"NARRATOR:" "No planet beats Saturn forjaw-dropping beauty." "CAROLYN PORCO:" "Saturn is the most photogenic planet in all the solar system." "Some of the pictures are to die for." "NARRATOR:" "But the postcards only tell part of the story." "KEVIN BAINES:" "You know, beauty is only skin deep." "It really is rolling and seething inside." "NARRATOR:" "For ringside action, soar above the planet with its six-sided storms." "LINDA SPILKER:" "I couId just imagine, what it might be like to like hold a ring particle in my hand?" "NARRATOR:" "Even more mystery surrounds the impressive Fountains of Enceladus where the secrets of life might spring from the moons salty geysers." "CHRIS McKAY:" "This is the little moon that has it all." "And the samples are coming out in space, there's a big sign there:" "Free samples:" "Take One." "NARRATOR:" "Then drop by th big orange moon Titan and descend beneath its smoggy veil." "RALPH LORENZ:" "It would be one of the seven wonders of the solar system." "NARRATOR:" "Take to Titanian skies for a magical mystery tour." "JULIAN NOTT:" "The balloon just allows extraordinary possibilities for exploring Titan." "NARRATOR:" "Drift over propane lakes, flammable sand dunes and methane streams." "JOHN SPENCER:" "You could actually stand next to a babbling brook of liquid methane." "I sometimes wonder, what would that sound like?" "NARRATOR:" "But nothing is as it seems here." "BOB BROWN:" "If you put your hand on a lava flow on" "Titan, you wouldn't burn your hand, you would freeze it." "NARRATOR:" "All this, and more, and only a billion miles from home." "Ready to take off?" "There has never been a better time to venture where no human has gone before." "To follow in the footsteps of our robot pioneers and explore the planets of our solar system." "Imagine boarding a flight to Saturn." "What would you need to know before travelling?" "The best ringside vantage points?" "The must-see moons?" "Think of this as your personal guide to the splendor of the Saturnian system." "A wandering spot of light twice as far as Jupiter and four times further than the asteroid belt." "Although its a billion miles from home," "Saturn has always commanded our attention." "CAROLYN PORCO:" "Saturn is the most phenomenoIogicaIIy rich planetary system that we have in our solar system because of its rings and planet and magnetosphere and an enormous collection of very diverse moons." "It has it all and I mean even just taking the rings as an example, in Saturn's rings we find examples of the other rings around Jupiter, around Uranus and Neptune, we find them in Saturn's" "rings so." "If you wanted to ask fundamental questions about the solar system in general," "Saturn would be the place you would go." "Narrator:" "When the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft took off in 1997 for a close encounter with Saturn it was packed with essential items for long adventure in deep space: a power generator, extra fuel, a good antenna, and a moon probe." "Imaging team leader, Carolyn Porco made sure it took along a pretty good camera too." "After all, this destination is the pin-up boy of the solar system." "Saturn might be the second largest planet in the solar system, but like gas giant neighbor Jupiter, it's a triumph of show over substance." "KEVIN BAINES:" "Saturn, first of all is a big giant gas ball, actually it's a big giant ball of fluid, and the outer parts of it are gases, atmospheres." "But as you go deeper it gets hotter and hotter and also gets more pressurized, and so if you get down deep enough you start getting sort of fluid effects." "NARRATOR:" "Saturn is a big boy, but pound for pound, a cosmic lightweight." "It's big enough to swallow 765 Earths, but as the least dense planet, it would float on water." "Like Jupiter, this is a world with nowhere to stand." "With no solid surface, it's hard to measure how long a day is, though the cloud tops go around about every 1 1 hours." "But it's what's up above, not down below, that will draw the crowds to Saturn." "TORRENCE JOHNSON:" "It's just hard to imagine anything more beautiful than the ring system." "They're the first thing any kid with a telescope wants to look at." "NARRATOR:" "Spotting these rings from a backyard telescope is a treat." "In an instant they can all but disappear when Saturn tilts toward the sun." "TORRENCE JOHNSON:" "The over whelming thing that you as a space tourist would be struck by is how incredibly thin they are." "CAROLYN PORCO:" "They are only no thicker than about one or two stories in a modern day