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00:00System, this is Rob.
00:28These people are watching their life's work come to an end on another world.
00:48They were all young when they sent her on a way.
00:55These men and women have been traveling vicariously with her for more than two decades.
01:07And now, her work is done.
01:11So she must die.
01:17But before she takes the fatal plunge, they've given her one final epic challenge.
01:24So she must die.
01:31So she must die.
01:36So she must die.
01:43So she must die.
01:48So she must die.
01:55So she must die.
02:00So she must die.
02:15So she must die.
02:22So she must die.
02:24So she must die.
02:26So she must die.
02:28So she must die.
02:47So she must die.
02:48So she must die.
02:50She must die.
02:52So she must die.
02:55Our own solar system alone has four ringed planets.
03:03This one, with the romantic name J1407b, is the first we found circling another sun.
03:12Why haven't we found more ringed planets in our galaxy?
03:21Is it that the rings are so unusual, or are the methods we use to find exoplanets not
03:26very good at seeing the ring systems that may surround them?
03:31J1407b's ring system is so vast that it eclipsed its star for days.
03:39These rings extend across an astonishing 112 million miles.
03:44They would more than fill the distance between Earth and the sun.
03:50As enormous as they are, they are shockingly thin.
03:54If the ring system of J1407b were the size of a dinner plate, it would have to be a hundred
04:00times thinner, as thin as a human hair.
04:07This surprising contrast between the immense territory of a ring system and its thinness
04:13is just as striking in our own solar system.
04:16The outermost ring of Neptune is so dainty that it was first thought to be the fragments
04:21of a ring.
04:23Not a ring, but a collection of arcs.
04:26That was until NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft revealed that the so-called arcs were clumps,
04:32the thicker parts of a fainter complete ring.
04:40It's funny that the weirdest planet in the solar system has attracted the least attention.
04:46The Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft that has ever been sent on a reconnaissance mission
04:51to Uranus, one of the two ice giant planets that circle the sun.
04:57During its 20-year-long summers, the sun never sets on Uranus.
05:02The winters are equally as long, 20 years of unbroken night.
05:12Unlike its fellow gas planets, Uranus is cold-hearted.
05:15It doesn't generate any internal heat.
05:27Uranus is one crazy world.
05:31The outer edge of Uranus's atmosphere is so hot, it's hotter than 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
05:41But Uranus also has the coldest clouds in the solar system.
05:44I'm talking nearly 400 degrees below zero.
05:55What kind of ocean is this?
05:58Is it made of ammonia?
06:00Water?
06:01Some scientists think it may be an ocean of liquid diamonds.
06:09Note to space agencies, it might be worth another visit.
06:13Then there's that thing about it being sideways.
06:22Uranus revolves around the sun at a roughly 90-degree angle to its own orbital plane.
06:28What could have happened to Uranus that it got knocked on its ass?
06:33Our best guess is that it went something like this.
06:42Uranus was in a terrible accident.
06:54After the second blow, the rotational axis of Uranus tipped 98 degrees.
07:03There's another world in our solar system that we don't think of as having a ring.
07:09The rings of Jupiter were so dim that no ground-based telescope ever saw them.
07:14They were discovered when Voyager 1 came flying by.
07:24Our Saturn is graced by the loveliest, largest and brightest ring system of any around our Sun.
07:32It's the most distant planet that can be seen with the naked eye.
07:36And it made quite an impression on our ancestors.
07:48When I think of the Babylonians of 3500 years ago, looking up at the planets and stars,
07:55I wonder how unlikely it would have seemed that one of their species would actually send an emissary to that distant point of light.
08:13We are in the Deep Space Network Room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
08:18In this place, the most ambitious voyages of discovery are directed and monitored.
08:25Why are these people so emotional?
08:28They have committed their professional lives to a collaboration with this robot.
08:42And now that partnership of decades is about to end in a most violent way.
08:48The pathway from our Earth-bound helplessness to our presence in Saturn's skies is about to unfold.
09:03What is that shimmering, unsteady thing we're looking at?
09:07That's what Galileo Galilei asked himself in 1610,
09:12when he became the first human to see Saturn as more than just a point of light.
09:18So this is the telescope that made the modern scientific revolution possible.
09:27You know, you really started something.
09:31You looked through that thing and found the cosmos.
09:35That's not to say you didn't make your share of mistakes.
