All language subtitles for the.farthest-voyager.in.space.2017.hdtv.x264-w4f_track3_eng

[wind blowing,
static radio and chimes]

[wind blowing, electronic
sounds, faint radio chatter]

[wind blowing,
electronic sounds]

[radio static,
faint radio chatter]

[wind blowing, wolf howling]

[faint Morse code style beeping]

LARRY SODERBLOM:
It is really true

that you can only explore
the solar system

for the first time once.

Ah...Voyager did that.

[whale sounds]

TOM KRIMIGIS:
How could one be so lucky?

It's a dream and it came true.

[Brandenburg Concerto No. 2
in F (Golden Record)]

BRAD SMITH: Fifty years from now

Voyager will be
the science project

of the 20th century.

The mission.

The big mission.

[Melancholy Blues
(Louis Armstrong)]

CANDY HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:
It opened our eyes to worlds,

to real worlds.

[aircraft/rocket noises]

[faint plucked guitar string]

FRANK DRAKE: This may
in the long run be

the only evidence
that we ever existed.

[faint plucked guitar string]

CAROLYN PORCO:
Voyager 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,

oars in the water and
then on to the next conquest.

[faint white noise]

["Wishing on a Star,"
Rose Royce]

♪ I'm wishing on a star ♪

♪ to follow where you are ♪

♪ I'm wishing on a dream ♪

SUZANNE DODD: It is
the little engine that could.

Nobody really knows
how it does it,

but everybody's rooting for it.

♪ ...and I wish on all
the rainbows that I've seen ♪

TOM SPILKER: Every second,
it goes to another place

where we have never been before.

♪ ...who really dream,
and I'm wishing on tomorrow ♪

DAVE LINICK:
Voyager takes the cake.

It's the most audacious mission.

Who'd have thought

that we'd actually be able
to do that in 1977?

♪ I'm wishing on a star... ♪

[music finishes with final line]

[soft piano]

NARRATOR: In 1977, a team
of scientists and engineers

launched a mission
of staggering ambition.

Voyager.

The initial idea was a grand
tour of the outermost planets--

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus
and Neptune.

What were their
atmospheres like?

Their moons?

At the time, our knowledge
of these worlds was scant.

[mechanical noises
and piano music plays]

ED STONE: We knew a little
because you can observe

from the Earth with telescopes.

DON GURNETT:
We knew for example at Jupiter

that there were moons:

Io, Europa, Ganymede
and Callisto going around.

[soft piano continues]

STONE: 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.

[soft piano]

CHARLEY KOHLHASE: It 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.

[soft piano continues]

TOM KRIMIGIS: For Saturn,
we knew about the rings

and we knew about
the major satellites,

but hardly anything more
than that,

and it was all very fuzzy.

[soft piano continues
and rattling noise comes in]

HEIDI HAMMEL: I had been staring
at these planets

through some of the best
telescopes on Earth,

and yet all I could see
was fuzzy blobs.

[soft piano continues, chain
rattling, squeaking, clanking]

FRAN BAGENAL: Astronomers
had worked pretty hard

to know what
the physical make-up was,

there were some
basic characteristics,

but their real nature,
what they were really made of

and what the means, moons,
were like,

we had none of that,
just little glimpses.

[soft piano continues, now
accompanied by light guitar]

[sea and bird sounds]

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: Human beings
are a curious bunch.

We want to know
what's around the corner.

We have to go past
that next bend in the road,

so it's some sort
of innate drive, I think,

that we have, as a species.

[light guitar & glockenspiel
music plays in the background]

STONE: 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 in the right place.

NARRATOR: The positions
of the outer planets

presented an opportunity.

A rare alignment meant the time

needed to cross the solar system

could be slashed.

[light guitar
& glockenspiel music
continues in the background]

SODERBLOM: It would go
Jupiter boom, Saturn boom,

Uranus boom, Neptune boom.

HAMMEL: The planets had to be
lined up in just the right way

to allow one spacecraft
to do that.

SODERBLOM: And that aligning up
only occurs rarely.

HAMMEL: That only happens
once like once every hundred,

more than a hundred years.

JIM BELL: ...175 years,
something like that.

KOHLHASE: Once every 176 years.

BELL: The previous time
it happened,

exploration was
wooden sailing ships.

[guitar music continues]
[ocean]

KRIMIGIS: It was named
"The Outer Planets Grand Tour,"

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
and said all right, just do two.

So, only two planets.

[electric guitar music begins]

NARRATOR: Jupiter and Saturn
were officially a go.

It would be a less grand--
but still ambitious--tour.

Yet the Voyager team

wasn't ready to give up
on going farther.

As they assembled the spacecraft
in a giant hangar,

some of them kept
a secret goal alive.

[sounds of light turning on]

KRIMIGIS:
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.

KOHLHASE: We designed that in
from the beginning.

We knew that we were endowing
Voyager with the option

if the chance was there
to use it.

[percussion kicks in
as music continues]

JOHN CASANI: 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.

[heartbeat, bottle falls,
water splashes]

BELL: A group of scientists
and visionaries realized

that these spacecraft
would leave the solar system.

They figured don't let
this opportunity pass,

you're going to throw a bottle
into the ocean.

Put a message in it.

[high pitched string music
begins]

NARRATOR: What would we want
to tell intelligent aliens

about our planet?

What would we want
to tell them about us?

The driving force
behind the message

was the astronomer Carl Sagan.

WATERS: Would you expect someone
to find this record out there?

Is there something out there?

CARL SAGAN: Well, nobody knows.

One of the great
unsolved questions

is whether we're alone
or whether...

JON LOMBERG:
Carl Sagan has become probably

the best-known scientist
of the late 20th century.

He was a working scientist,
he played a key role

in many of the NASA missions
to the planets,

including the Voyager one.

He was one of the scientists
on the Voyager imaging team,

but he also was the astronomer
who as much as any one person

made the study of
extraterrestrial life credible.

CARL SAGAN:
A comment by Thomas Carlyle,

a somewhat crusty old fellow

who upon thinking
about the stars said,

"A sad spectacle.

If they be inhabited, what
a scope for misery and folly.

If they be not inhabited...
what a waste of space."

[laughter]

CASANI: Carl Sagan was
a good friend of mine,

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."

And he told me he could do it
for 25,000 bucks,

so I authorized him
to go ahead and do it,

and I sort of was hands-off
at that point.

BELL: The Golden Record
followed in the footsteps

of a project called
the Pioneer plaque.

CASANI: The Pioneer spacecraft
had some line drawings

of a male and female form,

and some people went
absolutely bonkers.

I don't know if you've seen it,

but it's the most innocent thing
you can imagine,

and it caused
a lot of commotion.

But I thought that was great.

LOMBERG: At first Carl thought
they'd simply do another plaque,

maybe with
some more information,

but Frank Drake--

a brilliant
theoretical physicist

but also a very hands-on
kind of guy,

he came up with the idea

that for the same amount
of weight and space,

you could send
a phonograph record.

[harp music]

DRAKE: The people who actually
did the science part of Voyager

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

is more fascinating
than knowing the chemical makeup

of a mineral on Mars
or something.

[laughs]

LOMBERG: The record is
an old-style LP recording.

The only difference is
it's on metal,

and that's so it will last
a long time.

TIMOTHY FERRIS: And it was
recorded at half-speed

so that gave us two hours
of total time.

An hour and a half of it
was devoted to music

and the other half hour contains

all of the other data
on the record:

the natural sounds of Earth,
the spoken greetings

and the encoded photographs
of Earth.

LOMBERG: One of the first
questions a lot of people ask

is, well, they'll never
figure out how to play it.

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.

BELL: Maybe what's written on it

will seem like kindergarten
scribbles to them,

but they should be able
to figure it out

if they've got some smart minds
or whatever's in their heads,

if they even have heads.

[spraying sounds]

KOHLHASE:
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,

our solar system,

in terms of its direction
from different pulsars.

CASANI: A lot of people said,
well, why would you do that?

I said what do you mean?

They say, well, why would you
announce where you are,

you know, because there
are aliens out there,

that probably raid planets
and use them for food

or eat the people
or make them slaves.

You know, if 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.

Why would these people
expose themselves

to our voracious appetite?

They must be very altruistic,
you know?

[whale sounds]

[radio signals scrambling
and faint radio chatter]

NARRATOR: In 1972, preparation
for the mission got underway.

Other great journeys
of discovery--

by Magellan, Columbus,
Da Gama--

all involved more than one ship.

And so would Voyager.

Two spacecraft would be built--
two chances for success.

[birds and wildlife noises]

BELL: 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...

well, you've got to bring...

what if these bugs come out,
what if the tent gets flooded,

what if you run out of 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 your what if list
had better be like that long

or you're not going to be able
to survive.

[machines spinning and grinding]

FRANK LOCATELL:
These projects begin

with a conceptualization period.