building." "NARRATOR:" "Interested in seeing for yourself?" "Strap in Space travelers, its quite a ride." "After seven years and a billion miles of space, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft faces its greatest challenge on June 30th 2004:" "to go into orbit." "First it had to maneuver through an obstacle course of rings." "TODD BARBER:" "The hopes and dreams of thousands of scientists and engineers are resting on the next few moments." "Wed been to Saturn twice before with Voyager 1 and" "Voyager 2 space craft but rather than these quick" "Kodak moments we wanted to take a nice long leisurely" "look at the Saturnian system, the only way to do that was to slow down," "let Saturn's gravity capture us into orbit." "MISSION CONTROL:" "Current speed of the Cassini" "Huygens spacecraft is just under 70, 000 miles per hour per hour and increasing as" "Saturn's gravity pulls us in." "NARRATOR:" "Cassini presses on, aiming for the gap between the outer F and G rings, hopefully clear of orbital debris." "BOB MITCHELL:" "We turned the main high-gain antenna in the direction the craft would see the ring particles coming toward it, so that it wouId act as a shield." "NARRATOR:" "You are listening to the actual recording of tiny particles hitting the spacecraft as it crosses the plane of the rings." "MAN:" "Let's go ahead and switch Canberra over to V two." "NARRATOR:" "So far, so good." "But as Cassini disappears into radio silence behind" "Saturn, everything rests on the spacecraft firing its engine perfectly and slowing down." "Its a nail-biting wait at Mission Control." "MISSION CONTROL:" "Go ahead SOI com." "The doppler has flattened out!" "Ok we have burn complete here for the SOI orbit insertion burn." "NARRATOR:" "As Cassini emerges proudly from" "Saturn's shadow, it turns to cross the ring plane again." "TODD BARBER MISSION CONTROL:" "To any potential inhabitants of the Saturnian system, your eyes are not deceiving you tonight." "There is a 32nd moon gracing your night sky tonight and that is the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft." "NARRATOR:" "With Saturn's 62 known moons ," "Cassini finds itself in good company, with out of-this-world photo opportunities to make even a seasoned professional gasp." "CAROLYN PORCO:" "Saturn is the most photogenic planet in all the solar system so I just it, you know," "I mean you couldn't get luckier than me, right?" "The ones that, give me shivers, you know, are Saturn with the rings where Saturn is a crescent or were looking down on the rings from above and there's a moon in the background." "They are just artistic compositions." "Here I am leading a team of scientists, our duty, ourjob is to take images and we have this fantastic target." "I kind of have this feeling like I'm the, you know, standing on the bridge looking out the window, you know, I have a very strong feeling of being at the forefront, being out there" "exploring myself." "That's the thrill of it for me." "NARRATOR:" "The view from Cassini's bridge exceeds anything seen before." "LINDA SPILKER:" "Low and behold as we got close enough it looked like all of the rings dissolved into all of these individual ringIets like grooves on a phonograph record for people who remember phonograph records and it was just very exciting to try and figure out what was" "causing all that structure." "What looked like rather featureless rings in a telescope now had thousands of features in them." "CAROLYN PORCO:" "I was surprised at how surprised" "I was at the clarity of the images because I thought to myself well for Pete's sake, you know," "I've been thinking about this for years, for 14 years I've been thinking about this," "I've been planning these images for a decade or whatever it was, you'd think I would have, you know, anticipated well were going to have this kind of resolution, its going to look like this" "and I just hadn't." "NARRATOR:" "For the first time, vivid details of Saturn's rings is revealed , beckoning us to stare in wonder for a closer inspection." "NARRATOR:" "everyone is familiar with the rings of" "Saturn." "But what would you highlight if it were you sending back the postcards?" "Every tour itinerary ha one main attraction." "With Saturn, you just cant miss the rings." "As imaging team leader for Cassini," "Carolyn Porco has had a ringside seat." "CAROLYN PORCO:" "The rings consist ofjust countless particles and they range from the size of big boulders perhaps the size of small apartment buildings all the way down to the finest, finest dust particle and everything in between