- [Narrator] Ask someone to
draw a picture of a planet, and odds are it
will be this one. It is the sixth planet
out from the sun and the second-largest
in our solar system. It is, of course, Saturn, a world encircled not
only in majestic rings but in an array of moons
that have been likened to a solar system in miniature. (rocket boosters roaring) In 1997, an international
mission was launched to Saturn that would, for the first time, attempt to place an orbiting
spacecraft around the planet and land a probe on a moon
in the outer solar system. But this was a
mission that had to fight its way to the launch pad. - [Lew] We're going
to have to operate under a very strict
fund ceiling, one that is imposed by Congress. - [Casini] This will
require doing business in a drastically different
way than we've done before. - [Bob] It took a lotta
time, a lotta negotiating, a lot of compromises
to make that work. - [Julie] The first time I
saw the spacecraft together when we stacked without
the blankets, we were just, we were without words
standing out there. - [Narrator] The
journey to Saturn would take seven long years, but the success, or failure,
of being captured into orbit depended on what would happen
during just three hours. - [Charles] The
engine better fire, otherwise we'll
end with a flyby. - Copy. DCS Fault Protection. - [Linda] I think
as a ring scientist, my greatest concern
was really crossing through that gap in
the F and G rings. It would only have taken
one marble sized particle in the wrong place
in the spacecraft to perhaps have
ended the mission. - [Man] So I would lie in
bed at night and think about what other tests should we do? What other question
should I be asking? What should we be poking out
here that we haven't done yet? - [Julie] We chased
everything that could go wrong down the rabbit hole. We went down every path
of, if this goes wrong, what do we do? If that goes wrong,
what do we do? - [Earl] And this was
one of those moments where you're either in orbit or you're a billion
dollar flyby. - [Todd] Closest approach
is just a little over two minutes away. Predicted temps today,
-226 degrees Fahrenheit, winds of 1100 miles per hour. Hurricanes the
size of the Earth. Cassini would do well to
batten down the hatches. - [Narrator] Saturn
was once but a single bright point of light
in the night sky, but in 1610 Galileo peered
through his telescope and saw something else. On either side of the planet, he thought there might be moons. Two years later,
Galileo looked again. To his astonishment, the
two objects had disappeared. Another two years
passed and Galileo again trained his telescope on Saturn. The puzzling bulges
had returned. This drawing shows
how close Galileo came to solving the riddle, but he went to his grave
without ever knowing the answer. A half century would pass
before the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens realized
the bulges were rings. As for their appearing
and disappearing, when the rings are
viewed from Earth edge on, they all but disappear. As time passed, Saturn
came into closer focus, and in 1979, NASA's
Pioneer 11 spacecraft gave the world the
first closeup look at the planet and its rings. - We received several
pictures yesterday afternoon and evening, and we'd like to
run through some of those now. This is the one
that came in here at about three o'clock
yesterday afternoon. This is by far the most
spectacular picture that we have so far. This is raw data. It has not been
processed in any way. We can see the big banded
planet and, of course, the ring system is very
prominent in this picture. Also prominent is Saturn's
largest moon, Titan, in the upper right-hand corner. - [Narrator] The two Voyager
flybys soon followed, offering even more captivating
views and discoveries. What these missions
found left scientists clamoring to go again,
and not just to pass by, but to stay. A blueprint and even
some spare parts for just such an
adventure already existed. NASA's Galileo mission, that sent an orbiter
and a probe to Jupiter. Advocates in Europe
and the United States argued for a similar
mission destined for Saturn, one composed of an
international consortium. How such a project with
all its complexities could be done, no
one really knew. Sorting out roles,
responsibilities, and
especially funding, took the better
part of a decade. The European Space Agency
offered to build the probe, named Huygens, to land
on Saturn's moon Titan. The Italian Space Agency
would build the main antenna and communication system. The spacecraft thrusters
and the main engines would be provided by US
commercial space companies. And NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory signed on to build and fly the spacecraft, to be named in honor
of the 17th century astronomer Giovanni Cassini. JPL would also provide overall
management of the mission. In total, 19 countries
would provide hardware, while scientists would
come from 26 nations. - Good morning. I wanna welcome
all of you to JPL, and at the beginning of
what is gonna be clearly a very exciting mission. I know that a lot
of you have a... - [Narrator] This is
the first gathering of Cassini Huygens