How do we arrange
the spacecraft,

how do we take
the communications system,

this large 12-foot diameter
fixed antenna,

and arrange it relative
to the propulsion system?

The spacecraft took on
the dimension of being a child,

and our design teams, you know,
were like kind of parents.

This was actually
a nurturing process.

Bringing that child,
if you will, into reality.

CASANI: All spacecraft are made
basically of the same things:

silicon and aluminum,
that's about it.

You know, that's probably
95% of it.

Silicon and aluminum is cheap

until you start making stuff
out if it, you know.

[beeping machines
and low bass drum beats]

RICH TERRILE: 1972 was when you
had the technology freeze,

remember we launched in 1977,

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.

CASANI: What's wrong
with 70s technology?

I mean, you're looking at me,
I'm a 30s technology, right?

I don't apologize
for the limitations

that we were working with
at the time.

We milked the technology
for what we could get from it.

ED STONE: Voyager is
about 800 kilograms.

Its main antenna
is 12 feet in diameter,

which was the largest
we could launch.

BELL: There's this body,

this ten-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.

It has these feet
that connected it to the rocket

and then a really long arm

with a magnetic field sensor
on it over here

and another arm over there
with this plutonium power supply

to give it its electricity.

You can't keep that too close
to the spacecraft

because it will radiate
the spacecraft.

And 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.

STONE: We had eleven
scientific instruments

peeking out to see
what's out there.

BELL: When everything
is fully extended

to its greatest dimensions,

it's comparable in size
to sort of a small school bus.

A strange-looking being
for our planet,

but perfectly happy in space.

[Beethoven's 5th]

[Beethoven's 5th]

[music continues]

[Tchenhoukoumen percussion,
Senegal]

NARRATOR:
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony

was one of twenty-seven
pieces of music

chosen for the Golden Record.

FERRIS: I became the producer
of only one record in my career,

and only two copies of it
were made,

and they were both hurled
off the earth,

so I don't know if that's
a credential or not.

[needle sliding off record]

[Izlel je Delyo Hajdutin
(Golden Record)]

The launch window
for Voyager was set.

and they sure as hell weren't
going to wait for the record.

[Fairie Round--David Munrow]

LOMBERG: We had six weeks
to do it,

that's what always draws
the biggest gasp,

that you had to figure out a way
to explain the world to aliens,

and by the way it has to be
finished in six weeks.

[Melancholy Blues--
Louis Armstrong]

FERRIS: 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.

[Ugam--Azerbaijan bagpipes]

The other criterion was we
wanted it to be a good record.

[Mozart--Queen of the Night--
Eda Moser]

LOMBERG: It's a very
idiosyncratic message.

It doesn't seem like something
made by a committee.

It's too quirky.

[Mozart--Queen of the Night--
Eda Moser]

[Cranes in Their Nest--
Japan (Shakuhachi)]

FERRIS: If you listen
to the Voyager record,

it would be remarkable if you
didn't hear some pieces of music

that were quite unlike anything
you had heard before.

The Japanese shakuhachi piece

or the sixteen-year-old
pygmy girl singing

what's called
an initiation song,

a kind of puberty song,

in the Ituri forest of Africa
is just unbelievably beautiful.

[Pygmy girl initiation song]

There was a certain amount

of hunting up rare records
here and there.

I remember the back of an Indian
appliance store in New York

where they had
some Indian records,

and there was one copy of a raga

that we ended up putting
on the record.

[Jaat Kahan Ho--India--
Surshri]

[piano note]

[cello]

[cymbal crash]

FERRIS: I would love
to have had a Bob Dylan piece.

But really there's only room

for at most one
contemporary rock piece.

[electric guitar]

But you know you're up against
Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode,

which Bob Dylan himself would
admit is an awfully good single.

STEVE MARTIN: It may be
just four simple words,

but it is the first
positive proof

that other intelligent beings
inhabit the universe.

LARAINE NEWMAN: What are
the four words, Cocuwa?

MARTIN: Send more Chuck Berry.

[laughter and applause]

FERRIS: 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
than there is on it.

Which is a good thing, too,

I mean, if you imagine
living on a planet

that was so pathetic

that it only had 90 minutes
of decent music.

NARRATOR: In the summer of 1977,

final preparations for two
launches began in Florida.

BELL: When it was launched,

it was of course all folded up,
it was like origami.

LOCATELL: 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 the last time

any of us were going to see
the spacecraft with eyes.

And, um, that's a f...

that's a fairly moving
experience.

[picture flash sounds]

NARRATOR: Journalists
converged on Cape Canaveral

to cover
a once in a lifetime mission.

FERRIS: When the reporters
came to the launch,

they all wanted to know more
about the record.

Most of the press release
drawings

show the other side
of the spacecraft

so you can't see the record.

There was always a lot of
ambiguity in NASA about this.

There's no question that
the Voyager record is useless

from a scientific standpoint,

and the officials reluctantly
arranged a press conference.

[polka music plays]

FERRIS: The press conference
was a joke really.

It was held in a hotel room

separated by one of those
accordion folding barriers

from what was literally,
as memory serves me,

a Polish wedding reception.

We did the whole
press conference

with the oompah sound of
a wedding reception next door.

But I think the public
seemed to get it.

[polka music plays]

MAN ON LOUDSPEAKER:
Environmental control, ready.

MAN: Roger.

KOHLHASE: We actually launched
Voyager 2 first,

and this gave the media,
uh, 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 to the planet
before Voyager 2,

and the press was happy,
they understood it.

SPEAKER OVER TANNOY:
We have just had a report

from John Casani,
the Voyager project manager,

that we'll be able
to count down at 10:25.

[gentle guitar music]

NARRATOR: After five years
of planning,

the assembly of the spacecraft's
65,000 parts

and untold
mathematical calculations,

it all came down to this.

[gentle guitar music]

SPEAKER:
Five, four, three, two, one.

We have ignition
and we have lift-off.

LOCATELL: You see
those solids ignite,

and you are really not prepared
for what's about to occur.

[gentle guitar music]

The sound waves then catch up
and then this forceful shaking,

the body is actually moved
in resonance with this energy,

shaking it, right.

[audio of rocket taking off]

LOMBERG:
We were sitting in bleachers,

and they keep you pretty far
from the launch vehicle

because they can explode, and
it's basically, it's a big bomb.

LINDA SPILKER:
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.

[atmospheric guitar music]

DRAKE: We were all thinking
this thought:

There it goes, it's going to be
out there to represent us

for the next five billion years.

[audio of crowd
cheering and clapping]

LOCATELL: There were
outbursts of joy.

We were on our way!

CASANI: And then we launched it,

and then other things
went crazy.

[piano music]
[radio noises]

The spacecraft
began to do things

that we had no expectation
that it would have done.

STONE: Voyager was not
in control of itself,

it's just riding
this big rocket,

and that was shaking it
in such a way

that it thought it was failing,

and so it started
switching off various boxes,

changing to the back-up this,
to the back-up that.

Trying to figure out why
all this stuff was happening.

CASANI: As the launch vehicle
leaves the launchpad,

it has to roll through
a certain angle

to get to the right direction
for departure,

and the rate that it rolls at
is a much higher rate

than the spacecraft would ever
normally experience flying,

and so the gyro hits the stops.

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:
Us poor people on Earth,

we're like what is it doing?

CASANI: For a couple of days
it was a real nail-biter.

People were asking us,
have you lost the spacecraft

and we would say
we don't know for sure

because we didn't know
for sure.

LINICK: And the headline
read "Mutiny in Space."

The Voyager spacecraft
had decided

it just didn't want
to follow the instructions

that its human controllers
were giving it

and it was going to do
what it wanted to do.

BELL: So early in the mission
it's like, oh, man,

is this mission going to be
plagued with problems?

Is there some fundamental flaw
in the design?

LOCATELL:
That was a cliff hanger.

That was the end of the mission.

It could have been
the end of the mission.

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:
Fortunately, the person

who had written that code

was able to say this is OK,
it's doing this, it tried that,

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

[bird sounds]

The limits were set
simply too tight.

It needed to be able
to wiggle more and vibrate more.

[bird sounds]

NARRATOR: Finally stabilized,
Voyager 2 was bound for Jupiter.

The launch of Voyager 1
was coming up fast,

so the team scrambled

to fine-tune
the spacecraft's software

to head off another mutiny.

With the launch window
closing soon,

Voyager 1 finally took off.

But rocket science
is famously complicated.

SPEAKER: Centaur 6,
Titan Centaur 6

has lifted off at 8:56 from here

at the Cape Canaveral
Air Force Station...

KOHLHASE: We're thinking
everything's OK,

and then we begin to hear
that something wasn't right.

CASANI: I looked over at him

and he looked like he was
a little worried, you know.

And I said what's the matter,
Charley?

And he says I don't know,

I don't think we're
going to 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 second stage never got
to deliver its full thrust

because it ran out of fuel.