and they're all orbiting like crazy around Saturn at 20" "to 40,000 miles per hour but its like traffic on a highway you know everybody can be going ninety miles an hour but relative to each other they're going very, very slowly If you could put a space craft" "there, you could manage to move at the same speed then the speed wouldn't be that dangerous at all." "LINDA SPILKER:" "You can think of rush hour on a" "Friday night you know on the freeway but the B ring has a Iot of traffic and a Iot of particles, whereas you go to the A ring its a little bit better, the C ring is more like being out in the" "country, you aren't going to see ring particles too often." "NARRATOR:" "Possibly the remnants of a failed moon, the ring particles have been flattened by gravitational forces into a super thin disc nearly" "200,000 miles across." "Edge to edge, that's almost the distance from the Earth to the Moon." "CAROLYN PORCO:" "I have in fact imagined myself orbiting Saturn, hovering over the rings, its hard not to." "LINDA SPILKER:" "I couId just imagine what it might be like to like hold a ring particle in my hand and see what does it" "look like?" "Is it like a fluffy snowball if I start to pull it apart?" "What's it like on the inside, so I can think of each of the rings, A, B, C, D," "like different beaches and so you'd want to collect samples from each of those rings." "NARRATOR:" "And the icy grains on these Saturnian beaches are washed by passing traffic." "LINDA SPILKER:" "When a moon comes by it creates a wake, just like a motor boat creates a wake that goes behind it." "I kind of imagine the ring particles doing an intricate cosmic dance around the planet and you can almost picture a little ballet dancers each with their own orbits and paths and sometimes colliding and encountering and sometimes not." "NARRATOR:" "Deeper secrets of this cosmic ballet are revealed, courtesy of a seasonal trick of the light." "Once every 1 5 Earth years, as Saturn makes its slow trip around the sun, summer swaps hemispheres." "In 2009, Cassini was in a perfect position to witness Equinox on Saturn." "CAROLYN PORCO:" "The Sun at exact equinox will be shining exactly edge on to the rings." "But a little bit before and a little bit after the sun will be low to the rings just like the sun is now over London." "Any vertical protuberances, either up or down below the rings would cast very" "long shadows." "And we have in fact found that the rings aren't completely flat." "There are places where the ring particles in fact form these structures that soar a mile or two or three above the plane of the rings." "For the first time in four hundred years we now know that the rings are three dimensional." "NARRATOR:" "Enormous and enormously complicated:" "the rings also form a major part of Saturn's amazing weather machine." "Upon arrival, you might be slightly disappointed that the cloudy face of Saturn looks a little plain." "But the planet beneath the rings is wild at heart." "Saturn's apparently peaceful appearance is due to a haze of high level ammonia in the upper atmosphere." "By looking deep into Saturn in the infrared, using the planets own internal heat as a light source, Cassini has revealed the planets true nature" "KEVIN BAINES:" "The winds on Saturn vary dramatically from the equator to the pole, in fact at the equator, we have huge winds." "We are getting close to nine hundred miles an hour now, near the speed of sound in that planet." "ANDY INGERSOLL:" "The winds are stronger at Saturn than they are on Jupiter and that's a surprise because the two planets are similar in terms of basic composition, they're both gas giants, and yet Saturn has less sunlight to power the" "winds and the winds are stronger." "Try explaining the six-sided vortex at the North Pole!" "ANDY INGERSOLLL:" "Saturn has a hexagon." "Its some kind of a wave but its a permanent wave." "Its been there since Voyager discovered it back in 1 e80 and its just one more example of how atmospheric features which are basically nothing more than just gas they last forever on these planets." "NARRATOR:" "There is another permanent storm at the" "South Pole." "Not quite as strange , but gigantic in size:" "At five thousand miles across, you could almost fit the whole earth inside." "ANDY INGERSOLL:" "The South pole has something that" "looks very much like a hurricane eye except the clouds five times the height of the eye wall around a terrestrial hurricane." "KEVIN BAINES:" "So its kind of a window, into the depths of Saturn showing us just how dramatic the planet