from Parker solar probe uh the amount of discoveries it's Way Way Beyond uh any of us uh could have imagined it's just mind bugling um we are discovering by the day new phenomena in in the data that Parco Sol prob is sending us well the the the very first data we got from par solo probe when we got this data from the uh Fields instrument we were looking at the magnetic field measurements and for maybe 15 minutes we were thinking there is something wrong with the instrument only to realize that now the instrument is working perfectly and actually what we are seeing is physics it's physics that we have not seen before and it is this Which packs basically the magnetic field will flip over itself making a rotation of 180° and out again and it does that in a matter of seconds to minutes and uh it is just fascinating what is really important about these uh switchbacks is that they carry a lot of energy with them and that energy will dissipate it into the solar wind in the form of heat and speed two of the three goals of the of the mission is to explain the coronal Heating and the acceleration of the solar wind so the switchbacks could be the Smoking Gun that actually leads to the give us the answer to those questions by understanding switchbacks we could unlock the secrets of solar wind and how it's formed and accelerated towards Earth solar wind is not trivial it reaches speeds of over a million miles per hour traveling Way Beyond Pluto and it affects our everyday lives in 1989 a large solar flare caused the entire grid of cubec Canada to fail leaving them without power for over 12 hours so think what it could do to a rocket or a satellite and as well as solving Mysteries par solo probe is also creating puzzles for no and his team to try and solve parol probe like any other um missions and uh uh answer questions but by answering a question it it actually poses many more other questions in a way that's the essence of exploration we come to this world as Explorer and we believe it as Explorer on the eve of um Christmas of 2024 we will reach the closest approach to the sun ever that will be at 3.8 million miles from the solar surface it's so so close to it and after that we do two more orbits and that's the end of the Prime mission even after this Mission ends the discoveries made during this epic Mission will live on forever in the science and in the scientists it is the highlight of my career and it will be the highlight of my career uh uh definitely being involved in in Parco solar probe it's an honor we are really rewriting the textbooks about the Sun and it's amazing to have played a small part in that I am incredibly proud to have been part of the Parker solar Pro Mission parur probe changed me forever parur probe is an enabler in many respects it EMB Bolden us now to go after very challenging um ideas and concepts for future missions so we are not stopping here right now the two Voyager spacecrafts are hustling through Interstellar space at 35,000 000 mph the space is so far away that it took 35 years to get there and now we need new signs to understand it I couldn't believe how nature was fooling us it made us rethink everything we knew about the shape of our solar system I think I discovered that the tail is has a Coran shape and even where the edge of our solar system actually is there was a lot of confusion actually the confusion lasted almost a year even just to understand what Voyager is trying to say requires a very special set of skills it's really like a SS watch maker it need to be a trained eye to tell me can I trust this data or not what's even more extraordinary is how Voyager the old spacecraft from 1977 with 64 KOB of memory was able to make this journey at all 3 2 1 we have ignition and we have liftoff both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 and it had to be then thanks to an extremely rare planetary alignment it happens once every 175 years where we could fly past Jupiter get a gravity kick and go to Saturn get a gravity kick and get to Uranus and another gravity kick and go past Neptune within just two years Voyager one had reached Jupiter Voyer showed us a planet which looks so Serene through a telescope was actually rocked by hundreds of raging hurricans a glowing Aurora at the North Pole and three thin Rings Voyer took 33,000 images of Jupiter and its major moons that captured the world and we'd get to see these pictures and go whoa look at that what's this what's going on it was [Music] fantastic and a night like tonight our eyes our minds our our our souls our blood are moving out through the universe we're part of history and that means that we have to replace the old myths with new ones just one year later and Voyager one had already sped past Saturn spying intricate details in the planet's rings from earth scientists could only see five or six Saturn's rings Voyer showed us that there were more than a 100 and I can remember those first pictures as we flew away looking back at that system and seeing the reflected sunlight in that structured ring system was just so beautiful then the voyagers parted ways Voyager One headed straight for the edge of our solar system Voyager 2 took a more scenic route reaching Uranus in 1986 and eventually Neptune in 1989 showing us yet more outstanding views of the green and blue planets and spotted gas on Neptune's large Moon Triton and that was the main mission the first human made object to reach the distant world of our solar system but the Voyages weren't done yet they were about to embark on the journey to search for the edge of our solar system and before they left there was one last thing to do colan convinced NASA to turn the cameras um towards Earth and take that very famous picture the um pale blue dot on that blue dot that's where everyone you know and everyone you ever heard of and every human being whoever lived lived out there lives it's a very small stage in a great Cosmic Arena these images were the last of 67,000 