All language subtitles for Secrets of the Solar System Series 1 8of8 Pluto 1080p

(mysterious music)

Far out near the edge of the solar system

where the sun's light is weak

lies a world that until recently was completely unexplored.

Pluto is the amorous of the solar system,

the farthest and coldest and hardest to reach.

By going to Pluto, we were looking beyond

the known solar system and exploring a whole new world.

This is the story of Pluto's exploration

and what was found there told by those who dared to do it.

We're good?

I need water for answering this question.

Okay, I'll give you my personal opinion on this.

A mission 25 years in the making

attempting to discover our most ancient origins.

This mission represents the spirit of adventure

and discovery and inquiry which is inherent

in the human spirit.

Which is our insatiable desire

to explore the unknown and understand how we fit

into this vast universe.

We have ignition and we have liftoff.

There really is something intrinsic

in humans to want to explore.

(dramatic music)

You can look at it from an evolutionary perspective.

We didn't have the sharpest claws

or the strongest muscles

but we had this ability to invent and explore

and, you know we had curiosity.

That's how we've come to exist all over this planet

and that impulse doesn't stop at earth.

(eerie music)

The exploration of the outer solar system

began in the 1970s.

And in 1977, a pair of spacecrafts called Voyager 1

and Voyager 2 set off to visit

the most distant planets, including Uranus and Neptune.

Voyager 2 was the first to leave Earth.

Five, four, three, two, one,

we have ignition and we have liftoff.

(dramatic music)

(rocket rumbling)

The first of two Voyager spacecrafts

to extend mans' senses farther into the solar system

than ever before.

(suspenseful music)

The mission would fly past Jupiter,

then Saturn before heading for the mysterious outer worlds.

The Voyager mission was an incredible adventure

because it was our first time

to really visit all these worlds and start to get

to know their systems, not just the planets themselves,

but their moons.

Those of us that were involved felt almost as though

we were onboard the spacecraft lookin' out

the little window and the images come up

on the screen and for the first time,

you're seeing these new worlds.

When we first visit these planets, they're fly bys.

You're not going into orbit.

You're not landing.

It's just a very quick visit and you see it approaching

and then all of a sudden there it is

and then it's in the rear view mirror

and you can't stop and you're still going

so there's something about the pace

of discovery that's amazing.

The first pictures of Uranus were a little bit boring

and people were a little worried

about the lack of jazziness.

Uranus is a weird planet.

Instead of spinning, you know,

like we're spinning 23 and a half degrees from vertical,

Uranus is on its side.

Tipped on its side.

Why?

We don't know.

Very strange.

Unlike all the other planets.

Could it have been wanged by something going by,

tipping it over, we don't know.

Systems to control.

Copy.

We see lock up on the green box (mumbles).

September 1989, we're about to arrive at Neptune.

Copy this, thank you.

(dramatic music)

Again, it's sort of cold and dim

but Neptune is really

a little bit more interesting than Uranus.

We see a blue atmosphere.

Dark, deep clouds and then some white clouds above.

So there's a lot more structure than Uranus.

But perhaps the most important thing

about Neptune's system is the big moon, Triton.

We are pretty sure at this point

that Triton formed orbiting the sun just as Pluto did

and somehow early in the solar system,

it got captured into orbit around Neptune.

We saw landscapes like nothing we had ever seen before.

Looked like melted wax.

It was clearly a very active world.

There weren't many craters

so things had been happening very recently.

The most exciting thing and the weird thing that we saw

were black plumes of smoke coming up out of some hole.

(people clapping)
(people chattering)

So clearly, there's some geological activity going on here.

(people chattering)

And so Triton just instantly became

this incredibly complex world.

And seeing that which was thought sort of

to be a twin of Pluto, I think got a lot of people thinking,

well, wait a minute, there are other worlds up there.

For many of us, it was now what?

What are we gonna do after Voyager?

Is there life after Voyager?

(upbeat rock music)

I was lucky because a young man called Alan Stone,

he was a graduate student, came up to me

and said what about Pluto?

I think we should go to Pluto.

After Voyager had this smashing success

all the way across the solar system,

the United States Postal Service issued a set of stamps

and on each stamp they featured the spacecraft

and mission that had been first to that planet.

But for Pluto, there had been no exploration

so they had this lame stamp.

And that stamp became a dare

that we should finish this off.

We should make this happen.

We should change this stamp.