really is." "Its really kind of neat." "NARRATOR:" "And at the bottom of this window:" "storms within the storm." "Adding their own level of complexity to the weather forecasts of this alien planet, are the rings." "For half a Saturnian year the rings block the light in the northern hemisphere and the other half of the year its blocked in the southern hemispheres." "ANDY INGERSOLLL:" "We are interested in studying seasonal changes on Saturn because of this extreme effect of the rings." "already we know that the sky was blue when the northern hemisphere came out of the rings shadow and its now turned sort of pinkish, yellowish, hazy color because." "There's somehow smog developed in the atmosphere once the sun started shining." "probably not too different from the smog in Earths atmosphere, organic compounds or something." "NARRATOR:" "For a planetary weatherman like Andy Ingersoll, Saturn has it all." "ANDY INGERSOLLL:" "If I had an airplane that could fly in Saturn's atmosphere, I think it wouId be a wonderful sight to be surrounded by rings it wouldn't get dark at night there's more light on the night side of Saturn from the rings than there is" "from the full moon on earth so you could certainly read a newspaper on the dark side, on the night side of Saturn." "NARRATOR:" "There'd be no shortage of strange stories to read by ring shine in the Saturn" "Express." "And a lot of breaking "galactic" news." "For Saturn is far from the only show in town." "NARRATOR:" "In case you haven't heard yet, the biggest story in the Saturn system is coming from the tiny moon, Enceladus." "Its shaping up as perhaps the hottest place in space to search for life." "Shiny, white Enceladus." "A bright ball hiding within Saturn's diffuse E ring, this was a moon of little consequence until" "Cassini started sniffing around." "But something was fishy here." "BONNIE BURATTI:" "It was first found by the magnetometer team." "They saw this hint of something in the magnetic field of Saturn wasn't just right it was being kind of deflected to the side." "LINDA SPILKER:" "It was like unraveling a puzzle." "And so the magnetometer team said lets go closer." "As we got closer we watched as a star went through we noticed the brightness, something is going on." "CAROLYN PORCO:" "We could see even from a distance there seemed to be this material coming off the" "South pole and it was so dramatic and so unusual that we thought well it might be a camera artefact." "NARRATOR:" "Enceladus is tiny, lust 300 miles across." "Too small for any kind of dramatic geology." "BONNIE BURATTI:" "If you look at EnceIadus, it kind of looks like its covered in snow." "Its very bright, its as bright as freshly fallen snow." "CAROLYN PORCO:" "Everywhere you look there's fractures." "There are mountain ranges and there are deep chasms and when we finally looked at the south pole that's when it just became apparent, that's where all the activities going on." "NARRATOR:" "The team found something extraordinary." "Row after row of enormous geysers shooting water and ice crystals out into space from the snowy white surface." "LINDA SPILKER:" "It was like a giant detective story, piece by piece putting the evidence together and until finally we get back that really great picture, the smoking gun, showing the geysers actually coming out from the south pole of EnceIadus." "TORRENCE JOHNSON:" "Water and water ice are spewing out of giant cracks, from a region about the size of southern california which apparently just a big geothermal field." "You can think of it that way." "NARRATOR:" "It doesn't look much like California from orbit, just cool, as you'd expect an icy moon this far from the Sun to be." "But that's the mystery of Enceladus." "CAROLYN PORCO:" "I mean the bloody thing is hot." "The south poles hot." "OK, its like its as crazy as saying the North pole of the Earth is hotter than the equator." "NARRATOR:" "The best indications so far suggest the source of the water lies in a subterranean ocean or sea, hidden beneath the icy crust under the South Pole, warmed by tidal heating." "BOB BROWN:" "Its been a mystery because EnceIadus is so small." "Its not supposed to have that much heat." "We think that heat source under ground melts water and that melted water, which might be mixed with some ammonia and other things to lower is melting point, works its way out of the ground and spews up into space." "CHRIS McKAY:" "Here is the surprise entry in the search for life." "This little moon that you'd expect would be pretty dead and dull, and coming out of the South