Original subtitles

I'm wishing on a star

I'm missin all the day I

Was

When it was just recently announced that Voyager 1 was in interstellar space it was like

Humanity had just become an interstellar species knocking on eternities door

Voyager's on the other side in solar system and it's billions and billions of miles from the nearest other human-made object

Voyageur made it accomplished something no one dreamed. It could do

Every second it goes to another place where we have never been before

It's on an escape trajectory. It's not coming back

It's just gonna keep going forever and ever out into empty empty space

Voyager takes the cake it's the most audacious mission. I mean who'd have thought that we'd actually be able to do that in

1977

We knew a little because you can't observe from the earth with telescopes

If was big no, let's see what did we know?

We knew they were all gas giants

Mostly made up of hydrogen and helium and some methane on the outer planets we knew that there were winds on Jupiter

We knew about the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. We knew that there was trapped radiation, so we knew there was a magnetic field

We knew for example at Jupiter that there were four moons, Io Europa Ganymede and Callisto

That's what convinced Galileo that Copernicus was right and that the Sun is the center of the solar system

For Saturn when you bought the Rings and reading about the major satellites

But hardly anything more than that and it was all very fuzzy

And the same was true for Uranus and Neptune very far away. I

Have been staring at these planets through some of the best telescopes on earth and yet all I could see was fuzzy blobs

Uranus was a small bluish green dot in the telescope and Neptune was an even smaller

bluish thought and that's all

Astronomers had worked pretty hard to know what physical makeup was there were some basic

Characteristics, but their real nature. We had none of that just little glimpses

There's theory, but then there's unknowns and we're researching the unknowns

Human beings are a curious Bunch we want to know what's around that next bend in the road

this desire to explore conveys an

evolutionary advantage

And I think there is a feeling that our survival as a species is going to depend on our learning how to live on

Other worlds. It's a very human thing to ask questions. It's a very childlike thing to ask a million questions

And some of us never grow up

One of the key things that made this mission possible was

Gravity assist that is when you fly by Jupiter

You turn the corner, and you take a little bit of Jupiter's orbital speed with you like a slingshot

So you better make sure Saturn's are the right place?

We were very fortunate

That we had an alignment

Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune would all line up two ago Jupiter boom Saturn boom Uranus boom

Neptune boom the planets had to be lined up in just the right way to allow one spacecraft to do that then that

aligning up only occurs rarely

It only happens once like once every 100 more than hundred years hundred seventy-five years something like that once every

176 years

He was named the outer planets grant tool and the cost of the mission was

estimated to be in excess of a billion dollars

The NASA Administrator went to the president, and he said the last time the planets were lined up like that

President Jefferson was sitting at your desk, and he blew it

So mr. Nixon laughed. I said all right just do two

So only two plans and of course the price tag consequently was substantially less

Mission success was one spacecraft past Saturn

But we knew right from the get-go

That we were going to try as hard as we could to extend the mission to go to Uranus and Neptune

We designed that in from the beginning

We knew that we were endowing water with the option if the chance was there to use it

We didn't want to build anything into the design that would have prevented us from going further

So it was a mission within a mission yeah

The Golden Record really is the kind of heartbeat of the ship itself the reason why it's going there

It's certainly exploring, but it's the lifeblood is that record would you expect someone to find this this record out there?

Is there something out there?

Well nobody knows one of the great unsolved questions as whether we're alone or Carl Sagan has become probably the best-known

scientist of the late 20th century he played a key role in many of the NASA missions to the planets including the Voyager 1

But he also was the astronomer who as much as any one person made the study of

extraterrestrial life

credible

What a scope for misery and falling

1011 spacecraft they had some line drawings of a male and female form and it caused a lot of commotion well

I thought that was great and I called him up and said hey

Would you be willing to undertake to come up with something for us to put on the Voyager spacecraft? He says yes sure

They figured don't let this opportunity pass you're gonna throw a message in a bottle into the ocean

Put a message in it and so they decided to put time capsules in those bottles and at first Carl thought

They'd simply do another plaque, but Frank Drake

He came up with the idea that for the same amount of weight and space you could send a phonograph record

The only difference is it's on metal so it will last a long time

The people who actually did the science part of voyage are always jealous and mad because the Golden Record gets more attention than all the

Wonderful things they did exploring the outer planets of the solar system except Pluto and all that

But the main attention goes to the golden record

Because of the aura that surrounds anything to do with

extraterrestrial intelligent life any kind of effort to contact

Extraterrestrial life, it's more fascinating than knowing the chemical makeup of a mineral on Mars or something

One of the first questions a lot of people ask is well

They'll never figure out how to play and in fact we

included a cartridge and stylus in the package with the record and

The drawing on the cover of the record shows the method by which the stylus is to be placed on the record

Maybe what's written on it will seem like kindergarten scribbles to them, but they should be able to figure it out

They've got some smart minds or whatever is in their heads if they even have heads

what I find interesting is to protect it from the dust and tiny particles of the journey they put a cover over it and

on the cover was engraved the

location of Earth or our solar system in terms of its direction from different, pulsars a

Lot of people say well. Why would you do that? I said? What do you mean? He said well?

Why would you announce where you are that you know because there are aliens out there?

They probably read planets and use them for food or eat the people or make them slavery

You know as they find it their technology is probably more advanced than ours

They'll come here and destroy us so why would you do something like that so somebody did find it?

They would be thinking that way, and they said why would these people expose themselves to our?

Ferocious appetite they must be very altruistic

The chance that advanced intelligence beyond us would detect all hey

There's a radiating body coming into our area. Let's go out and find out what this

Bottle in the ocean what message it might have now is that grand mystery

Whoa

Well that brings up the whole question is there anybody out there

Listen there are

Give or take 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy

There are about 200 billion galaxies in the universe or at least in the universe we know about

It's a pretty small spacecraft, and it's a pretty big universe

If you take a piece of sky the size of the soda straw

Up there in the Big Dipper in that tiny piece of what we thought was blank sky

there's thousands of galaxies and

Each one of those galaxies is filled with billions of stars

That's just the soda straw and now you imagine the whole sky filled with

thousands and thousands of a thousand galaxies each of which is billions of billions of stars, there's a lot of

Possibility out there

If you took a grain of sand and put it on a table

And if that were the size of the Sun then the earth would be about an inch away

And it would be microscopic and the entire solar system would fit on a table six feet across

Think about the next star the next star would be another grain of sand how far away from that solar system

Would you have to put that and it turns out to be about seven and a half miles away?