I knew there was a chance that in my lifetime,

in my career, we could send a space probe off to Pluto.

What we didn't know is we were embarking

on an adventure that would last most of our careers.

(romantic orchestral music)

This path to Pluto all began with Clyde Tombaugh.

Clyde Tombaugh was an amazing person.

United States was in the grip

of a paralyzing depression.

Millions were unemployed, on some form of relief.

He grew up very poor on a farm in Kansas

during the Depression and as a young kid,

became enthralled with astronomy

and was self taught from the local library.

In 1928, the young farmer built a telescope

using the crank shafts of an old Buick

and pieces of farm equipment.

He dreamed of being an astronomer

but had no plan, no idea how this poor kid

in Depression Era Kansas could ever get off the farm.

Well, I was interested in knowledge

and so, of course I was fascinated with

what I saw in the sky.

(peaceful music)

And so I made drawings of Mars and Jupiter.

Tombaugh sent his drawings off

to the Lowell Observatory in Arizona

who was so impressed by his work

that they offered him a job.

The job was to go off to search for the planet

out beyond Neptune.

For decades, there'd been a theory

about a hidden planet out beyond Neptune.

Percival Lowell, a wealthy businessman and astronomer

had become obsessed with the theory

and spent the latter part of his life searching

for the mysterious planet but never found it.

After his death in 1916, the Lowell Observatory

that he founded continued the search.

They had been tryin' early years to find it

but without any success

and they weren't doin' too thorough a job of it either.

You have to have a very strong mental concentration,

otherwise, you can't let your mind wander.

You've got to be conscious of seein' every star

and see if it shifts.

And that's very demanding.

It was a difficult, painstaking task

with little chance of success.

Tombaugh used the telescope to photograph a tiny patch

of sky onto glass plates.

He studied these images on a special machine

in the hope that he would spot the mysterious planet

as it moved.

But, after searching for nearly a year, he'd found nothing.

Lotta people told him it was futile

and that they would never find it,

people had already looked.

But he was incredibly fastidious.

Then, on February 18th, 1930,

while comparing two photographic plates taken

in late January, six days apart,

he noticed a moving object.

He checked it again.

He photographed the patch of sky a third time.

That's when he realized he had found

a ninth planet beyond Neptune.

And then they announced it to the world.

Well, I think I decided to let the younger men do it now

but I feel quite satisfied with what I did in my lifetime.

Clyde passed away in 1997 and he said,

if a mission to Pluto ever got launched

and there was a way for his ashes

to be flown in the spacecraft,

he would really like that to happen.

There's lots of interesting things we can do.

Perhaps the most important thing is to look at what Voyager

did not do.

It did not visit Pluto.

When we were campaigning for this mission to Pluto,

it was a big establishment, the Voyager types,

the Cassini types, the Galileo types

who were pushing for those really big missions.

What we wanted was a lot smaller.

Just to fly out, take a few pictures of Pluto.

However, there's a political problem

of trying to sell a mission that will have a 14 year cruise

will not return information for 14 years

and when it does,

it'll be a half hour flyby with a handful of pictures.

You're not going to have 11 instruments.

You're not gonna have the data taking capability of Voyager.

But remember those nine pictures of Triton.

(suspenseful music)

We have to cut back our scientific desires to have more

and just send it out and take those pictures.

It was really a group of young scientists

who wanted to ask NASA why aren't we going to the last

of the planets.

And so it was a bit of an underground movement

of people who were pushing for this underdog, Pluto.

So we called ourselves the Pluto Underground.

Our first objective as the Pluto Underground

was to have NASA do a study of how you go about flying

a mission to explore Pluto.

In May of 1989, I went to the top

of the NASA Planetary Exploration Program

to a man named Jeff Briggs and just straight our asked him,

how 'bout a study of how to go explore

the last of the planets.

And to my complete surprise, he smiled

and said, you know, that's a brilliant idea.

No one has ever asked me that before.

I think we should study it.

A study was just the first step

on a very long road to making a mission happen.

The Pluto Underground had to research the idea

and devise a plan that showed

how a mission would actually work.

It's exciting to Mark and I

and to our whole scientific team to be able

to see this object that no humans really

could glimpse as a real planet.

We had no idea how complicated

the political process would be.

We would walk in to one of these meetings

and the NASA representative would say,

okay, this is the mission you're gonna get.