images taken by the two Voyager spacecrafts their cameras were then turned off to save power as They carried on their Journey towards Interstellar space the boundary where our Sun's solar wind ends and the rest of our universe begins problem was nobody actually knew where it really was scientists thought that sooner or later the charged particles that create solar wind were going to run out and Voyager would enter a pristine environment of interstellar space we thought that would happen oh maybe just beyond Neptune but no that didn't happen well we said to NASA give us a bit more money another 5 years well this kept happening year after year NASA please give us a little bit more money a little bit longer we'll soon we'll be there as voyages 1 and two continueed to move out into the outer reaches of the solar system they remarkably continue to send very faint signals back to Earth and this what makes it so interesting and so fragile the whole instrumentation of Voyager was designed to visit the outer planets that are that have very strong magnetic fields so now we are dealing with a signal that is almost at the noise of the instrument and because Voyager was not designed for that it's Miracle fit that all this Steam is able to go mine the data and pull out the signal and tell us what's going on just five instruments were still operating on the spacecraft and in 2012 more than 35 years since Voyager 1 left earth scientists started to see the first signs that they were crossing into Interstellar space through the boundary known as the helops think about the helops as your walls of your house this is what separate environment that is dominated by the solar wind from from environment that is dominated from other winds from other stars outside of our bubble the heliosphere the expectation was that there would be a sudden shock a burst of activity that would make it obvious we'd finally reach this sharp boundary but the reality was much stranger all of the detectors on Voyager were seeing particles suddenly appear and then disappear then appear and then disappear and nobody had a clue why these strange particles seem to be coming from elsewhere in the galaxy galy did we Cross or not the data was so confusing on one hand Voyager was still being affected by the sun's magnetic field but the particles were suggesting we had crossed and turns out what really tipped the scale in the team was the Radio Data the data was stored on the spacecraft using a tape recorder so ancient technology it's extraordinary but it worked um uh and the data were gathered and sent back bit by bit and 6 months later we played we turn to the radio station of Voyager and guess what we heard these plasma waves converted into sound that we can hear with the final proof that we had crossed the boundary into Interstellar space the first human-made object to venture into Interstellar space even more extraordinary than crossing the boundary into Interstellar space was what the data said about the shape of the solar system I was tasked to create a computer model with all the physics that we know to kind of predict this shape of the heliosphere it turned out that the Solar System's heliosphere is not round like you think but has a tail from whizzing around the Galaxy and more than that I was finding that has a CO Sun shape two horns with a void in the Middle with just a shock to realize that something such basic as the shape of our home is completely different and all of this was discovered by a small extremely low Tech probe more than 10 billion miles away and they're still going in 2018 NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft crossed the boundary finally both Voyager spacecrafts with their 1970s technology had reached where No human-made Object had ever been before Interstellar space there's very little material very empty space can be very very empty the environment out there is colder and denser and of course it's dark there's not a lot of light you're far away from the Sun Voyager has also discovered that our Solar System's impact is much bigger than we thought before we would have liked to get to a region where the heliosphere doesn't influence anymore the interstellar medium what we call a pristine interstellar medium what we're measuring now is a medium highly disturbed by the Sun the voyagers are still sending us ever fainter signals still teaching us new things about Interstellar space but they're running out of time we probably have two three maybe four more years of power to communicate with voyager but there are still so many Mysteries left to be solved what is the environment outside what's happening the nearby stars that are influencing our system and so on so one of the beauties of the Voyager mission that it started as a planetary Mission gave us the first images of our planets discover volcanoes in the solar system and then it's went to discover our heliosphere our vast you know regions of our solar system and enter into the Galaxy long after their power has gone the Voyages will continue to rush away from us monuments to human endeavor and exploration heading out towards the Stars Voyager will continue its little journey in the interstellar space way past when we maybe as a species will cease to exist when we might move to a different planet it'll keep going and going and going and going and going forever [Music] we used to seeing NASA fire up its rockets and launch billions of dollars of equipment into space but what happens when it messes up the Hubble Space Telescope project has suffered yet another setback and how do you fix a billion doll mistake up in space I did not have a line item that says NASA put wrong mirror in telescope with Engineers needing to fix it not once but twice so our the the the summer 2021 event um is a um was a pretty intense anomaly this is a story of how the Hubble Space Telescope nearly destroyed NASA's reputation and the retired engineer that helped bring the telescope back from the