The distances are almost unfathomable

These are the fastest spacecraft that had ever been built and launched and flown and they're traveling at

Ten miles per second you would even see it right and yet even at those

unfathomable by earth standards speeds

It takes decades

Decades to get out there into the outer solar system

If you want to realize how empty our galaxy is the nearest galaxy to our own is Andromeda

It's about two million light-years away

It's on a collision course with us right now, and if five billion years that galaxy's gonna collide with our own

You might say oh, no oh no what turns out

Spaces even in our galaxy. It's mostly empty space when our two galaxies collide

Almost no stars will hit any other star

It's mostly empty space there's just a lot of room out there

So this adventure for this little spacecraft is really just

Exploring the tiniest closest neighborhood when you start thinking about cosmic scales

The spacecraft were built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it's a federal research center. That's part of Caltech, and they build spacecraft

One of the things I just admire most about the engineers who built Voyager is that they're always thinking about the most improbable things happening

You know you want to take those people on a camping trip with you because they will think of April you got to bring what?

If these bugs come out what if the tent gets flooded? What if you're on a gas?

What if you can't start the fire you know? They're the what if people and

When you're sending something out into space you can't go do a service call you can't bring it back

So you're what if list had better be like that long

or

You're not going to be able to survive

These projects begin with a conceptualization

Period how feasible is it for us to do thus and so?

We didn't know what the spacecraft was gonna look like how do we arrange the spacecraft?

How how do we take the communication system this large 12-foot diameter?

Fixed antenna and arrange it relative to the propulsion system

The spacecraft to calm a dimension of being a child and our design teams, you know we're like

parents this was actually a

nurturing process

Bringing that child if you will

in in into reality

All spacecraft are made basically of the same thing as silicon in the loom that's probably ninety five percent of it

The spacecraft of course is quite primitive by modern day standards we have three computers on board their total memory is about

240,000 times less than in your smartphone

1972 was when you had the technology frees remember we launched in

77 so you freeze technology several years earlier and at the time the biggest computers in the world

Were comparable to the kinds of things we have in our pockets today, and I'm not talking about a cell phone

I'm actually talking about a key fob

What's wrong with 70s technology? I mean you look at me. I'm a 30s technology

I

Don't apologize for limitations that we were working with at the time. We milked the technology for what we could get from it

Voyager is about 800 kilograms its main antenna is 12 feet in diameter

Which is the largest we can launch?

There's this body this

10-sided can called the bus and that's got all the electronics and the computers and that's got these arms and these

appendages that stick out is his feet that connected it to the rocket and

In a really long arm with a magnetic field sensor on it over here and another arm there with this plutonium

Power supply to give it its electricity you can't keep that too close to the spacecraft because it'll radiate the spacecraft in another arm with

This device that had the cameras and other instruments on it that could point around kind of like the eyes

And the big antenna was the ears

When everything is fully extended

It's comparable in size to sort of a small School Bus a strange-looking being for our planet, but perfectly happy in space

I

Became the producer of only one record in my career and

Only two copies of her were made and they were both hurled off the Earth's. I don't know if that's that credential or not

The launch window for Voyager was set it had to do with an alignment of the outer planets

They sure as hell weren't gonna wait for the record

We had six weeks to do it

That's what always draws the biggest gasp

Figure out a way to explain the world to aliens and by the way it has to be finished in six weeks

We had two goals in making the Voyager record we wanted the music to

Represent many different cultures around the world and not just the culture of the society that had built and launched the spacecraft

The other criteria was we wanted it to be a good record

It's a very idiosyncratic

message

Doesn't seem like something made by a committee. It's too quirky

If you were listening to the Voyager record you would be

remarkable if you didn't hear some pieces of music they were quite unlike anything you'd heard before the Japanese shakuhachi piece or the

Sixteen-year-old pygmy girl singing it's called an initiation song copy birdie song in the teary

forests of Africa is just

unbelievably beautiful

It was a terrific mind-expanding adventure

Always the criterion was that we were trying to describe our culture and something we wanted very much was the music of the Beatles

And they said no way and we said well, this is all going in outer space and will never be heard on earth

No, we don't do it

They don't license for outer space I

Would have loved to have had a Bob, Dylan piece, but really there's only room for at most one

contemporary rock piece

But you know you're up against Chuck Berry's Johnny

Be good, which is Bob Dylan himself with a Miss awfully good single it may be just four simple words

But it is the first positive proof that other intelligent beings inhabit the universe

What are they forwards Kokua send more Chuck Berry?

The world is full of

Fantastic music, and it goes without saying there's a lot more great music. That's not on the Voyager record, then there is on

Mad which is a good thing too? I mean if he's imagine living at a planet?

That was so pathetic that it only had 90 minutes of decent music

Ten minutes before midnight tonight journey

Which will take the technology of Earth out of our solar system when it was launched. It was of course all folded up

It's like origami

Here was this

almost

unexpected

encapsulation I

Mean we knew that we were going to be encapsulated, but the emotional effect on that was kind of surprising

I noticed that in just looking around me I

realized that this was last time any of us we're going to see this spacecraft with pies and

That's that's safe, that's a fairly moving experience

We actually launched Voyager 2 first and this gave the media

Drove them nuts

we launched Voyager 1 later, but it was launched on a faster trajectory so it overtook Voyager 2 in December of

1977 from that point on Voyager 1 always got the

Planet before hordes of 2 and the press was happy they understood

They were launched on a Titan launch vehicle which were

intercontinental ballistic missiles for a long time and some of them as they were decommissioned were turned into

Rockets to launch spacecraft out to the plan five four three

two one

We have

You see the solids ignite, and you're really not prepared for what's about to occur

The sound waves then catch up and then this

Force is shaking the body is actually moved in resonance with this energy

Shaking in right

We were sitting in bleachers

And they keep you pretty far from the launch vehicle because they can't explode it and it's basically it's a big bomb

So there's a little bit of holding your breath and wanting to make sure you see it get that

first little motion off the pad starting into space

We were all thinking this thought there. It goes. It's gonna be out there to represent us for the next five billion years I