09:38You guessed wrong at what you thought you saw, believing that Saturn sported two symmetrical moons on either side of it.
09:47Two years later, when you took a second look, you were shocked to find that your moons had vanished.
09:53This was because both worlds, Earth and Saturn, were in motion, and the two worlds had changed in position to each other.
10:02You were now looking at Saturn's rings, edge on.
10:04The Saturn ring system is 175,000 miles across, but on average, only a few hundred feet thick.
10:14They were too thin for your fledgling telescope to see.
10:17But two years after that, you took a third look.
10:26Now, you thought that the planet had arms.
10:3740 years passed, until a Dutch astronomer named Christian Huygens took another look at Saturn with his own greatly improved telescope.
10:48Forty years passed until a Dutch astronomer named Christian Huygens took another look at Saturn with his own greatly improved telescope.
11:04Huygens was the first to know that worlds could be circled by rings, and Saturn was one of them.
11:25He also discovered Saturn's largest moon, which would later be known as Titan.
11:30When it finally came time for us to visit that world, our spacecraft bore Huygens' name.
11:40In science, there are the Galileos, the Newtons, the Darwins, the Einsteins, and then there's another kind of great scientist.
11:49Not the kind that paints a whole new picture of nature, but like Christian Huygens, someone who has much to contribute, filling in a blank or two on that vast canvas.
11:59Such a scientist was Giovanni Domenico Cassini.
12:06He was born early in the 17th century in the town of Perinaldo in what is now Italy.
12:13Cassini didn't start out as a scientist. He began his career as a pseudoscientist, an astrologer.
12:20Astrology is a collection of ideas based on the notion that worlds have certain human personality traits,
12:28and that the influence of these distant worlds, depending on which are rising and falling at the time of your birth,
12:35will determine who you are and what your fate will be.
12:39It's another form of prejudice, making unfounded assumptions about who a person is, without bothering to get to know them.
12:47Astronomy and astrology used to be the same thing, until there was a great awakening to our actual circumstances in the cosmos.
12:55In 1543, Nicholas Copernicus, a Polish cleric, demonstrated that contrary to popular belief,
13:05we were not the center of the universe. The earth and the other planets traveled around the sun.
13:12Demoting the earth from the center of the universe was a severe blow to human self-esteem.
13:18More than a century later, some people still hadn't gotten over it, and Giovanni Cassini was one of them.
13:26Cassini accepted a terrific job offer, an appointment by Louis XIV, the legendary Sun King of France.
13:34Louis believed himself to be an absolute ruler whose dominion was God's will,
13:40but he was also the first monarch in Europe to recognize the great power of science.
13:44He knew it was vital to national security.
13:50Louis XIV was inventing the first modern governmental scientific research institute,
13:57the Paris Observatory.
13:59Cassini told the absolute ruler that he would not be staying long in Paris, a year or two at most.
14:18But when the king placed his new observatory at Cassini's disposal, he lost all interest in
14:24returning home to Italy ever again. For the next 125 years, the Paris Observatory would be led by a Cassini.
14:37Cassini rewarded his patron with a map of the moon that remained cutting edge for a century.
14:44King Louis financed a research expedition to South America to obtain more accurate measurements of
14:49longitude. Intel of enormous value to the captains of his far-flung fleet and to astronomers.
14:58Cassini took all these data and became the first person to calculate the scale of the Copernican
15:03solar system that he had once rejected. With his increasingly powerful telescopes,
15:09he discovered the length of a day on Jupiter and the bands and spots on the planet's surface.
15:15Cassini discovered Jupiter's Great Red Spot independently of Robert Hooke in England.
15:21And to this day, they share the credit. Cassini went on to determine the length of the day on Mars.
15:31He was only off by three minutes. When he returned to his observations of Jupiter,
15:37he was stumped by the contradictions in them. The eclipses by Jupiter's moons did not begin when they were
15:44supposed to. They varied from observation to observation. Could it be that it was due to
15:51changes in the distance of the Earth from Jupiter as the two worlds moved through the solar system?
15:57If that were true, then light could not travel at an infinite speed, because it was taking longer to
16:03reach Earth. Was the speed of light finite? This idea was just too crazy for Cassini, too evolutionary.
16:12He rejected it out of hand. If he had followed the evidence wherever it led,
16:18he would have given us the yardstick for the cosmos that we still use 350 years later.
16:24But Cassini, ever the conservative, dismissed the idea as being just too wacky.