And our job was to justify that mission concept

and most of 'em were absolutely crazy schemes.

Let's do a small mission.

Let's do a grandiose mission.

Let's do a cheap mission.

Let's fly two.

No, we don't wanna do that.

But if we say no, then we're done.

Every year, something came up that prevented us,

that blocked us, that we had to find a way around.

We were close but then we were set back.

We were even closer than we were set back.

And what made it even more difficult

was the feedback that we would get

that you guys really should let go of this.

There must be other things that you're interested in doing.

(upbeat music)

I met Dave as a graduate student

and he was a professor and I needed a project to work on.

And she came to me one day and said,

you know, Dave, the thing I'm working on

is not going that well.

Have you got any ideas?

And I said, yeah, I've been thinkin' about searching

for things beyond Saturn.

And she said, okay, that'll be cool.

Dave pointed out

that the outer solar system seemed rather empty

compared to the inner solar system.

Inside Saturn, inside Jupiter we knew

of lots of asteroids and comets and all the planets

and then beyond Saturn, nothing much is there.

Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.

So he proposed that maybe we should look

in the outer solar system

to see if there were things out there.

Dave and Jane used the Mauna Kea Observatory

here in Hawaii.

Mauna Kea's 14,000 feet high.

It's above most of the clouds.

It's above most of the water vapor

in the atmosphere.

It's the second best place to put a telescope.

First best would be in space.

The telescope are on the peak, 4,000 meters,

it's miserable there because at that level,

the amount of oxygen that you get

is only about 60% of what you get at sea level.

So you don't have enough air to breathe.

The altitude gives me a headache every time.

Sometimes you would get a nosebleed.

Once Jane Luu collapsed from the altitude.

We never found out why but she simply couldn't stand up.

It's painful to work on Mauna Kea

but we put up with it because we understand

that this is the best place to make observations.

Everybody wondered where the cutoff point was.

So many people would say when are you going to stop.

We were looking for things that were not predicted

to exist by any theory.

So we take a series of pictures.

Four pictures, one after the other.

And the stars and the galaxies

which were basically infinitely far away don't move.

But anything in the solar system moves

'cause it's going around the sun

and the speed depends on is distance

and we look for anything that is moving slowly

with respect to the stars and the galaxies.

Every time we wanted to stop,

the technology would get better.

And we knew the technology was improving

because bigger cameras became available to us year by year.

(peaceful music)

At the end of August in 1992,

we took the first picture and it came out

then the second picture came out.

And I pretty much immediately saw this object

that seemed to moved,

and it didn't move much.

And I said to Jane, hey Jane, come and have a look at this

and she said, yeah, that looks good.

We were very excited because it

was the first believable candidate.

So the third picture came and the third picture showed

that same object but a little bit further over

and so we suddenly thought hey,

that's probably the best thing we've ever seen.

After doing thing for ages, for years.

So the fourth image came out

and it was just perfect.

It was bang, bang, bang, bang.

In a straight line going to the west

and during the whole time, we were able to measure it

and its speed was just a beautiful straight line.

How could that possibly be real.

Like, we've done this so much.

And there's just so much rubbish that we get.

How could this possibly be real.

(Jane laughing)

So we just took picture after picture

after picture after picture.

For the remaining six hours of the night.

(dramatic music)

Wow, this changes our view

of the solar system fundamentally

that there's a whole new unexplored area out

there of objects.

It was really clear that this was a major breakthrough.

There are 100,000 objects in the Kuiper belt

bigger than 60 miles across

and there's a billion objects in the Kuiper belt bigger

than about a mile across.

Pluto was not just some weird fringe oddball

by itself out in the outer fringes

of the solar system but in fact was the largest member

of this massive domain of objects

that clearly is important

in the story of how the solar system came to be.

(peaceful music)

The competition was really intense.

Five teams formed and frankly, of the five,

our team was the David in a David and Goliath battle.

We had the least experience

but probably the highest motivation.

No humans really could glimpse as a real planet.

One of the first things that we had to do

was to find a name for it

and when I was on a long run across my hometown,

Boulder, Colorado, and I turned around

to the west and saw the Rocky Mountains

and I thought this is a mission of New Horizons.

And people liked it and that's what we adopted.

We designed our mission as best we could.

Not too much, but not too little.

Just get it right.

These proposals are phone book thick engineering

and technical documents.

There's a lot of work that goes into

putting one of these together.