Was a seven year old child watching it go and thinking like oh, I had some small thing to do on that

But no real significance if it was like oh, it's okay

There were outbursts of joy

And then we launched it and other things went crazy

There's spacecraft began to do things that we had no expectation that would have done

as poor people on earth

Were like what is it doing?

as the launch vehicle leaves the launch pad it has to roll through a certain angle to get to the right direction for departure and

Rate that it rolls that is a much higher rate than the spacecraft would ever normally experience flying and so the gyro hits the stops

Voyager was not a control of itself is this writing this big rocket and that

Was shaking in such a way that it thought it was failing and so it started switching off various boxes

Changing to the backup this to the backup that trying to figure out why all this stuff was happening

for a couple of days

It was a real nail-biter and people were asking us if he lost his spacecraft

and we would say we don't know for sure because we didn't know for sure and

The headline read mutiny in space the Voyager spacecraft had decided it

Just didn't want to follow the instructions that his human controllers were giving it, and it was going to do what it wanted to do

Fortunately the person who had written that code was able to say this is okay

It's doing this it tried that it's doing this it tried that and calm everyone else down

All the time was doing that crazy stuff as it doing exactly what we had designed it to do

The limits were set simply too tight it needed to be able to wiggle more and vibrate more

All of those things were solved for Voyager 1

When Voyager 1 lifted off we're thinking everything's ok?

and then we begin to hear this we call it chatter over the launch vehicle net that something wasn't right I

Looked over at him and he looked like he was a little worried

You know and I says what's wrong or Charlie, and he says no. I don't think we're gonna make it you know

There was a leak in the propellant line

And we were losing propellant overboard so while it was burning propellant was escaping from the launch vehicle, and that's why

second-stage never got to deliver this full thrust because it ran out of fuel and

So the upper stage that was a scent or liquid to hydrogen oxygen as a stage

Had to make up for that

And the Centaurs the stage that's doing the guidance so the Centaur knows that it's not reaching the required velocity

Because it has to burn longer to add more velocity

The Centaur had to use 1,200 pounds of extra propellant now

We're all thinking is it going to have enough left in the tanks to make a normal injection

Or is he going to run out of fuel?

Fortunately it had three and a half seconds of

Thrusting left before it had run to fuel depletion

Three and a half seconds so Voyager one just barely made it

He wouldn't have gotten enough velocity to get to Jupiter. You know so instead of getting the two per

you know we didn't gotten almost a Jupiter, and then we'd come back toward the Sun which would not have been good I

Watch the ditch my school

Disappearo to the email sky. Oh you know with you on your journey

Never go say goodbye, and then of course you know there's the thought that it's out of our hands now

the

major reason for this mission was about to unfold that it's the science of

our role

As

keepers as

Progenitors as our role had been finished

That was moving

It's worth realizing that a human life ago less than a hundred years ago 87 years ago the universe

consisted of one gal of one galaxy our Milky Way galaxy in a static eternal universe

With eternal empty space we didn't know about the other 100 billion galaxies a single human lifetime ago

You can never really imagine

You can try, but you can never really imagine what?

Mother Nature will actually have in store

When you get there

Seems like time really flew I

Don't think we really fully understood

Before the first stupider and kind of just how intense it was gonna be no we didn't and then

We found out

You start working on a mission in 1972 you launched in 1977 all of that

There's no science. It's all getting ready and then March 79 the flood

The encounters they they creep up on you

When we were approaching every picture was the greatest picture ever taken of Jupiter

in the beginning it would be just a little dot getting bigger on the screen every day and

As we would get closer and closer

the images became more dramatic

Incredibly strange and beautiful and now by Voyager revealed and all of its splendor

With someone care to speculate what you would say to galileo galilei if you walk into the room today

How how are you able to live so long?

Jupiter is more than ten times the diameter earth. It's huge and it's mainly hydrogen helium

No solid surface on these planets these planets are liquid gas and liquid

deep inside the gas is compressed the farther down you go, and it gets very hot indeed and

You would melt

Vaporize in fact if you tried to fly through Jupiter

Let me first modify your statement not that it was wrong the atmospheric scientists got

Long-range views because we weren't looking at tiny moons

We were look at the big planet and so we could see things going on before the other groups could

See things and we are always the first to

start shouting

Even to this day we don't fly colour

Detectors you get a much higher

Resolution image in black and white and so when we want to make color we take them through different filters

And then on the ground you put it together and make a color image out of it

That acceleration as you're approaching encounters is really something it becomes very very exciting

We called it drinking out of a fire hose now you trying to take a little sip and this torrent of data is coming out

You go to Jupiter and you have a storm, that's been around for more than 300 years

That's the Great Red Spot you could fit two or three earths inside it

What in voyagers started getting close-up images? We realized that it was very active and that?

Deepened the mystery of how these big storms could even exist with all this

Turbulence going on it was swallowing up clouds and spitting out others

We knew that it was a vortex, but to see it in action

Every day you're wondering did we build a spacecraft well enough did we anticipate all the possible things that could go wrong?

You're approaching this monster

essentially this monster magnetic field this monster radiation environment on purpose

Because you need to get close because you want to see all the little moons and the clouds and the storms and you want to

slingshot on to Saturn

but you just don't know if you're gonna survive I

Think it's fried. You lose the mission still out there physically intact probably but unable to communicate with it the missions over

two months before shipping to the Cape for launch the scientists were

Predicting that the magnetic fields around Jupiter were intense enough that they would accelerate particles

Well, we were hearing initially 40,000 volts. That would be the end of our spacecraft

Cabling on these pentakus were conductors that would take these

Destroying pulses and just feed them right in to our systems and kill us so we need to ground everything

We didn't have time to go through the normal design reviews so in order to get this protection done

quickly enough we did some things that we're out of the ordinary very out of the ordinary I

Can remember asking one of the technicians to go out and buy?

aluminum foil

normally our procurement of spacecraft

Hardware

Supplies materials are a much more sophisticated

process

We're all in bunny suits cutting

Continuous strips cleaning them with alcohol and then finally wrapping these on all of our exterior cabling

but yeah same materials in your Christmas turkey I

Don't think we've created any shortage per

Se well it may have been a local shortage in the local grocery store for a few days and delay

Reordered right and now fast forward. You know did we know?