STONE: And so, the upper stage
which was a Centaur--

liquid hydrogen
and oxygen stage--

had to make up for that.

CASANI: And the Centaur
is the stage

that's doing the guidance,

so the Centaur knows

that it's not reaching
the required velocity,

and when it separates
from the second stage

it knows it has to burn longer
to add more velocity.

KOHLHASE: 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

or is it 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 1
just barely made it.

CASANI: It wouldn't have gotten
enough velocity

to get to Jupiter, you know,

so instead of getting
to Jupiter, you know,

we'd have gotten
almost to Jupiter

and then we'd come back
toward the sun,

which would not have been good.
[laughs]

[music: Gallagher & Lyle
"Breakaway"]

♪ I watch the distant lights
go down the runway ♪

♪ Disappear
into the evening sky ♪

♪ Oh, you know I'm with you
on your journey ♪

♪ Never could say goodbye ♪

LOCATELL: 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 is the science.

But our role as keepers,
as progenitors, as...

our role had been finished.

[music: Gallagher & Lyle
"Breakaway"]

♪ Though I won't stop you,
I don't want you to ♪

♪ Break away ♪

♪ Fly across your ocean ♪

♪ Break away ♪

♪ Time has come for you ♪

♪ Break away ♪

♪ Fly across your ocean ♪

♪ Break away ♪

♪ Time has come ♪

[radio signals and white noise]

NARRATOR:
Thanks to the dedicated work

of hundreds of the world's best
scientists and engineers,

the twin Voyagers had at last
embarked on their odyssey

across the solar system.

The first leg was almost
400 million miles to Jupiter.

SODERBLOM:
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.

[music: classical music]

[music: classical music]

LAWRENCE KRAUSS: It's worth
realizing that a human life ago,

less than 100 years ago,
87 years ago,

the universe consisted of one,
of one galaxy,

our Milky Way galaxy,

in a static eternal universe
with eternal empty space.

We didn't know about the other
hundred billion galaxies

a single human lifetime ago.

[classical string melody]

NARRATOR: In January 1979,

Voyager 1 was coming up on its
first planetary encounter,

and Voyager 2
was four months behind.

[classical string melody]

SODERBLOM: It seems like time
really flew.

SMITH: I don't think
we really fully understood

before the first
Jupiter encounter

just how intense
it was going to be.

No, we didn't.

We found out.
[laughs]

STONE: You start working
on a mission in 1972,

you launch in 1977,
all of that there's no science,

it's all getting ready.

And then March '79: the flood.

[piano music]

[piano music]

TERRILE: The encounters,
they creep up on you.

LINICK: When we were
approaching, every picture

was the greatest picture
ever taken of Jupiter.

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:
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.

BELL: Incredibly strange
and beautiful,

and now by Voyager revealed
in all of its splendor.

TERRILE: That acceleration
as you're approaching encounters

is really something that becomes
very, very exciting.

We called it drinking
out of a fire hose, you know,

you're trying to take
a little sip,

and this torrent of data
is coming out.

JOURNALIST: Would someone
care to speculate

what you would say
to Galileo Galilei

if he walked
into the room today?

SMITH: How...how, how are you
able to live so long?

[laughter]

STONE: I think Galileo...

STONE: Jupiter is more than ten
times the diameter of Earth,

it's huge, and it's mainly
hydrogen and helium;

there are no solid surface
on these planets.

These planets are liquid,
gas and liquid deep inside.

ANDREW INGERSOLL:
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.

INGERSOLL: Let me first modify
your statement,

not that it was wrong ...

INGERSOLL: The atmospheric
scientists got long-range views

because we weren't looking
at tiny moons,

we were looking
at the big planet,

and so we could see things
going on

before the other groups
could see things,

and we were always the first
to start shouting.

SMITH: Even to this day
we don't fly color 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.

[low dramatic
electronic rhythm music]

INGERSOLL: 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.

When Voyager 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.

SMITH: It was swallowing up
clouds and spitting out others.

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

NARRATOR: Another feature
of Jupiter's dynamic environment

posed a great danger to Voyager.

Powerful radiation might destroy
the spacecraft's electronics.

BELL: Every day you're wondering

did we build the spacecraft
well enough?

Did we anticipate
all the possible things

that could go wrong?

[low dramatic
electronic rhythm music]

BELL: You're approaching
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 going to survive.

Thing gets fried,
you lose the mission.

Still out there physically
intact probably,

but unable to communicate
with it, the mission's over.

LOCATELL: 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.

Whoa! We were hearing
initially 40,000 volts,

that would be the end
of our spacecraft.

Cabling on these appendages
were conductors

that would take
these destroying pulses

and just feed them right
into our systems and kill us,

so we needed
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,

an ad hoc team was formed

and we did some things
that were out of the ordinary,

very out of the ordinary.

I can remember asking
one of the technicians

to go out and buy
aluminum foil.

It was the only material
that was available to us.

Normally our procurement
of spacecraft hardware supplies,

materials, are a much more
sophisticated process.

We're actually cutting
continuous strips

and then cleaning them
with wipes and alcohol

and then finally wrapping these
on all of our exterior cabling,

but yeah, same material
that's in your Christmas turkey.

I don't think we created
any shortage per se.

It may have been
a local shortage

in the local grocery store
for a few days

until they reordered right.

Your turkey wrapping
is protecting Voyager,

and now fast forward, you know,

did we know whether
we had done enough?

[radiation sounds Voyager
recorded at Jupiter]

NARRATOR: Voyager
survived the onslaught

and went on to record signals
that led to a discovery.

DON GURNETT: If you had
the right kind of antennas

on your ears, you could go out
and hear what we record.

I'm going to call them
radio sounds

because we have to detect them
with antennas.

Amazingly we heard
all kinds of sounds.

[whistling frequency sounds]

Whistlers.

These things that go
[whistling sound], like that.

Yeah, whistlers mean lightning.

There are lightning flashes
at Jupiter

that would go halfway

from the east coast
of the United States

to the west coast.

That was the first detection
of lightning

on a planet other than Earth.

NARRATOR:
The two Voyagers were poised

to study Jupiter's
little known moons.

[background music: fast strings
with slow piano chords]

[high pitched radio noises]

Having picked up
36,000 miles an hour

from Jupiter's gravity assist,

the spacecraft were now
traveling fast.

[background music: fast strings
with slow piano chords]

SODERBLOM: When you're on
a flyby mission,

there ain't no second chance.

KOHLHASE:
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.

SODERBLOM: I think everyone
figured they would be

just battered ice-balls,
you know,

kind of like the highlands
of the moon,

nothing but impact craters.

And when we saw Callisto,

basically it's
totally hammered, right,

it's saturated
with impact craters.

Ganymede shows a lot of
interesting grooves and ridges,

but it's pretty blasted
with impact craters.

NARRATOR:
Every crater lasts for eons

because no forces were present
to resculpt the surface.

The first two moons
were dormant worlds.

SODERBLOM: And then as we went
into the inner two...

KOHLHASE: You could not see
craters on either one of them.

Well, this was encouraging,

because now we think
maybe this mission

is going to find
a lot of diversity.

BELL: Discovering this
billiard ball smooth icy crust

of Europa with cracks in it

and what looked
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

in a moon going around Jupiter.

SPILKER: And then of course,
you know,

kind of the showstopper
for Voyager, we get to Io.

TERRILE: Io, of course,
Io was the star of the show

and we didn't learn that
until after the encounter.

[soft piano music]

INGERSOLL:
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
on images of Io.

LINDA MORABITO:
I was on the mission

as a mission navigator,

and our job involved
just looking back

over the shoulder
of the spacecraft

to say, OK, one more picture
of the realm of Jupiter,

so it wasn't high-priority work.

SMITH: It was
an optical navigation image,

and Linda saw this strange thing
on the limb.

MORABITO: 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 Io.

An object that size,
at that range, at that distance,

would have been seen from Earth,
it was sufficiently large.

I felt with certainty,
it's the only thing I knew,

that I was seeing something
that had never been seen before.

This was
an umbrella-shaped plume

rising 250 kilometers
above the surface of Io

with volcanic activity.

[soft piano music]

I found the very first evidence
of active volcanism

on a world beyond the Earth.

[soft piano music]

STONE: It was so hard to believe
that a little moon

could have 10 times
the volcanic activity of Earth,

which was the only known
active volcanoes

in the solar system
were here on Earth.

And then there's Io.

Suddenly we had realized

this was a different journey
we were on.

NARRATOR:
Io's volcanoes can shoot lava

over 200 miles into space.

These eruptions are powered
by Jupiter's gravity,

which endlessly compresses
and releases the moon.

SODERBLOM: 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

and 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.

[laughter]

SODERBLOM: The flyby is
basically a week-long affair

that's 24 hours a day.

It's intense.

ANNOUNCER: There will be
a Voyager report

in 30 seconds.

[electric guitar music]

BELL: 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.

Oh, no pressure there, right?