brink both times when I received the call I was honored that they would think of me to try and help them uh resolve this this is electrical engineer Ron barish I started working on uh Hubble in 1987 approximately 2 years before launch Hubble was one of the most ambitious space projects the world had ever seen NASA had spent hundreds of millions designing a massive mirror in the telescope to get the sharpest pictures of the universe ever seen expectations were high it promised to catapult space science into a radical new era and all eyes were on it and liftoff of the Space Shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope our window on the universe it was very exciting to uh to watch the launch when it was turned on in orbit uh very exciting NASA was quick to Champion it as the greatest advance in astronomy since Galileo but then disaster struck the Hubble Space Telescope project has suffered yet another setback Engineers have discovered that the the giant telescope has a warped mirror which means the images sent back to NASA are distorted the pictures are little better than those from groundbased telescopes we found out that there was Distortion in in the image uh well the images I saw were uh blurry the uh they called it spherical aberration when light enters the telescope it's reflected first by a large 8ft mirror onto a smaller secondary mirror which concentrates the light onto the cameras if either the mirror is slightly out of true the picture becomes distorted and that's exactly what had happened the mirror hadn't been tested with the rest of Hubble had it been tested the scientists would have seen that the mirror was ground incorrectly by just 150th of a human hair tiny but enough to ruin everything everyone on the project was very disappointed uh and it was an embarrassment that we had spent so much time on the uh program and that there was uh a significant flaw the news was not very uh kind to the project well the American taxpayer they're not going to be happy well look you launched this $2 billion white elephant what are you going to do and the bad news kept coming as NASA's reputation received blow after blow after blow but despite the setback there were still some that had hope for so do not write off the Hubble telescope it merely means it's not going to be quite so good as expected until the repairs are carried out replacing the mirror wasn't practical so instead Ron and the rest of the team created an instrument called co-star which would act almost like a pair of glasses redirecting the light to account for the floor in the mirror my job was to provide uh an Electronics interface box called the remote interface unit co-star 3 years after Hubble's embarrassing start they finally had the parts needed to fix the broken Hubble Space Telescope all that was needed now was a team of astronauts bold enough and daring enough to attempt a mission of this magnitude there weren't very many of us in the office at that time who had done space walks and so that's how I got kind of a quick turnaround from one flight to the next you know in all the failes the hundreds and hundreds of failes I came up with that I had to accommodate I did not have a line item that says NASA put wrong mirror in telescope Catherine Thornton and story Musgrave were two of the astronauts that were selected for the mission and in 1993 they set off the world held its breath as the astronauts carried out five back-to-back space walks in an attempt to bring Hubble back from the brink the first space walk on Hubble um did the dance when the music starts what you going to do well you got a power tool and you unbolt the thing you undo the connection Zip Zip stick it in the Box hang it over there get the new one out slide the new one in it's fingertips baby fingertips that's what's so awesome about Hubble it's almost like plug and play we installed co-star we installed a co-processor on the computer to give it more memory added a new magnetometer and um other cats and dogs as we called it it is easy you've got to make it easy around the world astronomers anxiously awaited the first pictures from hub new camera on the 18th of December 1993 the results came [Applause] in right there did it when an image hit the monitor everyone screamed it just got it's fixed okay that is better than any decompostion you those are actually Stars I think you got it yep yep sir a little premature but I'll shake your hand when the images first came back and I saw them made me be feel proud that I was part of that mission and that we had brought the telescope back to what it was supposed to be as a matter of fact uh my understanding is the images were clearer than uh what they had ever expected to the relief of Ron NASA and the entire world Hubble was finally fixed and it immediately began to deliver on its original promise allowing us to see the universe in ways we could previously only dream about Hubble was only supposed to last 15 years instead it continued to make groundbreaking discoveries for more than 30 but then in 2021 it suddenly shut down and the team at Nasa once again had to fight for Hubble survival so our the the the summer 2021 event um is a um was a pretty intense anomaly probably one of the more dramatic ones that we've had and Zinga is the anomaly response manager for Hubble and it was her job to figure out why Hubble's computer had shut down and ultimately find a way to get it back up and running but that was Far easier said than done so Zinger had to think outside the box after the first few days and it wasn't immediately apparent um that we could get a path forward to resume science uh we knew we'd have to pull in um a lot more folks with Hubble still showing no signs of life and Zinga knew she needed some very Niche expertise to try and help fix Hubble so she called upon Hubble's original Architects to come back and get stuck in when I received the call I was honored that they would think of me to try and help them uh resolve