scientists and engineers, their goal to transform
this complex partnership into a functioning team. - Our Congress has had some
agony over the program. For a time it looked
as though only Cassini would be approved. - [Narrator] There are
layers of unease in the room. The Europeans want to
know that they'll be treated as equal partners. And there are also concerns
about US reliability, given that NASA has
recently dropped out of another partnership. - We're going to have to operate under a very strict
fund ceiling, one that is imposed by Congress
and an unyielding schedule. And we all have
great challenges- - [Narrator] NASA
has already warned that the mission
will be canceled if the project strays
over its budget. All eyes are on Cassini's
first program manager, John Casani, who has already
spoken of eliminating some of the science instruments. - Seriously like to
welcome everybody. Nice to be here. A lot of old friends,
a lot of new faces, which I hope we'll be
friends before we're through with this process. But those of you
who don't know me, will find out a lot in
the next couple of years. This will require doing
business in a fairly drastically different way than
we've done before. We are all gonna
have to strive for, as we go through this process,
is a continual search, as my old friend Gentry
Lee used to like to say, for the least
unacceptable solution. There are gonna have
to be compromises. We wanna work with you. - [Narrator] This was not what
scientists had hoped to hear. - I think this is a
very severe degrade in the capabilities
of this mission. - What we did was we
did all of these things to finally get down to
something that we could afford. - That sounds to me like
a very unwise thing to do. I mean, the essence of this
mission is to get data back. - [Narrator] The friction
between what scientists want and what engineers
can do will be a theme running throughout the
lifetime of the mission. So, we'll be deciding
which of Cassini's 12 different science
instruments will have priority at any given time. First up to plead
his case is the head of the science radar
team, Charles Elachi. - Good morning. I understand from Dennis
that the first speaker gets everything he asks for. There is a good thing and a
bad thing about the radar. The good thing is that
for every Saturn orbit, we need to operate
only for one hour. You can have all the rest
of the time, but one hour. The bad thing is that
when we turn it on, the lights on the
spacecraft will dim, you know, it'll go down. - [Narrator] Representing
the needs of the imaging team is its leader, Carolyn Porco. - Rates which are
lower than that. After all, we know
what it will take to image the objects at Saturn, that we know are there. My question is, what is it
that's there that we don't know and we want to have a
very stable platform and be able to do
long exposures. These are issues
that ring scientists stay up late at
night worrying about. - We are running a
bit behind schedule so we shall skip
the coffee break, but there is still coffee
for those who can't survive. - [Narrator] One after another, the science teams take to the
podium to make their pitches and at times to express
their displeasure. - Okay, this is one
of the smaller teams, and I suppose one of
the smaller instruments, although perhaps not as small
as the project might like. I'm afraid I have to
say that we have to have an instrument that performs best within the planetary
environment. So life is not as
simple as perhaps some people have seen it. - The other challenge
that we've had here is a recognition over the
past few months that the... - [Narrator] Hoping to
resolve these conflicts, Casani offers up
an unexpected plan to put the scientists
more in control. - We need to incentivize
you to do the best job of making the best estimates
of what it's gonna cost at the time of confirmation. - [Narrator] Instead of
having decisions made from the top down, Casani proposes establishing
a trading system. Each science team will be given
a defined amount of money, mass, power and data rates. If later they need
more of anything, they will have to work
with the other teams to solve their problem. The scientists agree to this
unusual bartering system. It is the first major
step in building a functioning
international team. - Any questions? All right, Dennis, thank you. - [Narrator] By
the fall of 1997, what had once been
just blueprints are now real pieces of hardware. For over the last six years, the mission has managed
to survive being canceled, something another
NASA spacecraft meant to rendezvous with
a comet and an asteroid, was unable to do. This was part of a new
NASA strategy to cut back on large and
expensive spacecraft. And there was no
disguising Cassini's size. It remains, to this day, the largest US interplanetary
spacecraft ever built. Standing three stories
tall, when fully loaded, it will weigh 12 and a
half thousand pounds. - The first time I saw
the spacecraft together, when we stacked
without the blankets, I must have stood in the
visitor gallery for 30 minutes. And it's... I don't
know how to describe it. It's not yours
anymore, you know. Even though I had been
intimate with each piece and part of that spacecraft