Whether we've done enough

Amazingly we heard all kinds of sounds

If you had the right kind of antennas on your ears you could go out and hear what we record

Whistlers whistlers mean lightning

That was the first detection of lightning on a planet other than Earth

Much more intense there are lightning flashes at Jupiter ooh. That wouldn't go halfway from the East Coast the united states to the west coast

So it's fascinating what you hear in space

When you're on a flyby mission there ain't no second chance

We were getting pictures. They were getting better and better, and you could begin to see detail as these moons got bigger

You know the dread you have is that you don't want to see a lot of worlds that look like Earth's moon

Let's face it. It's dull

Our minds I was oh yeah, we're gonna see battered ice balls like the highlands of the moon nothing

But impact craters when we saw Callisto basically it's totally hammered, right?

saturated with impact craters Ganymede shows a lot of interesting

grooves and ridges, but it's pretty blasted with impact craters, and then as we went into the inner -

You could not see craters on either one of them

Well, this was encouraging because now we think maybe this mission is gonna find a lot of diversity

Discovering this

billiard ball smooth

icy crust of Europa with cracks in it and

What look like plates of ice that might be moving relative to each other?

The best explanation for that is that there's a thick ocean of liquid water salty water underneath that icy crust

More ocean water than on the entire earth probably two or three times

It's the largest ocean in the solar system and a moon around going around Jupiter

And then of course you know kind of the showstopper for Voyager we get to IO

I of course I was to start the show and we didn't learn that

until after the encounter

Everyone had gone home and

Linda Morabito an engineer whose job was to find out the positioning and the orbit of the spacecraft

noticed some bumps

images of aisle I was on the mission as a

Mission navigator and our job involved just looking back over the shoulder of the spacecraft to say

One more picture of the realm of Jupiter, so it wasn't high priority work

It was an optical navigation

Image and Linda saw this strange thing on the on the limb an enormous

Object emerged enormous and the first thing I said to myself. What is that?

And I'm like it looks like another satellite

In the picture emerging from behind, I own

An object that size at that range at that distance would have been seen from Earth. It was sufficiently large I

Felt with certainty was the only thing I knew that I was seeing something that had never been seen before

This was an umbrella shaped plume

rising

250 kilometres above the surface of Io with volcanic activity

I

Found the very first evidence of active volcanism on a world beyond Earth

It was so hard to believe that a little moon could have ten times the volcanic

Activity of Earth which was the only known active volcanoes in the solar system. We're here on earth, and then there's Isle

Suddenly we we had realized this was a different journey. We were on I wanted to say one other thing

We've been saying that perhaps

There's some funny way in which Jupiter gobbles up all the things that are coming in doesn't let IO be hit by any well

We aimed a spacecraft and went very close, and had we missed we would have made the first impact crater

the flyby is basically a

Week-long affair, that's 28 24 hours a day

It's intense

Instant science because there's going to be a press conference that night this picture comes down and you've got three hours to figure out

What's going on, and then tell the world about it? No pressure there, right?

The confines of being a piece of biology got in a way of that. I mean you got hungry you got tired

You know you had to go to bathroom. I mean we're gonna miss something

You don't want to miss anything because every 48 seconds a new image would come down

No one got any sleep during one of these flybys from the spacecraft would go zooming past

the photo labs were working day and night and

People were sleeping in their cars

It was just way too exciting to sleep

This is the first picture ever of Jupiter's wreak

Jupiter was really just wonderful. It was just discovery after discovery

Toobin was the game-changer

Jupiter reset all the registers now. We're really up for something and to know that this was just the very very beginning of this journey

If we're blown away by Jupiter just wait until we get the Saturn

Voyageur to me was Homeric it was years of

passing across the solar system from one planet to the other and then it was a week or two of

Frenzied activity and discovery and conquest, and then it was well back in the boats

Or is in the water and then on to the next conquest

My father was Carl, Sagan and my mother is Linda Salzmann, Sagan

And she's a writer and an artist and she designed the iconic pioneer plaque she actually drew it

And she's the one who got all the greetings for the Voyager, Golden Record I?

Like to think of her that she kind of put together a kind of choir voices of greetings to stars

The parents wanted a child to have a voice as one of the voices

And they just came to me one day and said Nick if you'd like to leave a message to aliens if they happen to exist

What would you like to say to them?

Hello from the children of planet Earth oh hello from the children of planet Earth, that's why I would say to aliens

They love that and so's the great let's record you

It's a bit of a blur

Like the only thing I know that I remember from that time is those knobs and a little recording level that goes into the red

if you speak too much the 70s kind of

So remember that and I remember watching the needle move as I spoke and seeing like work

I hope that got close to the red that actually didn't go into the red okay. That's probably good

And that was that and then I you know drank my apple juice and went back to my books

It was really not told considerably later that the kind of enormity of what that meant actually hit me

Alton is podesta pirated irony cos Prospero's le lucemon feel oi

see any being al element our wings officially in cons or and

The reason I was chosen was not because I'm something special. I happened to be there at the right time at the right place and

People knew that I speak Arabic

so I was lucky I

Said why me?

They said because you speak fluent Portuguese

I didn't get any instructions about what to say

Except that it needs to be short

The greetings to the universe are almost like proto twits the first tweets keep it short keep it simple

Some Logan and Mario ROM ROM Ponte, I'm not a taraji cozy. Huh the maharajah cushy radio

It's not like there's a rule book for what you should say when you're treating the universe pretty bossy Hirata

Santa Monica visa coastal economy

Basically cidade de todos which means peace and happiness to everybody

It seemed like a safe thing to say if you ran across some aliens

rather than saying take me to your leader or

Whatever I when you need no ninja bhave. We angle on Jo Jo because the

Equipment is called the spaceship is inanimate

Even the record itself is metal, and I just wanted my voice to convey warmth and to make contact

The hayata non-elastic ah finishin ya later ash - the man

Greetings to our friends in the sky. We long to meet you someday

There is some piece of minute that is a traveler on that ship. It's just gone. It's just going

Continues to go it's gonna keep going when I'm long long gone. It'll keep going and it's like a little piece of magic

Please close your eyes and concentrate with every thought you think

Upon the recitation we're about to say

Calling occupants

I'd like to know the answer are we alone I'd like to know the answer to that question