this uh anytime time you work on a system like this it's part of you it's uh if there's ever a problem with a spacecraft in orbit uh everyone jumps in and works on it even if you're retired a lot of people were concerned that we would not be able to uh to fix the Hubble it was very stressful the last thing I wanted was to have the uh system that I spent 18 years of my life on to be the cause of the end of the mission and so so I was under a lot of stress but undeterred by the challenge the team set to work to identify what went wrong and get HBL back online the telescope uh was down for approximately 4 weeks um I think the first couple of weeks was probably the most frustrating and the most anxiety producing uh we put together what's known as a uh fishbone diagram uh everything that could possibly cause the problem was written down and we eliminated them one by one until we zeroed in on the uh the exact cause it was amazing how everything came back to me on July 15th inzinga and her team successfully powered up the backup computer onboard Hubble and over the next few days the team gradually brought the science instruments back online once we realized that we had solved the problem and the telescope was back up and running it was quite a relief mainly relief a lot of relief how did it feel compared to 93 in my case it was even better uh this was my system that had stopped uh that had halted the telescope and to be able to get it back up and running was very proud I I was very proud when after the first servicing mission that we got the telescope up and running but this was more personal if another problem comes up I'd be very proud to work on the with this team again to uh resolve any future issues it would be an honor and a privilege for me to be called back to support Hubble at any point in time I will always be a Hubble hugger it's it'sing you waited years for this I waited years this was almost the perfect day almost Rosetta was and is a unique space mission it's a travel not just in space it's also a travel back in time to the very early days of the solar system this is the story of the Epic ambitious mission to land a spacecraft on a comet hurtling through space nothing like it had ever been attempted before or since Rosetta completely transformed our view of comets it was a mission 25 years in the making that all came down to a few frantic hours fer was not anchored it bounced we don't know where it is but let's go back a bit to 2004 the Rosetta spacecraft with its little F Lander tucked away inside is about to launch uh well the the actual launch took place on 2nd of March in 2004 the first part of the mission was just to catch up with the mysterious Comet known as 67p that took 10 years during which time everything on board Rosetta was powered down only to be woken up as it neared the comet it was quite a nervous time when Rosetta was coming out of hybernation because if it didn't wake up that that was curtains really billion euros of Kit out in space and if it didn't call home at the expected time um there was very little that could be done about it and then it got this it got this signal wake up Rosetta and it's just like hasn't woken up all right send the signal again switch it off and switch it on again T it's woken up which was just so so much of a relief hle one out the way when Rosetta woke up that that was really the point where everybody got excited again we had no idea how the comet would look like we don't know what shape it is it's probably spherical is we didn't immediately see the high uh quality images we saw better and better ones the closer and closer uh Rosetta came then wow what shape is that the shape is not potato shaped as we expected not roundish it's it's the comet has this kind of rubber duct shape it's like one of those yellow plastic ducks and that made hurdle too that extra bit harder Landing F safely on top of it there was no area on this Comet which is nice and smooth as we have hoped for the terrain was was rough everywhere um so there was a risk uh but that also made it fascinating and and interesting filet was equipped with little harpoons to fire off to help it cling to the comet once it made contact and the Landing site had to be meticulously chosen to allow Fila to recharge its solar batteries in the glow of the Sun the stakes were huge this was a lifetime's work for most of the scientists on the Rosetta Mission the team already knew there may be a problem with the thrusters that were supposed to slow down fil's approach but the time had come to deploy F and on the 12th of November 2014 off it went one could see the fer Lander as it moves away from the main space craft getting smaller and smaller with the landing gear successfully uh deployed I found this already very emotional to see the baby go after 10 years attached to the spacecraft you now see it in in Freedom uh on its way the last 22 kilom uh to the surface of the Comet and then fer was Free Falling for almost exactly 7 hours to the surface of the Comet everybody was you know jittery and just waiting and waiting and waiting for for for the signal to say it had landed and [Applause] then I just went absolutely hey he's landed he's landed I'm so excited it's landed it's landed you it was it was just the the tension that had wound up and and the release of that tension and the releas you waited years for this I waited years I'm so so excited I'm going to cry I'm sorry it's fantastic it's and of course everywhere in the world in the control rooms in the scientific teams people started to open the champagne and started to celebrate it landed it was fantastic it was wonderful everybody was really really really happy in the control room we thought yeah great we are landing we have to touch down signal but the mood in the control room was suddenly very different something wasn't quite right within a few minutes we realized that although we have landed and although we still got radio contact which was positive