and put it together wire by wire and
in part by part, to watch it come together as
a whole entity was incredible. We were without words
standing out there. - Every now and then
we'll be working in here and you'll think, wow,
this is going to Saturn and this probe is
gonna land on Titan. And this is going
somewhere where we've never seen things before and you
get goosebumps from it. - [Narrator] The spacecraft
has been designed with redundancy as a priority. Each critical system
has an identical backup. And its advanced software
will allow the spacecraft at times to fly on its own, and even self-repair
computer glitches. In Cassini's interior are
some 22,000 wire connections and more than seven
miles of cabling. - I'm technically an
engineering assistant, and what I do is cabling
for the spacecraft and I've been doing
it for 20 years. One of the really positive
points about our mechanical team is that they never say no. They never seem to tire. They're always up. (chuckles) I don't think we
could ask for a better team. - [Narrator] One of
the last assembly tasks is to cover this bare
spacecraft with blankets. Using machines more often
used for fine tailoring than engineering, this reflective material is
cut to protect the spacecraft early in the mission, when
it flies toward the sun. This black fabric
will do the opposite, absorbing and retaining
heat out at Saturn, where sunlight is only 1%
the strength found at Earth. The layers will also
provide shielding from micro meteoroids, tiny particles of
dust that could damage the spacecraft's electronics. This is tedious work, cutting, stitching
and fitting hundreds of individually measured pieces. It is a job made
even more challenging knowing that this
intricate space quilt, like all of Cassini's
major components, will have to be unmounted
for shipping to Florida, where everything will
be reassembled again. - We have had less
problem with this than I can remember having
on any other spacecraft. It's almost scary. It's just beautiful. No problems. No major problems anyway. - [Narrator] While transforming
Cassini from a blueprint into a real spacecraft had
gone exceptionally well, getting to the final
design had been torturous. Facing budget cuts,
the project was forced to make another least
unacceptable decision. Instead of dropping
science instruments, the spacecraft itself was
scaled back by eliminating the scan platform, a kind of turntable
required by some instruments needing motion. Without the platform,
the entire spacecraft will have to rotate
to aim at targets, resulting also in
less observation time. But all of the science
instruments have survived. Operations are now
almost complete for the launch of
Cassini Huygens. Already on the launch
pad is the Air Force's heavy lifting Titan 4B Cassini and the probe
have been reassembled. One of the last
procedures involves loading onto the spacecraft
its power supply, 72 pounds of
plutonium encased in what are called radio isotope
thermoelectric generators, or mercifully called
for short RTGs. RTGs have been used
on previous missions, but recent nuclear
power plant accidents and the loss of the
Space Shuttle Challenger have heightened public
fears of a launch accident spreading nuclear debris. Hoping to stop the launch, anti-nuclear groups
file lawsuits, petition
the White House, and hold demonstrations at
the Kennedy Space Center. - Since this is the last public
forum to ensure the public that everything is
going to be all right, could you do that one last time and use your best
argument to persuade, perhaps, some of your opponents? - RTGs were designed
for accident conditions. We've designed them,
we've tested them, we've analyzed for
it, we've gone through a very lengthy review process. And in fact, these
are very safe to use. There's not a risk
to the public, even if there is an accident. - Would you all confirm
your faith in this mission by telling us how many
family members, kids, and grandkids you have here
watching this launch with you? - Well, I have 30 members
of my family here right now, including my two granddaughters. There's more on the way. (crowd laughing) I don't know if I have more
grandchildren on the way, but I have more
family on the way. The reality is there's no
technology on the horizon that has the promise
to be available in the foreseeable future at all that could be used
for feigning power way in outer space, where there is effectively
very little sunlight. At Saturn, we've got a 1% of
what we have here on Earth. We know Cassini is safe. The generator is designed to
be robust in the environments. We do not rely on success. We make it compatible
with the environments that might be generated
and it's safe. I invited everyone I
love to the launch. - [Man] Will there
be information on the success of
this launch too? - Absolutley. You can find us with a bottle
of champagne some place. - [Man] FLC, we have
325 and 326 complete. Roger. - [Man] EA and LCC
327 and 328 on time. Roger. - [Woman] LCC, roger. - [Man] The Air Force
launch controller has given a clear to launch. We've got to go from the range to proceed with the countdown. - [Woman] Launch
sequence started. - [Man] T minus 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, and liftoff of the