There has to be other civilizations. The numbers just compel it

It would be almost statistically impossible for there not to

Be other life forms and other life forms that have evolved to a state of intelligence and beyond

I'll tell you I think that

Intelligent life is we can include ourselves

That categorization is so prevalent that I'll bet you at this variance

There are two people

Probably one male and one female having exactly the same conversation that you and I are having right now

You're probably trying to contact us at this very minute I

Predict passing through this room right now

Radio messages that we could detect with equipment we could build if we knew where to aim that

detector and what frequency to tune to

And it's right here in this room than that so just mind boggling you know they're here right in the room right now

The big division with extraterrestrial life is not space it's time

It depends on how long civilizations last because you've got to get them to overlap for us to communicate

In our galaxy our Sun is relatively young

The galaxy is about 12 billion years old our Suns four-and-a-half million years old there many stars are a lot older

Therefore you could have imagined some

Civilization around such a star that might have watched our earth form over the last four and a half billion years well over that last

Four and a half billion years the only evidence of intelligent life

Would have been in the last 50 or 60 years by watching Star Trek

or I Love Lucy or whatever signals we sent out so even if someone told you look at that star and

Then look at the third Rock from that star, and that's we're gonna find life

There's only a 50-year period over five billion years almost where you'd be able to find intelligent life

If we're alone then we're truly unique and how did that happen and why us and how are we so?

Special and yet in such a kind of far-flung kind of humdrum part of the universe

and

If we're not alone how do we all get here and can we learn about ourselves by these other groups out there?

And what do they like and are they the creatures of our dreams or our nightmares? I?

Think what's gonna save us is that?

interstellar travel is much harder than we think and we're safe for quite a long time from the aliens because

They don't know how to travel very far either

We're all sort of stuck on the planets. We've got

Jupiter's Sun went just like that. It was really quick

We started off with images that we're probably no better than what you can get from the ground and then it keeps getting better and

Better and better as you get closer and closer

What are we gonna see when we get really close?

Having seen Saturn in a telescope with the Rings just looking like these little tiny ears on either side

Now seeing detail and the beauty of Saturn's rings yeah, looking like almost like the grooves on a photograph record

The rings of Saturn. What are they?

billions of icy particles some the size of a house

They're enormous much wider than many Earth's strung together, but less than a kilometer thick

We get there and we find that it's a blizzard of features throughout the Rings and it got very complex

We'd become junkies

Whoo this is how you become a planetary?

Flyby junkies. It's because you've gone through one of them

And you just know it's the greatest feeling and you want to keep doing it again and again

at some point

Perhaps a year or so from now it may be possible to put all this into perspective

But right at the moment that I do not recall being in such a state of euphoria

for any previous planetary encounter

including our two

remarkable Voyager encounters at a Jupiter

The largest moon of Saturn Titans the most extraordinary place

there is a dense methane atmosphere where a complex organic chemistry has been going on from perhaps billions of years and

We are in a moment of

extraordinary discovery

We had both spacecraft

Programmed to do identical mission that Saturn and that was the prime mission and it involved Titan

It's a huge amount of scientific interest in Titan because many people think that

Early in our own history our own planet may have been like that

So if you want to understand the starting conditions go study Titan

if Voyager 1 was successful at Titan Voyager 2

Which is nine months behind going to Saturn would be free to continue to yearn us and to go on to Neptune

but it depended upon forzar want to succeed in you Titan because

Voyager 1 had to be in a certain place in order to pass Titan you couldn't go on to Uranus and Neptune

There was just no way to bend this trajectory to go anywhere else

Voyager 2 would have done exactly that same thing if Voyager 1 had failed

We would have gone like this no more planets that would have been really tough

You're gonna try for Titan again and give up to other worlds you're innocent Neptune

So there was a lot of pressure on Voyager 1

Mostly what we looked at was a giant ball of brown smog with some

Sort of electric blue Hayes's above it

Titan did not reveal itself to the cameras of Voyager

But radio signals from the spacecraft passed through the

atmosphere of the planet and that gave them a measure of the pressure at the surface and also the temperature at the surface and

So we learned a lot about Titan from that radio signal

We gathered what we could with Voyager spacecraft

Shortly after that NASA headquarters agreed that we should continue with Voyager 2 on its Uranus trajectory so Voyager 1 had

succeeded

We almost didn't have that mission to Uranus Neptune if not for the success of Voyager 1 that Titan

We're getting pictures and other data back from Voyager, too

But at some point in time it had to go behind the planet and that blocks us

From getting radio signals to the earth and that happened to be in the middle of the night

It was a period of time several hours that everybody knows. We're gonna be out of contact with the spacecraft

Everybody's expecting pop champagne corks and say hey

We made it and all the data is on the tape recorder because it couldn't be transmitted to the earth

And instead it pops out of the other side, and there's all these crazy error signals coming from the spacecraft something bad has happened

Something happened right around ring plane crossing and the images that were coming back were blank

People thought maybe it crash into the rings of Saturn is this it is it dead

Ladies and gentlemen we can start the briefing I

Wanted to make a very brief statement

We do have a problem on board the Voyager 2 spacecraft spacecraft has a problem the scan platform operating

Mechanism is not operating properly and make sure we understand where we're headed if the following instruments are mounted on the platform the wide-angle camera

The narrow angle camera the infrared instrument the ultraviolet instrument in the photo polarimeter. Yeah, that was the darkest

darkest day of the whole mission there is

circumstantial evidence I came into the auditorium

And it was just boom like everybody's face. You're beginning to speculate I

Quickly learned what had happened the scan platform

had frozen a frozen scan platform

Could be a fatal crippling event

We have our speakers up the rest of the Saturn mission and Uranus and Neptune are dead and

Seeing everything that we were planning just

gone just

Suddenly gone the problem is not with the camera

It's with the articulated platform that moves all of the instruments are cameras as far as we know are working just fine

It's just that we're taking lots of pictures of black space

All of the science that we had hoped to do and your initial Neptune there were no other spacecraft that we're going to be going

There it was up to Voyager to do it and all of a sudden

It looked as though a voyage is not going to do it. It was devastating it was

It took a couple of days while the engineering team went to work diagnosing the problem