we did not anchor and the Lander was moving again and then uh the principal investigators came out of their little cocoon and Ian came up to me and he gave me a big hug and I gave him a big hug and I said oh you know it's fantastic isn't it is really great you know you must be so so proud and pleased and he said no has gone wrong he bounced we don't know where it is I said what do you mean he said well it hasn't been announced yet but it will be announced in a minute that actually feel it feel I did land but the the Harpoon didn't anchor it and the little crampons on the on the legs couldn't get a grip and so it's bounced and we had no idea what's going on where we would jump and how we would land and when we would land oh dear Phil had crashed off the face of the Comet and bounced about 1 km back into space any further and it risked escaping the comet's weak gravitational pool and drifting off into space forever anxiously they waited we had no idea whether this would be a successful Mission or would be just a touch and and we would never again hear from the Landers and then the news came in so we did land somewhere uh and we still had radio contact we still received signals and this was the moment of great relief because that was the moment where we knew we are at the surface and we can still communicate with the Lander but the good news didn't last long it landed in the shade not great for something reliant on solar power this meant they had l Le than 72 hours of battery time to undertake months worth of scientific collection the Clock Was ticking so it's one of those things it's like okay let's just throw away 10 years worth of calculations and let's just redo them all over the space of five hours which is what they did we also optimized the sequence in a way to get the maximum science out of the energy available once they knew they only got 70 hours and and it was just going to seep away it's like it wasn't if you turned all the instruments off the battery would stay at that particular level no because it was so cold it was having to maintain it was having to keep heaters on as well you know to make sure that the instruments kept working so you just knew you'd got 70 hours full stop all right so you worked for 70 hours you you just did it you just barreled through get as much data as we can and amazingly almost all of the instruments on filet had survived the impact it was go time we were very lucky I mean we ended up in an orientation that the antenna were pointing uh well upward so to say that we could establish the radio link uh with the main spacecraft and again we were also lucky uh because we could switch on the instruments we could do fantastic signs from the surface of the common about 80% of the science goals of the the the feli Lander were achieved so it was an absolute fantastic success you know the fact that crash landed got around that it was a amazing success this was of course a bit sad to see the voltage of the pety drop and and knowing that fer will go into a hibernation and eventually that's what happened even in those few hours Phil had unveiled a world full of surprises of dust and debris gases erupted from deep within the comet even the crash landing threw up interesting discoveries even by analyzing the bounce itself uh we got information on what's what's the surface made of and it was a bit surprising that the surface was rather hard but perhaps most exciting of all was what this Comet was able to teach us about us the Rosetta Mission had as one of its goals to understand the building blocks of life because Comet 67p was rich in organic compounds like phosphorus carbon oxygen nitrogen and the amino acid glycine all essential for the origins of life and offering tantalizing Clues as to how these compounds may have arrived on Earth in the first place so the the original building blocks of life came from Comet while F had gone into eternal hibernation the mothership Rosetta continued to fly around the comet collecting data for two more years but then Rosetta's time had to come in a last ditch effort to get as much out of the mission as possible the team decided to crash land Rosetta into the comet collecting data along the way and allowing the scientists to get one last look at their old friend F took this sort of shallow dive onto the surface of the Comet and and then sort of Crash landed and its camera was going the whole time so we saw these last pictures of the of the the the surface rushing up to greet Rosetta and then the signal died and you got this little sort of osilloscope scope thing with nothing on it just like you know like somebody when they die and you see the the signal die on the heart thing and it was just like it was it was so devastating people were in tears I cried and it's just hell's teeth it's a robot you know but it's been part of your life for so long and so important so that was it that was the end of the Rosetta Mission there is still many many Publications done using the data from Rosetta that's still the most relevant and best um scientific information we have uh from a comet Wasa completely transformed our view of comets to some extent what we know about the uh evolution of the solar system what we believe about the formation of Life uh all of this is is triggered by Rosetta and this is not often in lifetime you get a chance to get involved in in such a project

Channel: BBC Earth Science

Views: 1,126,028

Keywords: bbc earth lab, earth lab, science, chemistry, physics, why, biology, space, science for kids, space documentary, bbc earth lab space, bbc earth lab black hole, bbc earth lab jupiter, bbc earth lab venus, science documentary, space exploration, bbc documentary, black holes, space mission, full episodes, space news, solar system project, compilation, full series, the sun, space travel, full documentary, science experiments, mind-blowing

Id: pJZQlX2Fs7A

Length: 51min 48sec (3108 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 04 2023