Cassini spacecraft on a billion mile
trek to Saturn. (cheering) Pitch program is in. (man talking indistinctly) - [Man] We have
cleared the tower and the Cassini spacecraft
is on its way to Saturn. T+20 seconds. All systems are go. Standing by for solid
rocket booster separation. And the solid rocket boosters
have been jettisoned. - [Man] Item 149 and 150. - [Man] All systems go. - [Man] All CAS core
stations, ops engineer, launch vehicle reports
payload fairing jettisoned. - This launch was, for all
practical purposes, perfect. It was just right on target. And the navigation
corrections that we normally, routinely expect to have to make for these kinds of
launches was very small. It was an exceptionally
good launch. - [Narrator] But the
launch, as good as it was, was not powerful enough to send
Cassini directly to Saturn. To get there, mission
designers had long before devised a flight path,
using mother nature to gain extra boosts of
speed by flying by planets, what are called gravity assists. Cassini's route required two
inward swing bys at Venus, next back to Earth,
then outward to Jupiter, and finally on to Saturn. In all, a journey of
over 2 billion miles, lasting nearly seven years. During the first
Venus encounter, Cassini grazed just above
the planet's surface, gaining an extra 16,000
miles per hour of speed. - The Cassini spacecraft
has now been in space, in flight, for a little
over eight months. And the performance of
the spacecraft has been essentially flawless. Typically on spacecraft like
this, of this complexity, there are issues, complications
of one sort or another, that we have to work with
some of our ground-based command capability. For the Cassini spacecraft,
this just hasn't happened. It's a remarkable spacecraft. - [Narrator] True enough, but Cassini is not yet a
fully complete spacecraft. - We had enough flight
software on board at launch to be able to fly the
spacecraft, operate
it, navigate it, and not a whole
lot more than that. - When we launched,
we had seven years to get to Saturn and we actually completely changed out the
computer system twice in flight. We would take the
old computer software and then load up the new
software in the backup computer, watch it for a while,
make sure it was stable. And then we would swap
and make the backup the prime computer. Make sure it was stable. - [Narrator] As engineers
worked on completing Cassini's software,
scientists started lobbying to begin using their instruments far ahead of the
agreed upon schedule. - The cartoon. You gotta see the cartoon. You gotta see the whole thing. So the idle spacecraft is
the devil's playground. For the first three years, we weren't supposed
to do anything. We were supposed to fly a rock. And we were just
gonna go take this, take the spacecraft,
correct it engineering wise, fly it by Venus, a
couple of times by Earth, and we really weren't
gonna do much science. And here were the
scientists saying, "You've got this
great spacecraft, everything's working on it,
you don't have to check... You know, you don't have
to redo your thermal. You don't have to redo this. Let's do science." And so I came in one day
and this was on my door. The idle spacecraft is
the devil's playground. I swore for years that
one of the scientists had put that on my door. It was my boss. He put that on my door. - [Narrator] For the most part, the scientists
were accommodated, but the project's
priority was first getting safely past the Earth, which occurred in
the summer of 1999, giving Cassini another 12,000
miles per hour of speed. The next milestones were
passing beyond the orbit of Mars and the region of
the asteroid belt. Then came Jupiter, where Cassini saw raging storms, some centuries old. Cassini also teamed up with the
venerable Galileo spacecraft to jointly measure
Jupiter's magnetosphere, a bubble of charged
particles trapped within the planet's
magnetic field. At closest approach,
Cassini took this image. At that time, the most detailed
view of Jupiter ever seen. The Jupiter encounter served
as a full dress rehearsal for what awaited at Saturn. It revealed there
was work to be done in addressing Cassini's
design compromise. The lack of the scan platform
that would have allowed simultaneous use of
science instruments, needing either to move
or to be rock steady. - It meant you had to
turn the spacecraft every time you wanted to
point an instrument someplace. And we had 12 instruments, and each instrument
generally had different pointing
druthers, if not in fact, hard and fast
pointing requirements. And so there was an
awful lot of negotiation that went on between the
different science teams, the different instrument
representatives, in deciding who was
gonna get to control the pointing of the
spacecraft when. It took a lot of time,
a lot of negotiating, a lot of compromises
to make that work. - [Narrator] Despite
this restraint, Cassini could now boast
of being the most capable interplanetary
spacecraft ever sent out into the solar system. After a journey of
nearly seven years, Cassini and the Huygens probe
are nearing Saturn's doorstep. Whether two decades
of dreaming, planning, building, and undertaking