16:32Several years later, a Danish astronomer, Ole Römer, became Cassini's assistant at the Paris Observatory.
16:39Romer made his own observations of the eclipses of some of Jupiter's moons and found the same
16:46discrepancies in the data that Cassini had dismissed. But Romer recognized them for what they were,
16:52pieces of evidence for the finite speed of light.
16:55There was a time, however, when Cassini's faithfulness to the data was so extreme,
17:03that he was willing to risk the displeasure of King Louis. The monarch asked Cassini to calculate
17:09the exact area of his realm. No one had ever attempted to make an accurate map, much less a
17:15topographical one that would feature all the mountains and rivers and valleys of France,
17:20or of any other country for that matter. Cassini rose to the task, but discovered results that could
17:27not possibly please the King.
17:28Cassini told the King, I have some rather disappointing news for you, Your Highness.
17:46We all thought that France was a whole lot bigger than our studies revealed. I'm afraid,
17:53Your Majesty, Your Kingdom is much smaller than heretofore thought. The King surprised everyone
18:03with his great good humor, saying, Why Cassini, you've robbed me of more land than all the armies of my
18:10enemies combined. And then there was his work on Saturn.
18:24He was the first person to know what the rings of Saturn really were. He proposed that they were not
18:30solid, but instead composed of countless satellites orbiting the planet. And he observed that there was
18:37a division between the rings. Cassini filled in some of the big blanks in our understanding of Saturn.
18:45But how could we possibly ever get there? Accomplishing that mythic quest was left to one whose tragic life
18:56would have been completely forgotten, if not for what you are about to see.
19:01Weighing in at more than 12,000 pounds at launch, NASA's Cassini spacecraft is the size of a bus.
19:21That figure included 70 pounds of plutonium-238 fuel, enough to last her for more than 20 years.
19:29But that's not what powered her mythic odyssey.
19:32She rode gravity's rainbow all the way to the outer solar system.
19:37The lineage of the greatest of human achievements stretches further back than we might assume.
19:48Some of their roots are buried deep inside the tomb of lost hope.
19:52But somehow, dreams rise. The epic missions of the first golden age of space exploration,
20:00and likely the next, were made possible by a man whose two names, one real, one fake,
20:06are equally forgotten.
20:19Alexander Sergei's early years are not well documented,
20:22but it is believed that his mother, a political activist, was taken from him
20:27when he was only five years old.
20:36He took refuge in his father's physics and mathematics textbooks.
20:41But by the time Alexander was 13, the boy had lost his father, too.
20:47He lived with his grandmother, and despite great hardship,
20:50he managed to be accepted at the most prestigious high school,
20:53and afterwards gained admission to the best engineering institute in the Ukraine.
20:58But only two months after he arrived there, in 1914,
21:01he was drafted into the Tsar's army to fight in the First World War.
21:15In the hell of war at the front,
21:29Alexander Sergei conceived a scientific strategy for exploring the moon,
21:34not intended as fiction, but as blueprint.
21:45But Sergei's hell didn't end with the war.
22:05Now, Sergei was forced to navigate the treacherous political minefields of revolutionary Russia.
22:11He was much better at figuring out how to get to the moon.
22:15Former officers in the Tsar's army, and those such as Sergei,
22:19who were forced to join the counter-revolutionary white army,
22:22were assumed to be enemies of the people.
22:31Sergei could find no peace in the Soviet Union.
22:34So, in desperation, he tried to escape to Poland.
22:41Sergei, weakened by illness, was stopped by guards and turned back from the border.
22:57Sergei, weakened by illness, was stopped by guards and turned back from the border.
23:09These were dangerous times,
23:11and there was no telling what would get you into serious trouble.
23:14No one knows where Sergei spent the next three years.
23:24He simply vanished.
23:27When, at last, he emerged, Alexander Sergei was no more.
23:31In his desperation to be left alone, he took the name of a dead man.
23:37He was now Yuri Kondratayuk.
23:42He finally published the book he had been dreaming about since his time in the trenches.
23:48No publisher was interested, so he printed it at his own expense.
23:52It was Kondratayuk's letter to a future no one else could see.
24:00He wrote it to whoever will read this paper in order to build an interplanetary rocket.
24:10In the late 1920s, Kondratayuk was enlisted to design a grain elevator.