Turns out the scan platform it has small motors to rotate it

we were of course wanted to look at lots of places so we had the thing of looking lots of places and

Lubrication wasn't adequate, and it's just jammed it was

Frozen sort of like a car stuck in stuck in the snow you tried to go forward or backward and a little bit

But keep working on it and try to get it out

And that's what we did with a schedule f1 we would try to push it a little bit in one direction and it would yield

A little bit, and then we push it in the other direction, and it would yield a little bit more

and then we kept doing that back and forth back and forth and

Finally that was enough to get the lubrication into the gears

It was freed up and back came the spacecraft and that came the imaging system and there was

Saturn on exit

We were looking to the shadow of

Saturn on the Rings and it was clearly from this wild crazy angle

Wow holy cat we're on the other side of Saturn

We're

We felt like we were there nobody even thought about it

Boy sure was was part of us we

All of planetary exploration to me is a story about longing

It's a longing to know ourselves. It's a longing to understand the significance of our own existence

It's a longing to communicate to say to the universe. We're here. You know know us, you know. Where are you?

We have intelligent life on our own planet

Dolphins and whales that we cannot communicate with other than tricks for fish

It's a little conceited to think that you know it's gonna be like Star Trek and that will immediately

Sit down for tea together or something. It's it's not that it's not going to be that simple

So the Voyager record has a set of pictures on it that depicts our civilization

But we only have the ability to do about a hundred pictures

There was as much data as we could send so that was kind of hard. It was a process of distillation

You can't describe the earth in a hundred pictures

It gets throughout the earth than a thousand pictures

But what art is about is?

Taking something. That's small but can represent the whole

We thought it was very important to take some pictures of humans nude on the record to show just what our Anatomy was really like

NASA had been

Seriously criticised about the Piner plaque there were actually letters to the editor in newspapers saying that

NASA was sending smut to space

how are we going to show pictures of naked humans without it looking salacious and

The answer that was why don't you put a pregnant woman in the picture because pregnant women are not considered salacious?

not appealing

sexually so that's what we did and

I figured if this doesn't get bestnice and nothing's getting past NASA

And I guess the answer was nothing's getting past NASA because it was the only picture that they made us take out

Now it's five years of cruising out to Uranus

Uranus will be the most remote object yet visited by a spacecraft, and it's so remote

that was not even known until two hundred years ago and

Very fortunate that we could swing by Jupiter and Saturn on our way

I've been trying to figure this thing out for the past twenty five years, and it's very frustrating in a telescope

But look at that tiny little disk so the next few days are gonna be very exciting

Once we got beyond Saturn

Essentially the engineers threw out the rulebook and said how are we going to make this work?

How are we going to take pictures of?

Planets this far from the Sun

Voyager was the first of a class of NASA spacecraft that could be reprogrammed

They could take what was on the computer and just wipe it away and give it a whole new set of software

They trained the spacecraft to pirouette like a ballet dancer

basically you want to take a picture of that thing and it's going past you really fast, so you spin the whole spacecraft and

Follow it like this and so even though it was darker at Uranus and really dark at Neptune

You could leave the shutter open without smearing and and that was just beautiful

We had all of the rich set of goodies from Jupiter and from Saturn, but Uranus was

was unknown

We just had the one spacecraft so we were more or less just flying blind and we didn't get a second chance

It was like taking something that was almost fiction almost mythological and then seeing it as a real object

Spacecraft flew through that system like a bull's eye because Uranus is tilted on its side

With this beautiful aquamarine blue methane atmosphere and all these pictures every single one of them's like whoa and you could hear people just wow

Everybody be doing something and somebody would go whoa and everybody would turn and look up. Oh my gosh look at that

There was no internet there was no news stream going out to live CNN

The only way to experience that sensation of being one of only a small group of people who saw a point of light

Become a world the only way to experience it was to be in that room

well just about two minutes ago Voyager 2 pass through its closest approach to Uranus the

New ring is

Here I don't

You're telling me you can't see it I can dr. Schneider plump as you whiz through your explanation

I couldn't put it all together could you try that again?

Slower slower in and a few more details that was pretty slow

Every time we arrived a new planet there were always surprises even though he had gotten a lot smarter

For instance before Voyager all the magnetic fields have the magnetic pole near the rotation axis of the planet

And that was true for Jupiter was true for satyr and then we flew by Uranus, and the pole is near the equator

There's been a lot of speculation about the - fear of Uranus with the b1 what would it be like and?

- fear of Uranus is far more weird and wonderful

We found the planets tipped on its site

But the magnetic field is then tipped relative to the spin axis so you have this huge

Contortion in the magnetic field as the planet spins around

just bizarre

Why on earth the magnetic field was so messed up we had no idea at

the time the Voyager 2 spacecraft

Flew by Uranus one pole was pointing at the Sun at that point in its orbit its

atmosphere shuts down so the planet didn't look exciting and

Part of that is Uranus itself holding its secrets back

That had to be I guess one of the

Well

Disappointments in that you're Uranus was not more photogenic than it was it was actually pretty blah

the poor Uranus a

poor Uranus

Uranus itself was not the character that Saturn and Jupiter were

the big stars of the Uranus encounter were actually the moons

The gravity assists the aiming point at Uranus just happened to be pretty close to the orbit of Miranda if

Yours had been the last stop the scientists might have wanted to go to a larger moon, which ironically

Probably, I don't see how anything could have been any more interesting than Marin

It looked like a jumbled up mess

This moon looked like it had been ripped to pieces and then just sort of shoved back together again

Whoa come look at this

Going up to the screen and pointing and say did you look at that look at that?

No nobody was ready for Miranda there were enormous cliffs and gashes one of them

You can see the edge of a cliff. It's got to be ten kilometers

Tall the gravity on Miranda is so weak that if you jumped off that cliff you could

Read the newspaper on the way down, but when you hit the bottom. You'd still be going 100 miles an hour, so it probably wouldn't

It would be the last newspaper you read

We were just about to

Present all our results we were all about to have the big final finale press conference

and

came back from breakfast, and I went to go watch the

shuttle being launched we have main engine start four

three two one and

liftoff

25th space shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower

No, we thought okay great. Well watch the shuttle launch and then we'll go to the press conference but

of course that was Challenger

Engines throttling up three engines and outer door person of Challenger

People were just like

astonished this gasp like oh

My did you see that did it really blow up?