pole of it is a jet of water-ice." "AII the things you need for life are there." "There's an energy source, there's a water source, there's an organic material source, there's a nitrogen source, check, check, check, all the requirements for life." "This is the little moon that has it all." "And, the samples are coming out in space, there's a big sign there:" "Free samples:" "Take One." "We just fly through and grab it on our way." "CAROLYN PORCO:" "I think it is the go to place in our solar system right now for investigating issues of astrobiological importance." "It wins out the game over Mars, over Europa, over Titan even simply because of accessibility." "Its accessible." "If these jets are deriving from liquid water then they're there for the, the sampling." "NARRATOR:" "The Cassini team has been flying the spacecraft at heights as low as 15 miles on its way to the plumes." "Unbelievable precision flying for a remotely controlled robot, that was never designed for such a feat, a billion miles from Earth." "CHRIS McKAY:" "From Cassini we learn that there's methane in the plume, nitrogen in the plume, ammonia in the plume, organic molecules in the plume, its a real soup." "Were seeing a soup of organics being spewed out into space where its freezing." "You can almost go there and jar it, put it in a can and sell it on Earth as organic nutrient soup NARRATOR:" "On Earth, geysers and hot springs are home to bacteria with pedigrees dating back to the beginning of life." "They can also be breathtaking," "But nothing on Earth matches the Saturnian cold faithful." "TORRENCE JOHNSON:" "Sitting there at the South pole of" "EnceIadus and taking a look at Saturn, while you're sitting there watching this eruption going on would be beautiful." "CAROLYN PORCO:" "It wouldn't be a dangerous thing." "You would see these towering dramatic fountains ofjust icy particles." "You would never see them stop because some of them actually extend tens of thousands of kilometers into the space above the South pole and in fact into orbit around Saturn, this is how the E ring of" "Saturn is formed." "NARRATOR:" "Cassini has solved the mystery of how at least one of Saturn's rings formed." "And this may help solve the bigger mystery of life beyond Earth." "NARRATOR:" "Enceladus may be the hottest ticket in town, but don't overlook the heavyweight contender for the title of moon with the most:" "Titan." "Larger than Mercury or Pluto," "Saturn's Titan is the only other world apart from the" "Earth and Venus to have both solid ground and a thick atmosphere." "RALPH LORENZ:" "Titan if it weren't in orbit around another planet, wed have no hesitation in calling it a planet in its own right." "BOB MITCHELL:" "We knew going that Titan was going to be exciting." "Titan was a mystery hidden inside this hazy foggy atmosphere." "NARRATOR:" "Cassini confirmed that Titan is shrouded in thick orange smog." "Laboratory experiments have shown this could be the result of four and a half billion years of sunlight reacting with the thick nitrogen and methane atmosphere." "Cassini's camera could only see partly through the haze: the patches of light and dark looked like continents and oceans." "CAROLYN PORCO:" "The picture we had of Titan before we got there was that it was going to be dark and eerie and cold." "As dark as twilight is on the Earth even at high noon and you could be standing on a body the size of the Mediterranean brimming with paint thinner." "NARRATOR:" "For over 7 years, the European Huygens probe rode piggyback on the" "American Cassini spacecraft." "On Christmas Day 2004, it was sent on its way." "Planet Earth never attempted to land on such a distant world before." "With the Huygens probe on final approach to Titan, operations switched to European mission control." "RALPH LORENZ:" "The probe hurtIed into Titans atmosphere at 6km a second." "The atmosphere would have been glowing violet around the probe as it decelerated." "NARRATOR:" "Once on a parachute, the probe descended for the first 80 miles , seeing nothing but smog and haze." "RALPH LORENZ:" "As we got closer to the surface down at about 30km the surface features started to peek through the haze." "progressively this landscape emerged of these bright hills cut by these small dark channels, that showed there had been rain, at some time in the past." "NARRATOR:" "The signal was taking over an hour to reach Earth." "No doubt Huygens was sending postcards from the edge." "JONATHAN LUNINE:" "There were just 20 of us in the office area where the pictures were delivered it was