24:16The Soviet Union was going through a metal shortage, so Kondratayuk's challenge was to build the
24:22largest grain elevator possible without using more than a single nail.
24:28It ended up being so big, they named it the Mastodon.
24:35Such was the nightmare logic of Stalin's Soviet Union.
24:39You could do the heroic in service to the state, successfully execute the seemingly impossible
24:45order to build a colossus with but a single nail.
24:48And when it was done, you could be imprisoned for sabotage.
24:54Who but an enemy of the state would do such a reckless thing as building a colossal grain
24:59elevator with only a single nail?
25:03It made no difference to Kondratayuk's fate that the grain elevator functioned for another 60 years
25:08until it burned down.
25:09Kondratayuk was sentenced to three years in a special prison camp, something new called a
25:17Sharashka, where scientists and engineers slaved away on the nation's most ambitious projects.
25:25Kondratayuk threw himself into a wind power project, but still he dreamed of exploring the solar system.
25:33Kondratayuk threw himself into the ocean.
25:36Soon after that, he met Sergei Korolev, who also dreamed of leaving Earth to explore the cosmos.
25:45Korolev would later become the father of the Soviet rocket program.
25:50Korolev wanted to enlist Kondratayuk in his fledgling rocket program.
25:54But Kondratayuk was so terrified that any change in his status might result in closer scrutiny by the secret police, he declined.
26:05If the authorities discovered that Kondratayuk was really Sergei, there was no telling what they would do to him.
26:11When Germany attacked Russia, Kondratayuk volunteered for armed service at the front, where he led a communications outfit.
26:22His precise fate is unknown, but he's believed to have died in battle on a February night in 1942.
26:30Alexander Sharjee, aka Yuri Kondratayuk, was only 44.
26:38That was the end of his story, but not his dream.
26:45In the early days of the Apollo program, the scientists and engineers struggled to figure out
26:51how a rocket could leave the Earth and land directly on the Moon.
26:55They were stymied. They couldn't figure it out.
27:00You'd need a big, powerful rocket to reach the Moon.
27:03How could you land such a thing on the surface of another world without crashing it?
27:11Being able to guarantee that it could take off again and bring your crew safely home was even more of a long shot.
27:19This approach, known as direct ascent, seemed like a dead end to a NASA engineer named John Hubbolt and his colleagues.
27:28One version of the story goes,
27:30two space scientists had kept the spark of Kondratayuk's dream alive.
27:36They delivered his 40-year-old manuscript to Hubbolt.
27:48They delivered his 40-year-old manuscript to Hubbolt.
27:52First of all, to the question of the work, let it not frighten you.
28:02Speaking about the possibility of flight implementation,
28:06just only remember that there is nothing improbable on the theoretical side of a flight of a rocket into space.
28:12Zero.
28:14Zero.
28:38Zero.
28:39Zero.
28:39Zero.
28:3937 degrees.
29:00Still looking very good.
29:01Here you go.
29:0412-0-1.
29:0712-0-1.
29:08Roger.
29:0812-0-1 alarm.
29:0912-0-1 alarm.
29:1012-0-1, we're go, flight.
29:11Okay, we're go.
29:12We're go.
29:13St. Hyde, we're go.
29:15Altitude 1,600.
29:17Eagle looking great.
29:19Tranquility safe here.
29:21The Eagle has landed.
29:24The surface appears to be very fine-grained as you get close to it.
29:28It's almost like a powder.
29:34NASA picked up Chondra Tyuk's vision of a lunar orbiter rendezvous
29:38and took it all the way to the moon.
29:42But Chondra Tyuk's horizon extended far beyond.
29:47Chondra Tyuk envisioned the first reconnaissance of the solar system
29:52by swinging round the planets
29:54and using the force of their gravity to slingshot the craft farther out into space.
30:00He dreamt that we would swing from world to world,
30:04as our ancestors had done from tree to tree.
30:08Bending gravity to human needs on a slightly grander scale.
30:15But what gravity giveth,
30:17it can also taketh away.
30:19Why do some worlds have rings
30:30and others don't?
30:33Why no rings for Earth?
30:38Or Mars?
30:40We wouldn't recognize Saturn without them.
30:44He looks naked without his rings.
30:46But how did he get them in the first place?
30:49This is exactly what the French astronomer,
30:52Edouard Roche, asked himself
30:53when he looked at Saturn through his telescope in 1848.