this arduous journey will be rewarded,
will soon be known. For just ahead is the
most dangerous moment that Cassini will face. SOI. Saturn Orbit Insertion. No one is more excited, or
anxious, about this moment than Charles Elachi. In addition to still
being the team lead for Cassini's radar experiment, he now heads JPL. - Cassini is probably one of
the most exciting missions ever undertaken by the US
and it deserves more credit. So when we come to
the orbit insertion, after advocating
for it, selling it, building it and flying it, it was a really very
sobering moment. The engine better
fire, otherwise we'll
end with a fly by. You have to remember that
we had the Mars Observer, where when we turned on the
engine, the thing disappeared. - [Narrator] 11 years before, as Mars Observer was
approaching Mars, the spacecraft was
commanded to pressurize its propulsion system. The spacecraft was
never heard from again. It's believed a massive rupture
in the fuel lines occurred, putting the spacecraft
into an unrecoverable spin. We have about 15, 20 minutes. This is Bob Mitchell, who
is the project manager. - Okay, well, I think
we've got what'll be a rather interesting
program laid out here for you this evening. Certainly gonna have
a little drama to it. I was kinda confident, but
I was worried, concerned. Nervous might be the
best word as well. - [Narrator] To slow down
enough to be captured by Saturn's gravity, Cassini will have to turn
on its seldom used engine for 96 minutes. Anything less could result
in flying past the planet, never to return. The flight path will take
Cassini and the probe up through and back down
a gap in Saturn's rings. There's worry that
there could be particles in these regions large
enough to damage, or even destroy, the spacecraft. - I think as a ring scientist, my greatest concern was really
crossing through that gap in the F and G rings. It would only have taken
one marble sized particle in the wrong place
in the spacecraft to perhaps have
ended the mission. So for me, the most,
you know, breathtaking, the heart stopping
time, was really crossing through the ring plane. - [Narrator] To reduce the risk, Cassini will fly through the
gaps with its high gain antenna facing forward to
act as a shield. During these times, the only
signal coming back to Earth will be from a smaller antenna
transmitting a single tone. The pitch, or frequency,
of the tone will vary with changes to the
spacecraft's speed. What's known as
the Doppler effect. This will tell engineers how
the spacecraft is performing... or not. - Zero is the
reference frequency, the nominal frequency
that we would see if there were no burn. So if the motor never ignited, what would happen
is this line up here would just go right
straight across. I would lie in bed at
night and think about what other tests should we do? What other question
should I be asking? What should we be poking at
here that we haven't done yet? And this corner right
here corresponds to where the burn should end. There wasn't any single
thing that I could point to and say that thing right there has a fair chance of biting us. There just wasn't
anything like that. But when you consider all the
things that had to happen... or not happen, there were enough of them
that the aggregate of them was cause for being nervous. And I was. That would be cause for
some level of concern. - [Julie] SOI was such a,
just such a team effort. We chased everything
that could go wrong down the rabbit hole. We went down every path
of, if this goes wrong, what do we do? If that goes wrong,
what do we do? There were 10,000 tests run to
put together that insertion. - Something we've
been preparing for for four or five years,
testing and testing, awfulizing all of the possible
things that could go wrong. And this was one of those
moments where you're either in orbit or you're a
billion dollar fly by. - Things continue to go well
in Cassini mission control. We're approximately 33
minutes from burn start. There's our flight
director, Julie Webster. This is one person we hope
to not hear from tonight. This is system fault protection
engineer, Paula Morgan. And if we hear from
fault protection, that means we've had some sort
of anomaly on the spacecraft. Doug Johnson, our radio
science and SOI communicator. He's the one reporting most of
the events we'll see tonight through that Doppler signal. - [Narrator] Also on
console is Jan Berkeley. She first worked at JPL
as a college intern. Now she's a key member
of the Cassini team that creates the computer
sequence commands that operate the spacecraft. - We would run them,
make sure that there were no problems with that. If we needed to do testing,
we would schedule testing. We were the ones that actually
sent them to the spacecraft. And then we watched
them clock out. That was the tense moment,
was not pushing the button, it was waiting for it to
come back, that it worked. And Saturn was so far away
that it would take three hours just to get there and come back. - Current speed of the
Cassini spacecraft: 22.2 kilometers per second, which is just under
50,000 miles an hour. And increasing as Saturn's
gravity draws us in. That's Shin Huh, our