On November the 29th, 2001,

after 300 days of competition,

I was at a planetary science meeting

and NASA scientist came to me

and said there's a phone call for you.

And I knew at that moment that that phone call

was the decision.

We would find out if we had won or lost.

And I picked up the phone

and time telescoped, it slowed down for me incredibly

and I knew that within moments, my life would change.

One way or the other.

And fortunately the phone call was a good one

and we found out we had won.

(dramatic music)

It was such a huge relief.

We were selected.

It was all systems to go to build the spacecraft

and to make it happen.

David had beat Goliath and we were actually going

to have an opportunity to do something

that had been our ambition for 14 years.

Then they actually have to built it

and make it succeed.

And they're on a ticking clock.

(machine rumbling)

All of the challenges associated

with building a spacecraft that was small enough,

used little enough power that we could perform

when the light levels are so low.

It was just technically very challenging.

Well, you know, the key to planetary science is

that you really have to go places to get the resolution

to get up close enough to really see what's going on.

We wanna get up close and personal.

I was so excited when I had the opportunity

to join this mission.

I had been studying Pluto

for years using ground based telescopes,

trying to understand what was going on in

this fuzzy point of light.

The Hubble Telescope produced the first image

that illuminated Pluto.

This image was made up of just eight pixels.

One pixels per 390 square kilometers of Pluto's surface.

And to be able to have a part in the New Horizons mission

where we got to turn Pluto from a point of light

into a world where we're mapping the surface is amazing.

We were ready for launch.

We had the spacecraft on top of the rocket.

The New Horizons spacecraft is a small spacecraft

and then we put it on the biggest rocket

that we had available from NASA at the time,

the Atlas V.

They put a stamp on there from the U.S. Postal Service

that says "Pluto, not yet explored".

In addition to a small vial of ashes

from the remains of Clyde Tombaugh.

It was my honor to be able to bring it back

to his efforts to actually find the planet.

We had a number of days

where everything's lining up and then somewhere

along the way, somebody said no, can't go.

That got to be the pattern.

11, 10, nine, eight, seven,

six, five.

I remember on that one day,

the clock's counting down and it's getting lower

and lower and they're not stopping

and I said wow if they don't stop this,

it's actually, they're gonna have to send it off.

Six, five, four, three, two, one.

We have ignition.

(woman cheering)

(uplifting music)

And sure enough that thing took off

like nobody's business.

We had a picture perfect launch.

At 11:00 p.m. I was out on the balcony

of the hotel where I was staying in Cape Canaveral.

Just looking up and seeing the beautiful bright moon

and the spacecraft was passing, you know,

at the orbit of the moon at that time already.

I mean, usually, it took the Apollo astronauts three days

to get there.

So we knew we were speeding on to our destination.

Flying past Jupiter allowed us

to check out our instruments.

New Horizons flew by Jupiter and took advantage

of a particular trick called a gravity assist.

So if you imagine Jupiter moving along

and New Horizons is catching up to it

and Jupiter pulls it forward

and then bends the orbit and as they keep goin',

that interchange will add a little bit more velocity

to the speed of New Horizons.

Spacecraft is outward bound from Jupiter

and we're on our way to Pluto.

All right.

(people clapping)

We shaved a couple of years off the flight time

but it was still a very long haul.

It was another eight years from there to Pluto.

So they pioneered this technique of hibernation

where you put the spacecraft to sleep first

for a day and then for a week

and then for weeks.

Which makes a lot of sense because if you think

of the wear and tear

on all the components, it's more likely to be working

after nine years if it's been off most of the time.

And it's just sending back a beacon, a beep.

(spacecraft beeps)

(upbeat music)

Pluto is a planet.

Pluto is a planet.

I wanna know that if it really is a planet

or if it's just something else in space.

There is this issue about what a planet should

or shouldn't be and whether Pluto was one.

I don't think it's a planet, I really don't.

There's a bunch of objects like that out there

so how did that get to be a planet, you know?

Didn't seen right to call Pluto a planet

when there were like thousands of other objects like it.

It's a big Kuiper belt object

but it's a Kuiper belt object,

there's no doubt about that.

And so the astronomers had a vote.

A vote is ludicrous in itself.

They had a vote on whether Pluto

was a planet and the idea of voting in science,

it just crazy.

Since when do we vote about scientific fact?

In the scientific community, most planetary scientists

simply ignore it.