[heavy guitar music]

TERRILE: The confines
of being a piece of biology

got in the way of that.

I mean, you got hungry,
you got tired, you know,

you had to go to the bathroom,

I mean, you're going
to miss something,

you don't want to miss anything

because every 48 seconds
a new image would come down.

[heavy guitar music]

INGERSOLL: No one got any sleep
during one of these flybys

when the spacecraft
would go zooming past.

The photo labs were working
day and night,

and people were sleeping
in their cars.

[heavy guitar music]

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: It was just
way too exciting to...to sleep.

[heavy guitar music]

[heavy guitar music ends
and fades out]

NARRATOR:
During its Jupiter encounter,

Voyager revealed a feature
of the giant planet

never seen before.

Jupiter had something in common

with its flashier neighbor,
Saturn.

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: The engineer
in charge of the camera came in,

and he was like, Candy,
what have you done?

What is the matter
with our camera?

And I looked at it and went,
ah, it's Jupiter's ring.

It went from being
you've broken the camera

to, "This is the first picture
ever of Jupiter's ring."

[atmospheric piano music]

TERRILE: Jupiter was
a 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
to Saturn.

[electronic version
of atmospheric motif]

NARRATOR: The journey to Saturn
would take over a year

and bring Voyager
and its message

one tiny step closer
to other stars

where, just possibly,

intelligent aliens
might discover it.

[atmospheric music on strings]

[atmospheric rhythmic music]

The Golden Record contained
the call of a humpback whale

and greetings
in 55 human languages.

Most were recorded
at Cornell University,

where Carl Sagan was
professor of astronomy.

[atmospheric rhythmic music]

NICK SAGAN:
My father was Carl Sagan,

and my mother
is Linda Salzman 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 a choir of voices
of greetings to the stars.

[recordings of voices
with rock music plays]

JANET STERNBERG:
The greetings to the universe

are almost like proto-tweets,
the first tweets,

keep it short, keep it simple,

and there was a limit to what
they could put on the record.

It's like kind of
a tasting menu.

It's enough to get the aliens

to understand
that, um, we're diverse.

NICK SAGAN:
My parents wanted a child

to have a voice
of 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?

[tape rewinding]

SAGAN AS A CHILD: Hello from
the children of planet Earth.

NICK SAGAN: "Oh, hello from
the children of planet Earth,"

that's what I would say
to aliens.

They loved that, and so it's
like great, let's record you.

It's a bit of a blur.

Like the only thing that I know
that I remember from that time

is those knobs
and the little recording level

that goes into the red
if you speak too much,

this 70s, kind of, um...

so I remember that,

and I remember watching
the needle move as I spoke

and seeing where it got,
oh, that got close to the red

but actually didn't go
into the red,

OK, 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
till considerably later

that the kind of enormity of
what that meant actually hit me.

[greetings in various languages]

[greetings in various languages]

KOHLHASE: 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.

HAMMEL:
It's a pretty small spacecraft,

and it's a pretty big universe.

If you take a piece of sky
the size of a 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 upon thousands
upon thousands of galaxies,

each of which is billions
and billions of stars,

there's a lot of possibility
out there.

[atmospheric guitar music]

PORCO: 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.

NARRATOR: But the chance
that an intelligent alien

might encounter Voyager
also hinges on another factor--

the sheer vastness of space.

SODERBLOM:
The bigger you think space is,

the less probable it is
you're going to find them

because they're needles
in infinite haystacks.

KRAUSS: 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 in five billion years

that galaxy's going to collide
with our own.

And you might say,
oh, no, oh, no,

but it turns out space is,
even in our galaxy,

it's mostly empty space.

When our two galaxies collide,

almost no stars
will hit any other star.

CASANI: There's just a lot of
room out there, a lot of room.

BAGENAL: Once you start getting
into the astronomical scales,

our solar system is pretty tiny,

and so this adventure of Voyager

which seems so remote
and distant

for this little spacecraft
to go out to the giant planets

is really just exploring
the tiniest closest neighborhood

when you start thinking
about cosmic scales.

BELL: The distances
are almost unfathomable.

These were
the fastest spacecraft

that had ever been built
and launched and flown,

and they're travelling
at ten miles per second.

You wouldn't even see it, right?

And yet, even at those

unfathomable
by Earth standard speeds,

it takes decades,
decades to get out there

into the outer solar system.

[music playing]

HAMMEL: I'd like to know
the answer, are we alone?

I'd like to know the answer
to that question.

[music playing]

FERRIS: The big division
with extraterrestrial life

is not space, it's time.

[music playing]

KRAUSS: In our galaxy,
our sun is relatively young.

The galaxy's about
12 billion years old,

our sun's four and a half
billion years old,

there are many stars
that 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
fifty or sixty years

by watching Star Trek
or I Love Lucy

or whatever signals we sent out,
so even if you knew,

even if someone told you
look at that star,

and then look at the third rock
from that star,

and that's where
you're going to find life.

Even if they knew which object
to look for,

there's only a 50-year period
over five billion years almost

where you'd be able to find
intelligent life.

NICK SAGAN: 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 did we all get here

and can we learn about ourselves
by these other groups out there

and what are they like

and are they the creatures
of our dreams or our nightmares?

[music playing]

NARRATOR: In the fall of 1980,

Voyager got its first close
views of the planet Saturn.

[light piano music plays]

SMITH:
We started off with images

that were 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 going to see
when we get really close?

SPILKER: Having seen Saturn
in a telescope with the rings

just looking like these little
tiny ears on either side,

to now seeing detail and
the beauty of Saturn's rings,

you know, looking like,

almost like the grooves
on a phonograph record.

BELL: The rings of Saturn,
what are they?

Billions of icy particles,
some the size of a house.

They're enormous, much wider
than many Earths strung together

but less than a kilometer thick.

PORCO: We get there and we find

that it's a blizzard of features
throughout the rings,

and it got very complex.

[guitar music]

PORCO: We become junkies who...

This is how you become
a planetary flyby junkie,

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.

SMITH: At some point,
perhaps a year or so from now,

it may be possible to put
all of this into perspective,

but right at the moment
I cannot recall

being in such a state
of euphoria

for any previous
planetary encounter,

including our two remarkable
Voyager encounters at Jupiter.

[electric guitar music]

[electric guitar music]

CARL SAGAN:
The largest moon of Saturn,

Titan's the most
extraordinary place.

There's a dense
methane atmosphere

where a complex organic
chemistry has been going on

for perhaps billions of years,

and we are in a moment
of extraordinary discovery.

CASANI: We had
both spacecraft programmed

to do identical missions
at Saturn,

and that was the prime mission
and it involved Titan.

BELL: There'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

with very little oxygen,
lots of hydrocarbons,

very thick, different,
smoggy atmosphere

that was changed dramatically
on our planet by life,

so if you want to understand
the starting conditions,

go study Titan.

KOHLHASE: If Voyager 1
was successful at Titan,

Voyager 2, which is nine months
behind going to Saturn,

would be free to continue to
Uranus and to go on to Neptune.

But it depended upon Voyager 1
succeeding at Titan.

TERRILE: Because Voyager 1
had to be in a certain place

in order to pass Titan,

it couldn't go on
to Uranus and Neptune.

There was just no way
to bend its trajectory

to go anywhere else.

STONE: Voyager 2 would have done
exactly that same thing

if Voyager 1 had failed,

we would have gone like this,
no more planets.

KOHLHASE: That would have been
really tough.

You gonna try for Titan again
and give up two other worlds--

Uranus and Neptune?

BELL: So there was a lot
of pressure on Voyager 1.

SODERBLOM:
Mostly what we looked at

was a giant ball of brown smog

with some sort of electric blue
hazes above it.

INGERSOLL:
With the Voyager camera,

you couldn't see through
the clouds and haze.

[radio chatter]

But the radio signal
from the spacecraft

passed through the atmosphere
of the moon,

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.

NARRATOR:
Voyager 1 revealed a world

at nearly 300 degrees
below zero Fahrenheit

that might have lakes
of liquid methane

under its smoggy atmosphere.

STONE: Voyager 1 had succeeded.

And shortly after that,
NASA Headquarters agreed

that we should continue
with Voyager 2

on its Uranus trajectory.

NARRATOR: Voyager 1,
its planetary mission over,

sped away from the plane
of the planets.

Voyager 2--in part to get
on its trajectory to Uranus--

would have to fly dangerously
close to Saturn's rings.

[music playing]

BELL: We're getting pictures and
other data back from Voyager 2.

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 going to be

out of contact
with the spacecraft.

Everybody's expecting
to pop champagne corks

and say hey, we made it,

and all the data's
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.

[machines beeping]

TERRILE: Something happened

right around
ring-plane crossing,

and the images that were
coming back were blank.

BELL: People thought
maybe it crashed

into the rings of Saturn.

Is this it, is it dead?

SPEAKER: OK.

Ladies and gentlemen,
we can start the briefing.