SOI systems engineer. Shin has eaten, breathed,
slept, and lived SOI for many years. Tonight is his big night. - All stations on
that SOI systems. Just an advisory, we're
coming up on the time for the critical sequence
will initiate the turn to the SOI burn attitude. The burn command will be sent
at 7:35:35 PM local time. Flight director, SOI systems, all subsystems report the
spacecraft data is nominal and ready to support SOI. - [Man] Okay, I copy that. SOI, comms flight director... - [Todd] We're waiting. - Copy telecomm A JPL tradition has begun, starting in the back of
the Mission Support Area. This is the consuming of
the lucky JPL peanuts. Doug Johnson just
reported a signal, we've survived the
ring plane crossing through the F and G rings. (applause) One hurdle down, one to go,
with the start of the burn a meer nine minutes away. - [Julie] ACE flight
director on FSL court. Are you still tracking
Canberra on B2? - [Man] That's affirmative. - Let's go ahead and switch
Canberra over to B-Zero. Go ahead, NAV-1. - [Man] We can confirm
that we are receiving one way data from the DSN. - [Julie] One way
Doppler from DSS14? - [Man] Yes, that's affirmative. - Navigation can also
confirm we're receiving the Doppler data. We've been able to
verify that the turn to the SY burn
attitude is complete. We're approaching two
minutes before the SOI burn. Hopes and dreams of
thousands of scientists and engineers are resting
on the next few moments. So Godspeed, Cassini Huygens. May we see you in orbit. - We're gonna drop in. - On the Doppler display,
what we're looking for is a turning of the corner
to start to follow that line down to the lower right. And that's our indication
the burn has begun. Flight, SOI comms.. - [Julie] Go ahead. - [Man] We have a Doppler
signature consistent with engine turn on. (cheers and applause) - [Todd] Lots of high
fives and celebrations in mission control. Congratulations all of you
that have worked so hard for this moment. One minute down, about
96 minutes to go. We're continuing to follow
the nominal predicted curve on the Doppler. So the fact we turned the corner means the engine has started. The fact that we're
following the line means we're getting the right
thrust out of the engine. So more good news for the
Cassini Huygens spacecraft. - Way to go. Way to go. - [Narrator] There's now
90 minutes of waiting until Cassini's engine
is to stop firing. The lull in the action
affords a rare opportunity to give members of
Congress who are on hand a very up close
and personal tour. It's a moment to witness
history in the making, and, as politicians well-know, to take advantage of
an excellent photo op. - It's 7:42 PM in NASA's
Cassini mission control. The next thing we'll look
for is an occultation by the A ring around 8:05
PM Pacific time local. At that time, we'll
see an increased noise in the Doppler signal, similar to the increased
noise there at the far left of the Doppler plot. And our final scary
moment of the evening will be to make sure to
get the burn shut down. The history making day for
JPL, NASA, and the world. - [Man] Flight, SOI comm. - Go ahead, SOI comm. - [Man] We have hit
the A ring pretty hard. - All right. - [Todd] More good news
from SOI Comm there, the frightening looking
change to our Doppler data is totally anticipated. This proves that Saturn's A
ring is where we think it is. And the Cassini spacecraft is
where we think it is as well. - [Man] We're continuing to
track a two to three DB signal with occasional outages
through the A ring. And we expect to see
a nice strong signal, we have the main
division coming up. - [Julie] Copy
that, sounds good. (phone ringing) - [Todd] As we see, we're
approaching the B ring, and we must remember tonight,
everything happening at Saturn occurred an hour and
24 minutes earlier due to that pesky speed of
light, 186,000 miles per second, our interplanetary speed
limit, if you will. - [Julie] Go ahead SOI Comm. - [Man] After a brief
peak up to 11DB, we have now exited the division. - Copy. - [Man] What just happened? - They just announced
that we are now a captured object around Saturn. We are now an
orbit... an orbiter. - First in history
around Saturn. - There you go. First man-made
orbiter around Saturn. Voyager, eat your heart out. - [Man] SOI systems,
this is contingency. - Closest approach is just a
little over two minutes away. And given that, it's
probably about time for our Saturnian
weather forecast. Predicted temps today,
-226 degrees Fahrenheit or -143 degrees Celsius. Winds of 1100 miles
per hour or so. Chance of helium rain
inside the interior, 100%. Hurricanes the
size of the Earth. Cassini would do well to
batten down the hatches. Closest approach is
upon us with a speed of almost 69,000 miles per hour. And the speed HAS
started slowing. - [Man] Flight, SOI Comm. - [Julie] Go ahead, SOI Comm. - [Man] The Doppler
has flattened out. (cheers and applause) (indistinct chatter) - [Todd] Okay, we have
burn complete here, for the SOI orbit
insertion burn. Congratulations continue
in mission control. The high-fives begin in the back of our mission support area. I'm just hearing a
report from radio... - You did great. You did great.