Because we had stopped in our meeting so everyone could watch it, and then there was just silence people were crying

No, what can you say?

You knew right away that a bunch of people were dead

And then of course they showed replays and replays and replays over and over and over again

The Challenger accident happened as we were receding from Uranus

I have this vivid memory of picture after picture of

The Crescent Uranus coming back and the replay of the Challenger explosion, and it was just devastating

Today is a day for mourning and remembering

Nancy and I are came to the core of the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger

We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country

This is truly a national loss. I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen

It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery

It's all part of taking a chance at expanding man's horizons

The future doesn't belong to the faint-hearted

belongs to the brave

I went to eight degrees west

During these closest approach time periods we would have hundreds of reporters come to JPL, and it was a great news

atmosphere and

when the Challenger exploded

Everybody just left

It was a really a very sad time sad ending to another great mission

Those cosmic

Questions we hope to learn by sending our machines out there very same questions that you and I and every child has asked themselves

Where do we come from are we alone?

What's the universe made of how will it end all these basic questions are the other questions that drive science?

I do cosmology

I study the beginning and end of the universe and some people say what's that good for?

And I always say to them

You know you don't ask what's a Mozart symphony good for or a Picasso painting?

But science somehow seems in order to be useful for people has to produce technology, but the beautiful thing about science is the ideas

There it was just sitting out on the edge of our solar system

Waiting for somebody to come out and appreciate its beauty just waiting for the day that

Humans would get out there and and go

Neptune was photogenic right from the beginning I

Had been taking pictures of Neptune from the ground where we couldn't see very much

You know in my head imagining what it might look like and seeing that turned into reality

It's a rush

Looking at this

bloom

bright blue or

it was a votive of the earth which was bizarre for the last planet that we were flying by I

Was a meticulous log taker and I would make little notations in these logs

And I would draw the pictures and you could see a little dark spot bright clouds like wow

Wow

exclamation point and draw pictures and arrows

The most surprising thing was a giant dark spot

Nobody had any idea that would be there. It's huge. It's like a hole in the planet so we called it the great dark spot

Because we're not very original when it comes to names

We had to basically make a forecast of the

Storms on Neptune in order to point the cameras during the last day and at the same time

There was a hurricane off the east coast of the US and the weather

forecasters

We're trying to forecast that hurricane, but they were trying to forecast it 12 hours in advance

And they're having go on to trouble this the storm kept changing position

And we were just calmly plotting points on graph paper

and then say okay two weeks from now this storm is going to be right here and

it usually was

At Jupiter Saturn and Uranus

The goal was to do a flyby that would take the spacecraft on to the next planet

When it came to Neptune we knew that that was the last planet that we were going to fly by and so

We could take a different trajectory

This allowed us to get a really spectacular view of the Rings and then look back on the system

In a way that was quite beautiful

Think about imaging the rings of Neptune

They have reflectivity at which is twice as dark as soot

And the light is falling on them is a thousand times fainter than on earth

So you have one 1000th of light and you're trying to image something?

Which is twice as dark as suit against the jet black background more than one ring could be seen even in raw images

that is so-called ring arcs and it seemed reasonable that this was indeed the

Lost Ark that our

imaging team Raiders were looking for

Now you're going to turn on me

We knew at Neptune we wanted a close flyby a Triton which was a huge world and a retrograde orbit around Neptune

If you looked at them on the way in the weren't lined up put us up here and ones down here

So what are you gonna?

Do well there was a way fly over the North Pole very close to Neptune to bend the spacecraft

So it would go down, but that meant getting to within just a few thousand miles of the cloud tops skimming the surface

And I had to hit that you know exactly right

There was a lot of concern that we didn't know enough about Neptune's atmosphere

To really be sure that the spacecraft would not tumble

Just a slight error in the calculations and instead of skimming across the cloud tops you're skimming into the clouds and the spacecraft burns up

Slight error the other way you go a little too far. You don't bend enough

Maybe you run right into Triton and crash

And that's the end of the mission you don't have enough time and to make your last best guess

if the send button

It would have been just

Fascinating to be hanging onto that spacecraft right skimming over these beautiful blue cloud tops of Neptune

And then as you come over the pole of Neptune seeing that big moon Triton rise up

After several billion miles of journey to get us to within a few kilometers of where we need to be it's just absolutely remarkable

You know threading an incredible needle

Southern hemisphere of Triton is entirely covered with nitrogen ice and as we flew past

There we go again as we flew past we were able to look down at

What look at markings on the surface of the polar cap?

We were putting together a mosaic of

Tritons globe, but we couldn't get things to line up quite right

Some of the dark streaks - in particular would not line up

He's like she's scratching his heads like I have no idea what's going on here. This guy's one of the world's experts on

Anything having to do with planets and moons he can't figure this out. The only crazy idea. That's left is

eruptions I

Said well, let's put it in a stereo viewer red and blue glasses

And the images fused into a three-dimensional model and uh popped these geysers

And I said holy moly and so we knew what we had

These plans black guys's spewing out this stuff the plumes

extending out of

the surface for like

Kilometers we were seeing eruptions there on a world, which should have been just a frozen cinder

The last place we would have expected to see further dynamics further eruptions was at a moon this remote in the solar system

So there's solar driven geysers on a satellite that 30 astronomical units from the Sun

Who would have thought just because an idea is crazy, it's not necessarily wrong

This was the last planet Widger would explore before it headed on for the rest of its journey

And so I think the times together as a team the times to look at the pictures talk meet together

became more precious I was

Passing by the Secretary's desk, and she said Oh candy. There's a reporter that wants to talk to you and

he said

the countdown clock just went from

- counting down

to counting up

your voyagers now leaving

Neptune and he said how does that make you feel and

In that moment I dissolved into tears

After the spacecraft went past and turned around and looked back, and he's beautiful Crescent Neptune and Triton and people realized

That's the end of the planetary part of Voyager that that's the last port O'Call

The last thing that we'll see in our solar system is now behind us

And it went from the voyager planetary mission to the voyager interstellar mission we could have

enhance the color a bit to make us somewhat pretty a picture but

Out of respect to the Voyager spacecraft we decided to show it to you. Just as it is

So this was

Gorgeous farewell to us, and it's our farewell to you

The way I looked at it was she we did something really great

Very very successful mission a little weepy I mean

It's there was a lot of energy put into this mission

Years of intense effort it was the end of a Sentimental Journey

We did it we pulled it off and that's important it is

We've had a big party at JPL Chuck Berry was there, so that was a good send-off for Voyager

Moment and sale on Voyager

Meanwhile Voyager 1 is still kind of cruising out

They're getting farther and farther out and a number of folks on the team

Including Carl Sagan had this idea that before we have to shut the cameras down

Let's turn around

Look back towards the Sun and let's take a picture of our solar system unlike any that had ever been taken before and there was

Actually opposition to it. They just didn't want to do it

They couldn't get their heads around what would be the point of taking a picture of the Earth and Jupiter?