[tapping microphone]

SPEAKER: I wanted to make
a very brief statement.

We do have a problem on board
the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

AL HIBBS:
The spacecraft has a problem.

The scan platform
operating mechanism

is not operating properly.

SPEAKER: Make sure we understand
where we're headed

for the following instruments
are mounted on the platform:

the wide-angle camera,
the narrow-angle camera,

the infrared instrument,
the ultraviolet instrument

and the photopolarimeter.

SODERBLOM:
A frozen scan platform

could be a fatal,
crippling event.

SMITH: Yeah, that was
the darkest, the darkest day

of the whole mission.

SPEAKER: There is
circumstantial evidence...

SMITH:
I came into the auditorium,

and there was just gloom
on everybody's face.

SPEAKER: You're beginning
to speculate.

SMITH: I quickly learned
what had happened.

The scan platform had frozen.

SMITH: The problem is not
with the camera,

it's with
the articulated platform

that moves all
of the instruments.

Our cameras, as far as we know,
are working just fine,

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

SMITH: The rest
of the Saturn mission

and Uranus and Neptune
were dead.

And seeing everything
that we were planning just gone,

just suddenly gone.

All of the science
that we had hoped to do,

and Uranus and Neptune--

there were no other spacecraft

that were going to be
going there.

It was up to Voyager to do it,
and all of a sudden it looked

as though Voyager
was not going to do it.

It was devastating, it was...

[electronic inquisitive music]

SPEAKER: So, we've analyzed
the slew data.

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:
It took a couple of days

while the engineering team went
to work diagnosing the problem.

SPEAKER: We are going to command
an azimuth slew

and an elevation slew
to the Saturn position...

STONE: It turns out
the scan platform

has small motors to rotate it,

and we could run it
at slow speed--

tick, tick, tick, tick--

fast...medium speed or very fast
(makes turning noise).

We were of course wanting
to look at lots of places,

so we had the thing looking
lots of places,

and the lubrication wasn't
adequate and it just jammed.

SMITH: It was frozen
sort of like a car

stuck in the, stuck in the snow.

You try to go forward
or backward little bit...

lil...and keep working on it
and try to get it out,

and that's what we did
with the scan platform.

We would try to push it
a little bit in one direction

and it would yield a little bit,

and then we'd 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.

SODERBLOM: It was freed up
and back came the spacecraft

and back came
the imaging system,

and there was Saturn on exit.

SMITH: [laughing] Yeah.

["Us & Them," Pink Floyd]

TERRILE: We were looking at the
shadow of Saturn on the rings,

and it was clearly
from this wild, crazy angle.

Wow. Holy cow, we're on
the other side of Saturn.

["Us & Them," Pink Floyd]

♪ Us and them ♪

♪ And after all we're only
ordinary men... ♪

SODERBLOM: We felt like
we were there.

Nobody even thought about it.

Voyager was part of us.

We...

♪ Me and you... ♪

PORCO: 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?

♪ Forward! He cried ♪

♪ from the rear
and the front rank died ♪

♪ And the general sat,
and the lines... ♪

NARRATOR: In the grooves
of the Golden Record

was another gift
from us to them.

[guitar music]

DRAKE: The Voyager record
has a set of pictures on it.

It depicts our civilization,

but we only had the ability
to do about a hundred pictures,

that was as much data
as we could send,

so that was kind of hard.

LOMBERG: It was a process
of distillation.

You can't describe the Earth

in a hundred pictures.

You can't describe the Earth
in a thousand pictures,

but what art is about
is taking something that's small

but can represent the whole.

[guitar music]

DRAKE: We thought
it was very important

to put some pictures
of humans nude on the record

to show just what our anatomy
and physiology was really like.

NASA had been
seriously criticized

about the Pioneer plaque.

There were actually letters
to the editors of newspapers

saying that NASA
was sending smut to space.

NARRATOR: For Voyager,
NASA decided to play it safe.

Still, they gave the aliens
some hints about our bodies.

BELL: Now it's five years
of cruising out to Uranus.

STONE: Uranus would be
the most remote object yet

visited by a spacecraft,

and it's so remote
that it was not even known

until 200 years ago,

and it's a great distance
out there,

and if we'd launched
directly from Earth

it would have taken thirty years
to get there,

so we were very fortunate

that we could swing by Jupiter
and Saturn on our way.

SMITH: I've been trying
to figure this thing out

for the past 25 years,

and it's very frustrating
in a telescope

to look at that
tiny little disc,

so the next few days
are going to be very exciting.

[piano music]

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:
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?

[piano music]

BELL: 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 that was just beautiful.

SODERBLOM: We had all
of the rich set of goodies

from Jupiter and from Saturn,
but Uranus was...was unknown.

[xylophone music]

NARRATOR: In January 1986,

Voyager 2 closed in on Uranus.

It would be by far

the most remote planetary
encounter ever attempted.

[xylophone music]

TERRILE: It was like
taking something

that was almost fictional,
almost mythological,

and then seeing it
as a real object.

BELL: 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
is like whoa!

And you could hear people
just whoa!

And everybody
would 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.

STONE: Well, just about
two minutes ago,

Voyager 2 passed through
its closest approach to Uranus.

[applause]

SMITH: The new ring
is right here.

Now, I don't...
[laughter]

you're telling me
you can't see it.

I can.

JOURNALIST: Dr. Soderblom,

as you whizzed
through your explanation,

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

SODERBLOM: Slower?

[laughter]

JOURNALIST:
Slower and a few more details.

SODERBLOM: I thought
that was pretty slow.

[guitar and strings music]

STONE: Every time we arrived
at a new planet

there were always surprises,

even though we 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,
it was true for Saturn,

and then we flew by Uranus and
the pole was near the equator.

BAGENAL: There's been
a lot of speculation

about the magnetosphere
of Uranus.

Would there be one,
what would it be like?

And the magnetosphere of Uranus

is far more weird
and wonderful...

BAGENAL: We found the planet's
tipped on its side,

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.

HAMMEL:
At that point in its orbit,

the planet didn't look exciting,

and part of that
is Uranus itself,

holding its secrets back.

SMITH: That had to be, I guess,
one of the...

well, disappointments
in that Uranus

was not more photogenic
than it was.

It was actually pretty blah.

HAMMEL: Ah...poor Uranus.

[laughs]

Poor Uranus.

[guitar and piano music]

[guitar and piano music]

TERRILE: The big stars
of the Uranus encounter

were actually the moons.

[guitar music]

KOHLHASE: If you're going
to go to Neptune,

you still have to use Uranus
for gravity assist.

The gravity assist aiming point
at Uranus

just happened to be pretty close
to the orbit of Miranda.

If Uranus has been
the last stop,

the scientists might have wanted
to go to a larger moon,

which ironically, I don't see
how anything could have been

any more interesting
than Miranda...

[string music]

It looked like
a jumbled-up mess.

[string music]

HAMMEL: This moon looked like
it had been ripped to pieces

and then just sort of shoved
back together again.

SMITH: Whoa!
Come look at this.

SPILKER: Going up to the screen
and pointing and saying,

"did you...look at that,
look at that."

HAMMEL: No...nobody
was ready for Miranda.

SODERBLOM: 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,

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
a hundred miles an hour,

so it probably wouldn't...

it would be
the last newspaper you read.

NARRATOR: At Uranus, Voyager
detected intense radiation belts

and discovered two new rings
and ten tiny moons.

BAGENAL: 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...

VO IN ARCHIVE:
We have main engines start...

4...3...2...1...and lift-off!

Lift off of the 25th
space shuttle mission,

and it has cleared the tower.

BAGENAL: ...and we thought,
OK, great,

we'll watch the shuttle launch

and then we'll go
to the press conference,

but of course
that was Challenger.

VO IN ARCHIVE:
Engines throttling up.

Three engine now at 104%.

Challenger,
go with throttle up.

Roger, go with throttle up.

[soft piano music]

SPILKER: People were just
like astonished.

This gasp of 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.

[soft piano music]

SMITH: Well, what can you say?

You knew right away that
a bunch of people were dead.

VO IN ARCHIVE:
Flight Throttle. Go ahead.

RSO reports vehicle exploded.

Copy.

DODD: And then of course
they showed replays and replays

and replays over and over
and over again.

MAN IN ARCHIVE:
We have no downlink.

OK, everybody, just stay
off the telephones.

Make sure you maintain
all your data,

start pulling it together.

SPILKER:
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.

RONALD REAGAN: Today is a day
for mourning and remembering.

Nancy and I
are pained to the core

over 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
and expanding man's horizons.

The future doesn't belong
to the faint hearted,

it belongs to the brave.

[sad string music plays]

DODD: During these closest
approach time periods,

we would have hundreds
of reporters come to JPL,

and when the Challenger
exploded, everybody just left.

[nearly silent save for ring
of unattended microphone]

[piano music]

KRAUSS: Those cosmic questions
we hope to learn

by sending our machines out,

the 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 of these basic questions

are the questions
that drive science.