- Thank you. - My pleasure. Here's to our lucky
propulsion engineers. Did a wonderful job tonight. - Knowing that it
survived and was there and we were ready to, you know, get to the meat of the science
and get these great images. It was a wonderful moment. The voyage begins. We made it, like, we did it. - Fantastic job. - Now we're gonna
put your ECAP in. (laughing) - [Todd] I was just
informed by my management, she'll put my performance
evaluation in. I'm glad she waited until
our success tonight. It's alive. - It's alive. (gentle music) - So there's this
amazing elation and then almost
immediately a crash, just because we're
exhausted and tired, but I couldn't sleep. And so I stayed in the MSA, and the images of the
rings were playing back, and slowly people started to
gather around these images, which no one had
seen close up images flying right over the
tops of the rings. And there were just goosebumps. That's a memory I
will never forget. - This is way more
ringlets, little pieces. - [Narrator] Until now,
the mission has been mostly the province
of engineers. With these first ever closeup
images of Saturn's rings, the shift to science
begins in earnest, and there are hints of
major discoveries ahead from what already can be seen. - I don't think you have
to be a ring scientist to imagine what last
night was for us. It was beyond
description really. It was mind blowing. It was every adjective
you could think of. I'm surprised at how
surprised I am at the beauty and the clarity of these images. They are shocking to me. The spacecraft allows us
a very steady platform. This machine, you turn it, you
point it, and it stays there. It's like a tripod in space. Anyway, I think ring scientists
are gonna have a field day. So thank you. Wow. (applause) - [Narrator] Cassini's
arrival coincided with a time when the planet
was well lit by sunlight, providing extraordinary
views of the rings. Saturn, plus the rings, span
about a quarter million miles, and they would fit in between
the Earth and its moon. And yet for all of
its wide expanse, the rings themselves
are paper thin, only about 10 feet thick. If you could scoop up
all the ring particles, there would be less mass
than one of Saturn's small moons named Mimas. - [Narrator] From a distance, the rings cast off
a sense of serenity, but they are as complex and
chaotic as they are beautiful. For they are made up
of countless numbers of disorderly objects of
different sizes and shapes. This is a simulated image
based on radar observations, showing particles sizes
found in different regions of the rings. The color purple
represents where there is a preponderance of objects
smaller than two inches. Particles in green are
about an inch in size. The blueish bands
are still smaller. The white bands are dense
regions that radio signals were unable to penetrate. This false color image
highlights what can be seen in the ultraviolet. The turquoise colors
represent water ice. The red colors are a
different kind of particle. Uncertain as to
what it might be, the scientists decided
to name it dirt. - Cassini was also
able to measure the temperature of
the ring particles, and the rings that had
the most dirt or pollution were slightly warmer than
the bright icy rings. - [Narrator] And,
despite being made of mostly cosmic dust and ice, the rings contained some
structures as large as a house. And as scientists discovered
to their astonishment, even transitory mountains. - There is a unique moment
in the Cassini mission where the sun was
edge onto the rings, and that allowed us to see
anything that would stick up above or below those
10 feet thick rings. Then lo and behold, we found
what looked like mountains casting huge shadows
on the rings. And it turns out that
the rings of Saturn are not like just
individual particles, but a lot of these
particles stick together and grow into larger
and larger particles. But these clumps of
particles are ephemeral. They don't last for a long time. They can be broken up and then
reformed in to new particles. - [Narrator] Saturn's
moons and smaller moonlets also influenced the rings. Even orbiting rubble
piles hold a kind of sway. Altogether, they help
shape the boundaries of Saturn's rings, herding in particles
that might otherwise rain down in a
torrent on the planet or escape into deep space. Meanwhile, particles from
some of Saturn's moons are constantly shedding off, helping to preserve existing