To me, it wasn't a big deal.

I knew Pluto was an amazing place

and I couldn't wait to see it

and what we called it was pretty secondary.

Dwarf people are people, dwarf planets are planets.

Because it's a flyby mission,

we knew we were gonna get a really good shot

at one half of Pluto.

The other half we would see it but it would be blurry.

One of the projects I worked on was

to take images with the Hubble Space Telescope.

And figured out a map

but Pluto was so far away and so tiny

that even with Hubble, it's very, very difficult

to get any information.

It took about six or seven years worth

of computer processing to get the maps up.

I think this map is probably the best,

the best map we're gonna get prior

to the spacecraft getting there.

I said here's the deal.

I can tell ya right now where you need to go.

There's one patch of Pluto that's the brightest part

of the body.

Right next to it is one of the darkest areas

on the entire surface.

You're gonna see the darkest stuff,

you're gonna see the brightest stuff

and you're gonna see the contact in between

and then all the northern polar areas.

On July the fourth, 2015,

New Horizons had been journeying towards Pluto

for over nine years.

It was now just 10 days from reaching the planet.

As the country celebrated Independence Day,

Alice Bowman, the mission operation manager

was in mission control,

preparing to upload the main flyby sequence

that would direct New Horizons towards Pluto.

There are a number of gates that we go through

when we establish communications with the spacecraft.

You know, you see the first gate locked.

The second gate locked.

The third gate locked

and that's when you get your telemetry.

But at 1:54 in the afternoon,

their worst fears came true.

We went out of lock.

The next one went out of lock

and then we lost the last one out of lock.

I got a phone call from our project manager,

saying something I almost couldn't process the words for.

He said to me, Alan, we've lost contact with the spacecraft.

I had people that were very upset

that I needed to calm down and have them focus

'cause I needed their expertise.

Just over an hour later

at 11 minutes past three in the afternoon,

the team reestablished communication with New Horizons.

But the problems were far from over.

The spacecraft reports on its status

and it was bad news.

The spacecraft had overloaded a computer memory

and rebooted itself

while this uplink was happening of core commands

for the encounter sequence

and all of that software was lost.

The team had just three days

to rewrite the flyby sequence and upload it

to the spacecraft.

Otherwise New Horizons would miss Pluto.

This is the fourth of July

and everybody was takin' the holiday off.

So people start showing up there in mission control

in their bathing suits and flip flops.

We knew that if we could not fix this problem

that everything we had invested

in the previous 26 years, all of that, was for nothing

unless we could fix the problem.

So, it was necessary to reboot the computer

and then start rewriting some of that software

and finding the right files

and reloading those core sequences.

But that process took time.

It takes nine hours just to say hey are you okay?

(suspenseful music)

You know, nine hours later,

the spacecraft goes yeah, I'm here, what should I do.

Well all felt that sense of a ticking clock.

People were sleeping on desks,

people were sleeping on the floor

and eating out of candy machines.

This is our mission.

We have flown nine and a half years

and none of us were going to give up.

None of us.

After three grueling days,

the team waited for New Horizons to respond

and find out if they'd saved the mission.

(woman mumbles)

We saw that the spacecraft had transitioned

into that mode to accomplish the flyby

and it was pretty amazing.

Our team rose to that occasion with no preparation

and saved the day.

With the flyby sequence initiated,

New Horizons turned towards Pluto.

When people ask me what my favorite picture is

of the Pluto system, it's that blurry picture,

the first one that comes down on July seventh.

That's a representation of what we had accomplished

and what we were going to accomplish.

It's one of those moments that you will never forget

in your whole life.

I had been working my entire career,

leading up to this moment of time.

Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four,

three, two, one!

(people cheering)

On July 14th, 2015,

New Horizons signaled to Earth

that it had successfully flown by Pluto.

But the team had to wait nine more hours

due to the vast distance between Earth and Pluto

to find out if they'd achieved their goal

of photographing this far off world.

(melancholy music)

So there we were at Johns Hopkins applied physics lab

with all the press and the family and friends

and a whole bunch of people who were just dying to know

what Pluto's like.

When we finally get that image down

and we displayed it on the monitor, it was unbelievable.

(people clapping)

The whole team was like aghast at this beautiful image.

(people cheering)

(uplifting music)

In 1989, a small team

of young scientists took it upon themselves

to campaign for a mission to Pluto.