And so on because if it's just gonna be little points of light so Carl being Carl

Actually went all the way to the NASA Administrator

And got the NASA Administrator to direct the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to take this series of pictures

absolutely zero science in it absolutely

People have been taking selfies of our planet for as long as the space probe has been going on

No one had ever taken one like this. They ended up on Valentine's Day, 1990 taking this beautiful family portrait

When we did our portrait of each of the planets I was the first person to look at the pictures

And I knew every blemish and so I could pretty quickly go blemish blemish blemish

And I thought well where's the earth where how could we you know and then I realized there was a lot of?

There were a lot of streaks of light in that image

And I realized finally that the earth was sitting in one of those rays of light

You know I just sat there for a while just kind of realizing wow, that's

That's the earth you know that's Voyager looking back at the earth

And so this is a different kind of milestone than the scientific milestones. We've had one that is some really symbolic

I'm in imaging scientists, so I first realized

Oh this didn't turn out the way we thought it was going to turn out and my first impulse is to

Take my hand and wipe away the dust because it was some dust on it

Well one of the pieces of dust that I wanted to wipe away was the earth

But it didn't matter because in the hands of Karl he turned it into an allegory on the human condition

and the next slide

Your earth in a sunbeam in

This color picture you can see that it is in fact less than a pixel and this is where we live on a blue dot

on that blue dot

That's where

Everyone you know and everyone you ever heard of and every human being who ever lived

lived out their lives I

think this perspective

Underscores our responsibility to preserve and cherish that blue dot the only home

We had

My father talks about this little tiny speck in this vast cosmic night and that part of something bigger

We're all so you know alone. This is a great thing Rhys is like

There's no sign that any help is going to come here to save us from ourselves. It's up to us

After Neptune the project continued, but it continued in quite a different way

The voyagers didn't have any more encounters

They were just sailing on out into interstellar space which people didn't really understand how far that was gonna be

At the time we were designing Voyager

Interstellar space where the boundary was was totally unknown

We had our eyes on the interstellar machine

Are we going to push the spacecraft to get out of our solar system and into the galaxy?

He was a shot in the dark because nobody knew how far

Uncharted waters

Goldstone Poitras

Please turn command modulation on at one eight zero zero

We know the Sun has this gravitational

Influence that goes way out almost halfway to the nearest star so in terms of gravity the edge of the solar system

It's gonna take Voyager tens of thousands of years to get there, but the magnetic field of the Sun can only extend so far

It's a bubble around our star. We can see the bubbles around other stars out there. Where's our bubble end

Where's the influence of the Sun give way to?

the galaxy

We kept going and years went by years with life, and we don't detect the interstellar medium

Throughout the 1990s

Still didn't find the edge of the bubble

Throughout the 2000s still didn't find the edge of the bubble and then finally

Where drew one which is going to fastest? Which is the farthest?

Started to see these funny things happen to the squiggly lines

Crazy spike everybody goes. Oh is that it and it goes back to normal

And then it was just literally one magical day in it was in August of 2012 that

everything changed, and it was like just

popped out of the bubble

Border one has left our solar system. It's the first thing built by humans that has left our solar system

And now it's in interstellar space

major historic announcement by NASA just a short time ago

Confirming the Voyager spacecraft Voyager as in the thing that launched way back in

1977 exploring the moons exploring the planet well it has entered interstellar space

We've slipped the outermost grasp of our solar system with Voyager 1 the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space

It's a wonderful achievement actually when you think about historic is our first step out of our bubble which

Has been around all the planets and around the Earth essentially forever now finally some little

thing that we have built has left that bubble and is in the space between the stars we all feel like Voyager has carried a

bit of us

into the galaxy

There's never going to be another mission like it

it was the first and last of his own kind is a universe any different than it was then no but

Are we different?

absolutely

the thrill of the discoveries

completing the Grand Tour I mean man our child just

Made it

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2

Will be orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy

With all the stars and every two hundred and roughly 50 million years it will complete an orbit around the center of the galaxy

There's no wind water rain weathering. There's no planets

they're going to run into there's no asteroid belts or comets that they're going to run into and

over billions of years

They're predicted to remain pretty intact

We are the generation that sent something out into space. That's not only going to outlive us. It's going to outlive our star

Four billion years from now when our Sun turns into a red giant

Voyager is still going to be trucking out there through the stars and

The songs of our time are going to be out there Chuck Berry is still out there. We'll still be out there

When the voyagers power sources go dad and when the spacecraft can no longer send back any

useful information

That's really the point at which the golden record

becomes the primary function of those missions still floating somewhere in interstellar space

completing the last part of the mission

All of the human tragedies and the greatest triumphs and our existence as a species all of that's going to be forgotten

And the universe doesn't care about it, but it's possible that at least one thing

We've created will be out there and who knows maybe someday with an infinitesimally small chance

Another being might find it and at least know of our existence

It's highly unlikely, but it's not impossible

and that small possibility

Surely gives us hope

We will

continue

to get signals back from Voyager

And we will continue to try and get signals back for Voyager as long as we can there will be a day

When the antennas are listening to Voyager, and we don't hear anything

And that will be the day that we

Stop communications with Voyager

And that'll be very sad because it will have gone silent, and we really won't have a chance to say goodbye

Or ever

cold

and lost in space

We've won the race

We've claimed a place

forever

Come

The creation of everything and what the future might hold next on bbc4

Jim al-khalili takes on Sciences greatest questions with a double bill of the beginning and end of the universe