[piano music]

[traffic]

[machines beeping]

STONE: Finally at Neptune,
Voyager has begun

the last of a decade's worth
of encounters

with the outer planets.

BELL: It was another
three and a half years

to get out to Neptune.

They had to reprogram
the spacecraft again,

give it,
teach it some new tricks,

to work in this even
darker environment,

even colder environment.

BAGENAL: If we take the Earth

being one astronomical unit
from the sun, or AU for short.

Neptune is 30 times
that distance.

STONE: When we launched Voyager,

there was no capability to get
any images back from 30 AU.

That capability happened
all after launch.

It involved taking
two 34-meter antennas

and adding them
to a 70-meter antenna.

VLA RADIO CONTROL: Copy, we're
ready to run that observation.

STONE: It meant using the entire
Very Large Array in New Mexico,

27 antennas to collect
the very weak signal

that we could get back
from 30 AU.

BELL: The flybys past Jupiter,
Saturn and Uranus

had sped up the spacecraft too,
so it's going even faster,

so enormous amounts
of pressure, and one shot.

[light keyboard music]

NARRATOR: In the summer of 1989,

Voyager 2 finally came up
on the ice giant Neptune.

Thanks to slingshots at Jupiter,
Saturn and Uranus,

the trip was almost 20 years
shorter than a direct approach,

one without gravity assist.

[music playing]

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:
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 go wow!

HAMMEL: 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.

BAGENAL: Looking at this blue,
bright blue orb,

it was evocative of the Earth,

which was bizarre for the last
planet that we were flying by.

HAMMEL:
I was a meticulous log taker

and I would make little
notations in these logs

and I would draw
little pictures,

and you could see
what's this little dark spot,

bright clouds, I'm like wow!

Wow! Exclamation point!

And I'd 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.

[electric guitar music]

INGERSOLL: 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

were trying to forecast
that hurricane,

but they were trying to forecast
it twelve hours in advance

and they were having
a lot of trouble

because the storm
kept changing position.

And we were just calmly plotting
points on graph paper

and then said, OK,
two weeks from now,

this storm is going to be
right here and it usually was.

[electric guitar music]

BAGENAL: 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.

TERRILE: Think about imaging
the rings of Neptune.

They have reflectivity which
is twice as dark as soot,

and the light
that's falling on them

is a thousand times fainter
than on Earth.

So you have
one one-thousandth the light

and you're trying
to image something

which is twice as dark as soot
against a jet-black background.

SMITH: More than one ring can be
seen even in the raw images,

the so-called ring arcs,

and it seemed reasonable that
this was indeed the lost arc

that our imaging team raiders
were looking for.

CROWD: Oh dear!

SMITH: Now you're going
to turn on me, right?

[laughter]

KOHLHASE: We knew at Neptune we
wanted a close flyby of Triton,

which was a huge world
around Neptune.

SODERBLOM: If you looked at them
on the way in,

they weren't lined up.

One's up here; one's down here.

And so, what are you
going to do?

Well, there was a way--

fly over the north pole,
very close to Neptune

to bend the spacecraft
so it would go down.

BELL: But the meant getting to
within just a few thousand miles

of the cloud tops
skimming the surface.

And they had to hit that,
you know, exactly right.

SODERBLOM:
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.

BELL: 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,

you have to make
your last best guess,

hit the send button.

[atmospheric suspenseful music]

It would have been
just fascinating

to be hanging on
to 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...

[atmospheric suspenseful music]

TERRILE: After several billion
miles of journey

to get us
to within a few kilometers

of where we needed to be,

it's just absolutely remarkable.

You know, threading
an incredible needle.

SODERBLOM:
Southern hemisphere of Triton

is entirely covered
with nitrogen ice,

and as we flew past,
we were able to look down

at markings on the surface
of the polar cap.

We were putting together
a mosaic of Triton's globe,

but we couldn't get things
to line up quite right.

Some of the dark streaks, two
in particular would not line up.

BELL: He's like
just scratching his head,

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,

and he can't figure this out.

SODERBLOM: 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 up popped these geysers.

[atmospheric suspenseful music]

SODERBLOM: And I said holy moly,
and so we knew what we had.

[music playing]

[music playing]

BAGENAL: These plumes.

Black geysers spewing out
this stuff.

HAMMEL: The plumes extending
out of the surface

for like kilometers.

TERRILE: We were seeing
eruptions 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.

SODERBLOM: Just because
an idea's crazy,

it's not necessarily wrong.

CROWD: [laughter]

NARRATOR: Geysers.
Volcanoes on Io.

Hints of a giant ocean
of liquid water

under Europa's icy crust.

Each of these features is
evidence of a source of energy.

And that's a prerequisite
for life as we know it.

SPILKER: We knew this
was the last planet

Voyager 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.

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK: 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 minus,

counting down, to counting up.

Voyager's now leaving Neptune.

And he said
how does that make you feel?

And in that moment,
I dissolved into tears.

[piano music]

BELL: After the spacecraft
went past,

it turned around
and looked back,

and there's this beautiful
crescent Neptune and Triton,

and people realized
that's the end

of the planetary part
of Voyager.

That's the last port of call,

the last thing we'll see in our
solar system is now behind us.

[piano music]

SMITH: We could have enhanced
the color a bit

to make a somewhat
prettier picture,

but out of respect
to the Voyager spacecraft

we decided to show it to you
just as it is.

[applause]

[piano music]

SMITH: The way I looked at it

was gee, we did something
really great.

Very, very successful mission.

SODERBLOM: A little weepy.

I mean it's...there was a lot of
energy put into this mission.

SPEAKER: We have ignition
and we have lift-off.

[piano music]

SODERBLOM:
Years of intense effort.

It was the end
of a sentimental journey.

[piano music]

KOHLHASE: We did it.

We pulled it off,
and that's important.

It is.

[music: "Johnny B. Goode"
by Chuck Berry]

♪ Deep down in Lousiana
close to New Orleans ♪

♪ Way back up in the woods
among the evergreens ♪

♪ There stood a log cabin
made of earth and wood ♪

♪ Where lived a country boy
named Johnny B. Goode ♪

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:
We had a big party at JPL,

Chuck Berry was there,

so that was a good send-off
for Voyager.

CHUCK BERRY: ♪ Go, go ♪

♪ Go, Johnny, go, go ♪

♪ Go, Johnny,
go, go ♪

♪ Go, Johnny, go, go ♪

♪ Go, Johnny,
go, go ♪

♪ Johnny B. Goode ♪

[music ends]

DODD: Rockstar moment
and sail on Voyager.

CARL SAGAN: And I'm going
to go get some sleep

or maybe I'll do
a little more dancing...

Thank you very much, Lou?

[clapping]

BELL: Meanwhile Voyager 1

is still kind of
cruising out there,

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.

PORCO: 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 they're just going to be
little points of light.

So Carl being Carl

actually went all the way
to the NASA administrator

and got him to direct
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

to take this series of pictures.

SMITH:
Absolutely zero science in it.

Absolutely none.

NARRATOR:
From a unique vantage point,

nearly four billion miles away,

Voyager 1's cameras
turned homeward

to take family snapshots.

It was Valentine's Day, 1990.

[music playing]

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:
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 the Earth, you know,

that's Voyager looking back
at the Earth,

and then once I had
sort of recovered,

I started calling people.

I called Brad.

Brad, we got it,
called Carl, Carl, we got it.

Called my dad.

[laughs]

STONE: And so this is
a different kind of milestone

than the scientific milestones
we've had.

One that is really symbolic...

PORCO: I'm an imaging scientist,
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
there 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 Carl,

he turned it into an allegory
on the human condition.

CARL SAGAN: And the next slide.

The Earth in a sunbeam.

And 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 have.

["Eclipse" by Pink Floyd
begins to play]

♪ All that you touch ♪

♪ And all that you see ♪

♪ All that you taste ♪

♪ All you feel ♪

♪ And all that you love ♪

♪ All that you hate ♪

♪ All you distrust ♪

♪ All you save ♪

♪ And all you create ♪

♪ And all you destroy ♪

♪ And all that you do ♪

♪ And all that you say ♪

♪ And all that you eat ♪

♪ And everyone you meet ♪

♪ And all that you slight ♪

♪ And everyone you fight ♪

♪ And all that is now ♪

♪ And all that is gone ♪

♪ And all that's to come ♪

♪ and everything under the sun
is in tune ♪

♪ but the sun is eclipsed
by the moon ♪

NARRATOR: The two Voyagers
still communicate with Earth

nearly every day.

It takes huge antennas
to detect their faint signals,

now less than one trillionth
of a watt.

The spacecraft
continue to be tracked

as they begin the final part
of their mission,

to travel beyond the edge
of our solar system,

into interstellar space.

It's in this never travelled
region between the stars

that Voyager
and its Golden Record

will have a chance
of being discovered.