We have to just send it out and take those pictures.

To be able to see this object

that no humans really could glimpse.

Over two and half decades later,

they had achieved their goal

and made one the most unique discoveries

in the history of space travel.

It was just extraordinary.

This was a whole new world.

Just as Voyager had revealed Neptune's moon,

Triton, New Horizons images showed a world

that was geologically active.

We began to see all of these features.

Mountains and ravines and glaciers

and all sorts of indications of activity

and physics taking place on the surface.

It just blew us away.

(peaceful music)

Pluto has mountains.

But these aren't ordinary mountains.

These are mountains of ice, water ice,

that are sticking up, the size of the Rockies.

Huge, big mountains.

And Pluto, as Alan is always saying,

is the Everest of the solar system.

The farthest and coldest and hardest to reach.

And so these mountain ranges were named Norgay

and Hillary after the original explorers of Everest.

Many of the features on Pluto were named

after famous explorers and famous vessels of exploration.

As we were flying up to Pluto and imaging it,

day after day and week after week on approach,

we could see this bright feature on the surface.

(dramatic music)

One morning, we got an image back

and as soon as it came up on the big screen,

I remember a NASA official who said,

do you see that looks like a heart?

And as we got closer and closer,

amazingly, it looked more and more like a heart.

I think that's what emblazoned Pluto into the public mind

as this amazing place at the frontier

of our solar system.

Pluto's heart measures 1,600 kilometers across

and is composed of nitrogen ice.

We believe that structure might be supported by water

underneath the surface.

There could be an ocean underneath Pluto's surface.

There probably is some kind of liquid water ocean.

It's very deep down inside but we think

there's a pretty good chance that it's there.

It's one of those things where if you find water,

is there a chance for life?

Wouldn't that be cool if Pluto's actually one

of those places in the solar system that has

or had life on it, even out at the outer reaches

of the solar system.

That's just mind blowing right there.

(dramatic music)

(peaceful music)

When we flew behind and we looked at the sun

go behind Pluto,

we saw this big ring of blue sky,

a haze in the upper atmosphere.

New Horizons continued further

into the Kuiper belt.

And three and a half year later

on New Years' Day 2019,

it reached a small Kuiper belt object

officially named Arrokoth.

With the spacecraft now a billion miles

farther out than Pluto,

here was this fantastically complex object.

It's in a very special category of objects

out in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune.

These are objects we call the cold classical objects.

These are objects that are in very flat, circular orbits

that are all traveling around the sun pretty much parallel

to each other, they very rarely run into each other.

And they clearly have been in these orbits

since the formation of the solar system.

That's the only way they can have such undisturbed orbit.

These are the building blocks of solar system formation.

They're the things that didn't get accreted

into the giant planets and the terrestrial planets

so they're the leftovers out in the deep freeze

of our solar system.

(peaceful music)

The images reveal that Arrakoth

is made up of two objects that are joined together.

This can't be done

without a very, very, very slow merging of the two objects.

Realizing, all right, this is how you make planets.

You have to take small objects

and bring them together gently

so they will stick.

And won't just smash each other to pieces

and so you can build up things into larger objects

and eventually end up with things the size of the Earth.

And here we were seeing that process

for the first time in a real object

that had been frozen in the early stages of that process.

Super exciting to be able to take science

by leaps and bounds just from a short period of time

where we're getting data.

(melancholy music)

The outpouring of interest was an amazing thing to see

and just goes to show that this kind of exploration

can really bring people together no matter

where you are in the world.

(people cheering)

I don't think words can really capture how much

this mission means and how much of an effect

it has had on my life.

Do what you're passionate about.

Don't do something because it's easy.

This was something for the post Voyager generation

that they could say they were there

just like the previous generations could say

they saw the first landing on the moon

or the first flyby of Jupiter or Saturn

or Uranus or Neptune.

This was their first.

We've opened up a new realm of the solar system.

A new realm of human discovery.

A half century long endeavor

that will forever be a legacy of our time.

We changed the world a little bit for the better.

And we made a little something called history.

(uplifting music)

There is no end to the discoveries that we can make

out here in the solar system.

We are just getting started.

I gave lots of talks to the public

and I've been to many schools

and it inspires young people to study science.

(people cheering)

When you have a dream, something in your heart,

you should follow your heart.

I never grew up thinking that I would

be a part of something like that but now looking back,

I realize everyday people make history.