rings or creating new ones. Among the unexpected
discoveries within the rings were these propeller
like objects. - Propellers are these largest
clumps of ring particles, and they get big
enough so their gravity wants to push apart the
rings and open up a gap. And then there's not
quite enough gravity to open it up all the way. And so you see these
little propellers sprinkled throughout the rings, especially in Saturn's A ring. - [Narrator] A mystery
dating back to Voyager was the appearing and
disappearing of ghostly spokes. Cassini determined their cause. Electrostatic charges that
lift up dust particles, where they levitate for
a time above the rings. There remain two
fundamental questions lacking definitive answers. The first is knowing how
the rings came to be. - So many things about the
rings are unexplained even now. There are a lot of ideas
for how Saturn's rings initially formed. One of those is that
perhaps the rings formed from the material
that was left over from when Saturn formed. So if that's true,
then the rings are old, as old as Saturn itself. Other ideas: say perhaps
an object may be a comet, or a meteor, came in
too close to Saturn, was torn apart by
Saturn's gravity, and then created the rings. Or perhaps a moon wandered
too close to Saturn and was torn apart. And so then the rains could
be as young as maybe only 10 or a hundred million years old. - [Narrator] Along
with determining the
origin of the rings, understanding their fate is
also an unanswered question. But the adage that
nothing lasts forever likely applies even to them. - As micro meteoroids
continue to bombard the rings, and some of the innermost
particles fall into Saturn and actually water the planet, the rings are getting lighter
and lighter with time. And so perhaps in another
few hundred million years, Saturn's rings as we
know it might be gone. Maybe we'll be left
with narrow rings like we see in
the Uranus system. - [Narrator] And one
day long from now, Saturn's glorious rings
might disappear altogether. One more reason to
enjoy them while we can. Next time on "JPL
and the Space Age", Part Two of "Triumph
at Saturn"... With Cassini safely in orbit,
science takes center stage, beginning with the dramatic
descent of the Huygens Probe to the surface of
Saturn's moon Titan. - [Man] We knew Titan
was a tough target, was going to hold
its secrets tightly. And so we designed
this mission to hit it with everything we've got. - [Narrator] In the
years that follow, one unexpected discovery
after another will be made, earning this
international mission accolades from around the world. - Science is about what is, and engineering is
about what can BE. The Cassini-Huygens
program has demonstrated the best of both. The number of your
new discoveries is nothing short of amazing. - [Woman] I would say
Cassini's discoveries fundamentally altered the way
we look at our solar system. Around one planet,
we find two moons that could potentially
be habitable, have the key ingredients
to support life. - I have more than a
passing interest in Saturn and its family of moons. When Cassini was launched,
we knew only 18 moons. I understand there's
now 60 and counting. I can't resist the
temptation to say, my God, it's full of moons. - [Narrator] "Triumph at
Saturn" Part Two, next time. (gentle music)
Love it! I didn't know the rings are only 10 feet thick and most of the material is only 1-2" in diameter! Also those views of larger objects disrupting the ring structure was really interesting.
An impromptu AMA: I was the lead telecom engineer for SOI (and wrote the software to analyze and display the radio signal)
Ask me anything
It's a science documentary about people doing amazing things with spacecraft and the comments here seem to be doing the opposite.
Reddit !!! What has happened to you?
I vividly remember this Cassini launching. There were protesters predicting plutonium being strewn into the upper atmosphere of it exploded during launch or fly by. They interviewed all kinds of scientists on the news about the low probability of that happening. The fact the mission is over and done for years now makes me feel older than just about anything else.
This mission AND this documentary are a triumph of mankind.
Documentaries like this are the primary reason I LOVE this subreddit.
No violence, no drugs, no conspiracy, or crime. Just pure achievment and great filmmaking. Fantastic.
Thank you for posting here OP.
Cool