KRIMIGIS: At the time
we were designing Voyager,

interstellar space,
where the boundary was,

was totally unknown.

We had our eyes
on the interstellar mission.

Are we going to boost
the spacecraft

to get out of our solar system
and into the galaxy?

It was a shot in the dark
because nobody knew how far.

Uncharted waters.

[inquisitive uplifting music]

BELL: The magnetic field of
the sun can only extend so far,

it's a bubble around our star,
all the stars have bubbles,

we can see the bubbles
around other stars out there,

so we know
that they have bubbles.

Where does our bubble end?

NARRATOR:
Somewhere beyond Neptune

is the edge of the bubble
around our sun.

At the heliopause
two forces balance--

the outward pressure
of the solar wind

and the pressure
of interstellar space.

But how far out it was,
no one was sure.

DON GURNETT: We kept going

and years went by
and years went by

and we don't detect
the interstellar medium.

[music continues]

BELL: 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 in 2012
Voyager 1,

which is going the fastest,
which is the farthest,

started to see
these funny things happen

to the squiggly lines.

This crazy spike.

And everybody goes,
oh, is that it?

And then 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 pfff just...
popped out of the bubble.

Voyager 1 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.

[violin music]

VO IN ARCHIVE:
NASA says that Voyager 1

has become
the first man-made object

to reach interstellar space,

the cold dark region
between stars.

OBAMA IN ARCHIVE: And we've
slipped the outermost grasp

of our solar system
with Voyager 1,

the first human-made object

to venture into
interstellar space.

STONE: It's a wonderful
achievement, actually.

When you think of it,
it's historic,

it's our first step
out of our bubble

which has been around
all the planets

and around the Earth
essentially forever,

and now finally some little
thing that we have built

has left that bubble and is
in the space between the stars.

PORCO: It was like humanity

had just become
an interstellar species.

It was like knocking
on eternity's door.

STERNBERG: When the Voyagers'
power sources go dead

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,

that when everything else
is turned off,

those records are still floating
somewhere in interstellar space,

completing the last part
of the mission.

[splashing noise]

LOCATELL: The chance that
advanced intelligence beyond us

would detect oh, hey,
there is 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 a grand mystery?

Whoa!

NICK SAGAN:
I love the optimism of it,

I love the idea
that these are things

that are meaningful to us,

maybe you'll find them
meaningful, too,

hypothetical alien, and yeah,
it just touches my heart.

FERRIS: One thing we know
about a metal record

with these grooves
engraved on it

is that information is good
for at least one billion years.

The inside of the record,

which was more protected
from cosmic rays,

two billion years or more.

BELL: There's no wind, water,
rain, weathering,

there's no planets or comets
that they're going to run into,

and over thousands, millions,
billions of years

they're predicted to remain
pretty intact.

NICK SAGAN: Because there's
no proof that there's anything

that Voyager's
ever going to encounter,

ultimately,
it's a story about us.

LOMBERG: Voyager is rarely
out of my thoughts.

Always some little part of me

is wondering
where is Voyager tonight.

Whenever I look up
at the night stars,

I look in the direction
that each of them is going.

SODERBLOM: There is never going
to be another mission like it.

It was the first and last
of its own kind.

KRAUSS: Maybe someday,
another being might find Voyager

and at least know
of our existence.

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

And that small possibility
surely gives us hope.

LOCATELL: Is the universe
any different than it was then?

No.

But are we different?

Absolutely!

The thrill of the discoveries,
reaching the heliopause,

completing the Grand Tour,

I mean man, our child
has just made it.

[guitar/xylophone music]

HANSEN-KOHARCHECK:
We're 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.

[contemporary guitar
interpretation

of "Johnny B. Goode"
plays over credits]

[music continues]

[music continues]

[music continues]

[crickets chirping]

NARRATOR:
For as long as humanity

has gazed up at the sky,

we've wondered:

What's out there?

Are there any other worlds
like ours?

[crickets chirping]

CAROLYN PORCO: We knew very
little about the solar system

before we started sending
spacecraft there.

The outer planets were just
tiny points of light,

we knew very little about them.

And much less about the moons
in orbit around them.

[radio chatter]
[rocket ignition]

NARRATOR: But in the 40 years
since NASA's Voyager missions

began their grand tour
of the outer planets,

we've made huge leaps
in space exploration.

We've sent rovers
to explore Mars,

discovered volcanoes
on distant moons,

and found frozen worlds
that hide oceans

beneath thick crusts of ice.

[crackling]

Features and processes
once thought unique to Earth

are turning up
all over the solar system,

and there's a growing optimism

that one day we will find life,
somewhere out among the stars.

[radio chatter]
[rocket ignition]

More and more, that search
for extraterrestrial life

is driving exploration.

Finding it would revolutionize
our understanding

of our place in the cosmos.

[boom]

PORCO: Copernicus
completely revamped

our views about our universe

when he postulated the sun,
and not the Earth,

was at the center
of the solar system.

Darwin announced
that all of life on Earth,

including humans,
came from a common root.

And now, we are searching
for evidence

that life began and evolved
somewhere other than Earth.

A completely independent
second genesis.

And to find it would force us
to rewrite the story of life.

[music swells]

NARRATOR:
NASA's Voyager missions

were an epic drive-by
of the outer planets.

Carolyn Porco began her career
on Voyager,,

helping to transform

our understanding
of the solar system

and unravel the mystery
and beauty

of the gas giants
and their moons.

[projector whirring]

In 1990, she was selected
as the lead imaging scientist

on a next-generation
NASA mission, called Cassini.

VOICE ON RADIO: 3...2...1...

and lift-off
of the Cassini spacecraft

on a billion-mile trek
to Saturn.

NARRATOR: Launched in 1997,

Cassini has been orbiting Saturn
for the last 13 years,

gathering data and beaming back
spectacular images

of the planet...

[camera shutter]

its rings...

[camera shutter]

and many of its 62 moons.

[camera shutter]

Carolyn was initially fascinated

by the interactions
of the rings and moons...

[radio static]

but a major discovery in 2005

pushed her toward
the search for life.

[dust crackling]

PORCO: We had planned to take
a close look at Enceladus,

which is this tiny moon
in orbit around Saturn.

NARRATOR: What Cassini
revealed...was spectacular.

[camera shutter]

PORCO: In November of 2005,

we saw dozens of geysers
coming from Enceladus.

[dust crackling]

Narrow spiky-looking jets
of fine icy particles

erupting from the south pole.

[static crackling]

NARRATOR: Enceladus--a moon
less than 500 miles around.

And because of its icy surface,

one of the brightest objects
in the solar system.

And in the southern hemisphere,

mysterious fractures
nicknamed "tiger stripes"--

the source of the watery jets,

and a link to a liquid ocean
beneath the ice.

PORCO: Once we found the geysers

and knew that they were coming
from liquid water,

I realized this had
tremendous implications

for the study of life
elsewhere in the solar system.

NARRATOR:
Tremendous implications,

because liquid water
is considered crucial for life.

And that made Enceladus
an alluring candidate

as a home for life beyond Earth.

PORCO: I kind of did a pivot.

I just started to throw myself
into the study of Enceladus.

NARRATOR: The search for life

on places like Enceladus, Mars,
or Jupiter's icy moon Europa

represents a new wave
in space exploration.

But the quest is still rooted
in what we know

about the history
of life on Earth.

[birds chirping]

Today life is rich and varied,

found almost everywhere,
in wondrous forms.

[bats squeaking]

[crowd screaming in excitement]

But only in the last
500 million years or so

did it begin evolving

into the animals and plants
we now know.

Before that,
for some 3 billion years,

the planet was teeming with life
that came in only one size:

microscopic.

Because microbes were
the first forms of life

to appear on Earth

and have endured
for billions of years,

scientists believe
they are our best bet

for the size and shape of life
elsewhere in the solar system.

[whoosh]

But they're not the easiest
creatures to find.

[birds chirping]
[indistinct chatting]

Carolyn is meeting

with evolutionary biologist
Andy Knoll,

who studies ancient life
on Earth,

and the clues it left behind.

He's also helping guide
NASA's rover teams

as they search for evidence
of ancient life on Mars.

[rover whirrs]

PORCO:
So what do you actually do

in searching for early life
on Earth,

and how does that translate
to Mars?

ANDY KNOLL: It turns out,
when you look outside,

you see plants and animals,

there's conspicuous forms
of life.

[jungle sounds]

[seagulls squawking]
[crickets chirping]

Those are
evolutionary latecomers.

Most of the history
of life on Earth is microbial

and over the years we've learned
how to search successfully

for both physical
and chemical signatures

of ancient microbial life
on Earth.

And once you learn
how to do that

then it's a fairly easy matter
to export it to Mars.

Let me show you an example.

So what you're looking at here
is this so-called stromatolite,

and we see
these wavy laminations

which actually represent
microbial life

that trapped and bound sediments

and built up
this reef-life structure...