31:02Roche speculated that Saturn's rings
31:04were the debris of a moon or moons
31:06that had ventured too close
31:08and were pulled apart by the massive planet.
31:11Roche was able to devise an equation
31:29that applies to all worlds.
31:32It tells you how closely a body can come to a planet
31:35before it's pulled apart by the planet's tidal forces of gravity
31:38and is turned into a ring.
31:41That's the Roche limit.
31:47But until NASA's Cassini spacecraft
31:49executed a series of daredevil maneuvers in the Saturn system,
31:53there was a vigorous scientific debate
31:55about when his rings formed.
31:57Some astronomers suggested
31:58they were nearly as old as the planet itself.
32:02More than 4 billion years ago,
32:04when the planet coalesced out of the disk of gas and dust
32:07that surrounded the newborn sun,
32:09a moon or moons likely violated Saturn's Roche limit.
32:13others thought the rings to be fairly recent,
32:18perhaps only 100 million years old or so.
32:22And the Cassini spacecraft proved them right.
32:25what is Earth's own Roche limit?
32:32If the moon were ever to come closer than 12,000 miles,
32:36which, by the way,
32:37it's absolutely in no danger of doing...
32:40and it's a good thing, too,
32:52because I like our moon right where it is.
32:56There's only one other moon in the solar system
33:05that moves me like ours does.
33:08Maybe it's because it's the only one
33:10with a thick atmosphere like Earth's
33:12and the kind of surface features,
33:14lakes and mountains,
33:16that remind me of home.
33:17All of this was hidden from view
33:20by a dense layer of orange smog
33:23until the European Space Agency
33:25collaborated with NASA
33:27to send a spacecraft to land
33:29on his mysterious surface.
33:32Yes, that would be the one named after you,
33:35Christian Huygens.
33:37First to see that world
33:39through your telescope.
33:40After an interplanetary voyage of seven years,
33:51the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft
33:53arrived in the Saturn system,
33:55the fourth of our ships to venture there,
33:58but the first to send a probe
34:00to explore the surface of Saturn's moon, Titan,
34:08and to reveal a moon
34:10of far greater complexity and splendor
34:12than our own rather dull and lifeless moon.
34:27As Carl Sagan had predicted
34:29more than two decades before,
34:31there were seas of methane and ethane
34:33and there was water ice.
34:35When Cassini first arrived in 2004
34:41at Saturn's northern hemisphere,
34:43it was in the depths of winter,
34:46and the sun didn't come out
34:47until five years later
34:48when Saturn's northern spring began.
34:52Is it just me,
34:54or is this whirling hexagon
34:56at Saturn's north pole
34:57every bit as exotic
34:59as the fantasies
35:01our ancient ancestors had
35:02of these worlds?
35:03The geometrically regular hexagonal shape
35:06of this feature
35:07brings to mind
35:09the handiwork of intelligence,
35:12terraforming,
35:14reworking the surface
35:15for some unknown purpose.
35:17But it's actually the result
35:19of the sudden change in wind speeds
35:21as vast upwellings of ammonia
35:23rise near the poles.
35:24It's the mother of all hurricanes,
35:28a frenzy of thunder and lightning
35:30containing countless hurricanes within it.
35:34Spring can be a violent,
35:36stormy season on Earth, too.
35:38But it was during Saturn's
35:40seven-year-long summer
35:41that Cassini was commanded
35:44to take her own life.
35:46There's a human conceit
36:11that at the moment of death
36:13we relive our greatest memories.
36:21You are riffling
36:22through the memory bank
36:23of a doomed robot
36:25about to carry out
36:26the cruelest command.
36:43wasteland
36:45about to carry out
36:48the
41:47Project Manager on episode 4.
41:50Maybe a trickle of telemetry left, but you just heard the signal from the spacecraft is gone,
41:57and within the next 45 seconds, so will be the spacecraft.
42:17Official time of death, 1155, Universal Time.
42:26There are all kinds of stories in this struggle to understand the cosmos.
42:31Sometimes, your dreams die with you.
42:34But sometimes, the scientists of another age pick them up and take them to the moon and far beyond.
42:43The name of Yuri Kondratayuk was forgotten, but there was one who remembered.
42:55When Neil Armstrong returned from his trip to the moon,
42:59he made a pilgrimage to the childhood home of the man who made his mythic voyage possible.
43:13The End
43:18Transcription by CastingWords
43:48CastingWords