This particular specimen
is 2.7 billion years old...

PORCO: Wow.

KNOLL: ...and it is
an unambiguous signature

of life on Earth.

PORCO: Okay, very interesting.

So this is what you referred to

as the physical remains
or the physical evidence...

KNOLL: That's right.

PORCO: ...of life,
but then you said...

you're also looking
for chemical evidence,

how do you do that?

KNOLL: Okay, well, all life
that we know of is cellular.

All cells that we know of
have DNA and RNA,

which are the information
library of the cell--

that doesn't preserve very well.

Cells have proteins
that do the structural work,

and enzymatic work of the cell,

they don't preserve
very well either.

But then there's a third
constituent called lipids,

which make up
the membranes of cells,

and membranes actually separate
the cell from its environment.

And the good news there
is that some lipids

actually preserve very well
in the geologic record.

PORCO: How do you find
those molecules?

KNOLL: Well, as sediments
accumulate on the seafloor,

organic matter will get buried
with those sediments.

And if you extract
that organic matter,

you'll find lipids,
and those lipids can be related

to the types of organisms
that made them.

NARRATOR: These lipids--

preserved in rocks
nearly 2.5 billion years old--

are signatures of life.

In this case, evidence
of early life on Earth.

[wind]

Jump to Mars, where Andy
and the rover team

are looking for exactly
the same thing.

[rover whirrs]

[sand slides]

[rover buzzes]

[rover drives away]

PORCO: One time in its history
Mars had bodies of water on it.

We don't know how long
those bodies of water lasted,

so where on Mars
are you going to look?

KNOLL: Really it's a matter
of saying where was there water?

Where did that water result
in sedimentary rock deposits

capable of preserving
a signature of life?

And can the rover get there?

I mean in some ways
we're in the golden age

of Mars exploration,

we've found rocks
that are capable of preserving

various physical
and chemical signatures.

PORCO: Right.

KNOLL: And we actually
have instruments

that can detect
organic molecules.

What we have not yet found

is any strong, you know,
biosignatures.

[rover buzzing]

NARRATOR: They'll keep looking,

and someday soon astronauts
could join the search.

But in the meantime,

Carolyn is pushing for a shift
in focus to Enceladus.

There, they can have access
to water that is still flowing,

and search
not for fossilized evidence

of life billions of years old,

but for signatures of life
that could be living right now.

[particles crackle in the air]

PORCO: Those of us interested in
water in places like Enceladus,

we're in a different position

because we're not going to be
picking up rocks.

We're looking at it completely
from the chemical point of view.

NARRATOR: That's the beauty
of Enceladus.

The plume is offering
free samples of the liquid ocean

to anyone who stops by.

[particles falling
and crackling in the air]

What those samples contain

is the billion-dollar question--

one Cassini made a valiant
first attempt to answer.

[voices murmuring
and voice over radio]

Soon after the plume
was discovered,

the team reprogrammed the craft
to fly right through it.

[crackling of radio signal]

NPR REPORTER: In today's news
from Saturn, a NASA spacecraft

is flying through some geysers
on one of the planet's moons.

[plumes shooting out particles
that crackle in the air]

PORCO: Cassini's instruments
managed to return information

about the content,

water vapor and carbon dioxide,

and methane
and simple organic compounds,

and even ammonia
were found in the plume.

[particles crackling in the air]

NARRATOR: These simple chemicals
were present and necessary

for the formation of life
on early Earth.

Enceladus is now two for two.

It has a liquid ocean,

and the right starting materials
for life.

And further analysis
of the samples

revealed another
exciting surprise.

PORCO:
When my Cassini colleagues

analyzed the particles
in the plume,

they found microscopic
particles of silica.

And this is very good indication
of hydrothermal vents,

because at hydrothermal vents

you have hot,
mineral-laden fluids

being injected
into the cold ocean

and these particles like silica

get carried from the bottom
of the ocean

all the way up to the base
of the ice shell,

and they get forced
out the fractures.

[particles crackling
as they shoot out fractures]

And so this is how we know,

there are likely
hydrothermal vents

on the seafloor of Enceladus.

NARRATOR: This was a find
with exciting implications.

On Earth, deep sea vents
support life--

in fact, entire ecosystems
of strange creatures

get their energy directly
from the vent chemicals,

or by eating those that do.

[rumbling and bubbling of vents]

[birds chirping]

At NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena,

planetary chemist Laurie Barge
is investigating

how the chemicals spewing
from hydrothermal vents

fuel life--

and whether they could be
involved in creating it.

[whirring and buzzing
of machinery]

PORCO: Aha, so this is
the famous chimney.

LAURIE BARGE: Yeah, so this
is where we simulate

the hydrothermal vent, injecting
through cracks in the seafloor.

And then this is your ocean,
which contains anything

that would be reacting
with this fluid.

PORCO: So that's a simulation

of what could be happening
on Enceladus?

BARGE: Right, exactly.

NARRATOR: The simulations test
how the chemicals interact

with each other
and the seawater,

and how different combinations
produce different results.

BARGE: Vents are more
than just the chimney itself,

it actually has
all this sediment

around it and underneath it.

And that sediment
is also very reactive,

because it gives you
a lot of surface area.

So when you have
this pile of minerals,

all those mineral surfaces
are available for reacting.

That stuff can come up

and if it can interact
with mineral surfaces

then it might be able
to concentrate

and make things like amino acids
or maybe nucleotides.

NARRATOR: These are
the building blocks

of the very large molecules--
proteins, DNA and RNA--

that govern life as we know it.

While Laurie and others

are trying to create them
in their labs,

Carolyn is thinking bigger,
and farther afield.

[heels clacking]

She wants to hunt them down
in the wild,

and believes she knows
just where to look.

[plumes shooting out particles
that crackle in the air]

PORCO: Enceladus checks
all the boxes.

It's really no more complicated
than that.

It has liquid water,
it has abundant energy,

it has organic compounds.

It even has evidence
for hydrothermal activity

at the bottom of its ocean.

NARRATOR: Jupiter's moon Europa
is also a good target.

Beneath its icy surface,
the moon is believed to conceal

a global ocean
twice the volume of Earth's.

NASA recently approved
a new mission to explore it.

But the moon poses
some serious challenges.

PORCO: Europa is embedded

in Jupiter's very intense
radiation field.

It's nasty, and it can quickly
destroy organic materials,

and even, eventually,

the spacecraft that you
send there to find them.

And in the meantime Enceladus
is spewing its ocean into space.

You fly through it, and you can
just do tremendous things.

If you could land on its surface
you could do even more.

[spacecraft whooshing
through space]

NARRATOR: For Carolyn,
a return to Enceladus

is not just wishful thinking.

Competition for NASA dollars
is fierce,

but she and her colleagues

recently submitted
an official proposal

to do further testing
of the plume

with a more advanced orbiter.

After that, she's hoping
for a lander,

and has been working
on 3-D visualizations

of what these missions
might look like.

PORCO: We already know where
would be the best place to land.

JOHNNY FISK: Okay.

PORCO: And that is, in this
other picture that we took.

You could see the geysers
are very jam packed there.

Okay, very close together.

FISK: That's what
I would think, right?

You would want to get

right in the middle
of the valley, yeah, yeah.

PORCO: That would,
that would be lovely, really.

But even just getting in
the vicinity of these fractures

would be good because you have
material just falling on you.

[rumble of spacecraft
flying through space]

NARRATOR: The orbiter
would carry instruments

far more powerful
than Cassini's,

able to sniff out life itself,

or detect
the chemical biosignatures

life leaves behind.

[crackle of particles
flying through the air]

The lander would do even more--

gathering samples
of larger particles

that fall back to the surface
like snow.

[whoosh of lander
shooting off of spacecraft

and thud of its landing]

[crackle of particles
flying through the air]

PORCO: Material from the plumes,

which means of course
material from the oceans,

which means materials

from in and around
the hydrothermal vents.

And that's what makes this
so exciting.

All you have to do
is just stand back

and look at the big picture
and think about the magnitude

of the questions
we're trying to ask.

We could find life.

NARRATOR: Such missions,
if they're approved,

are still at least
a decade away.

But Carolyn and her colleagues
are charging ahead, undeterred.

A decade means nothing
when the stakes are this high.

[crackle of particles
flying through the air]

PORCO:
Anything we find at this point

just pushes us
all that much closer

to understanding life's origins.

[blowing of particles
in the wind]

Right now all of life we know of
happens on this one planet.

And our planet has gone
hog wild with life.

[whoosh of dolphins
swimming through ocean]

But it's all based on one root.

That's one biochemical recipe
operating on one small planet,

in one small solar system

in the corner
of one ordinary galaxy.

So the chances are excellent

that there is life
somewhere else.

and finding it elsewhere,
anywhere...

just once...in any form...

[child laughing]

would finally be proof

that we are but one
of many manifestations

that life can take
in the cosmos.

[music playing]