dark in Germany, it was the winter, it really felt like we were out there gazing at this alien world that was just at our door step." "NARRATOR:" "The probe drifted further, snapping these remarkable images all the way down." "RALPH LORENZ:" "We all kind of saw;" "a back yard in Arizona or the French Riviera, wherever it was you were from, you kind of saw some aspect of Titan that" "looked familiar." "CAROLYN PORCO:" "They were everything that our images from orbit were not." "You could see a dendritic drainage pattern that" "looked like a river system just like a river system would appear on the Earth." "So that was, boy, that was heady, that was like oh, it was like JuIes Verne come true." "It was just spectacular." "Rocks." "We've got rocks." "Yes, yes, yes." "Look Marty!" "Look!" "We've just earned all of our pay checks." "NARRATOR:" "Huygens landed on Titan." "It sent back these few hundred pictures until the batteries died and the probe froze solid." "RALPH LORENZ:" "The probe landed with a thud, on basically a stream bed, an area littered with rounded cobbles, which showed that these little rocks, ice particles had been tumbled around in a stream, at some point in the past." "JONATHON LUNINE:" "The whole thing was just very chilling." "Not in the sense of temperature but just in the sense of what we were looking at." "It was very, very alien." "BOB BROWN:" "Its not a place where you want to just jump out there in your shoes and socks and shorts and t-shirts." "Its roughly 200 degrees Fahrenheit colder than dry ice." "NARRATOR:" "With a surface temperature this low, nothing is what it seems on Titan." "CHRIS McKAY:" "Titan is a world with liquids." "The difference is the liquid is not water." "The liquid is methane." "Think of gasoline, its a Iiquid-Iike white gas." "TORRENCE JOHNSON:" "So you've got rivers of" "Methane flowing on the surface." "Anybody who has looked out of an airplane window, flying over desert and things like this say yeah," "I sort of understand what's going on, on the surface there." "RALPH LORENZ:" "Because its so cold water behaves like rock does and methane behaves like water does, everything has just sort of shifted along a scale of volatility." "NARRATOR:" "How do you end up with a landscape that looks so much like home on a world that's so different?" "NARRATOR:" "Methane soaks into ice like water into the ground." "And just like on Earth, any overflow will cut its path downhill." "JOHN SPENCER:" "Titan would be a wonderful place to visit." "Stand next to a babbling brook of liquid methane, running by your feet." "And I sometimes wonder, what would that sound like?" "TORRENCE JOHNSON:" "In fact as we took radar pictures of other parts of Titan we found even wilder things." "In the Northern polar areas there are entire" "lakes or seas." "It looks like for all the world you could go and take a boat and go do jet skiing or something, right you know up and down these channels there." "BOB BROWN:" "Titan is the only other place in the solar system that we know liquids exist on the surface." "So here you have on Titan huge reservoirs of liquid natural gas and oh by the way we have thrown in some ethane, which is a slightly more complex hydrocarbon and oh by the way there's some propane in there." "Everybody knows what propane is;" "you use it in your backyard BBQ." "narration:" "Cassini's radar spied lakes as big as inland seas, even bigger than Lake Superior." "BOB BROWN:" "Imagine standing on the shoreline of what to you looks like an ocean of liquid hydrocarbons." "That's got to be pretty special." "NARRATOR:" "And if you think the lakes are weird, try the volcanoes." "BOB BROWN:" "We think the material that comes out of" "Titanian volcanoes is a mixture of ammonia and water which allows water to melt at a much lower temperature." "NARRATOR:" "This is lava on Titan: a stinky mix of water and ammonia, molten at minus one hundred and fifty degrees." "BOB BROWN:" "You can build anything from small cones to large mountains on Titan out of this stuff." "If you were a visitor and you walked and put your hand on a lava flow, you wouldn't burn your hand, you would freeze it." "NARRATOR:" "In stark contrast to the cryo-volcanoes and wet polar lake lands, bordering the equator are Vast Titanian deserts, covered in dunes." "RALPH LORENZ:" "I think it wouId be one of the seven wonders of the solar system What you'd see is almost unending sea of massive dunes." "exactly the same size and scale as dunes we see on Earth." "Some areas where you see nothing but dunes for hundreds and hundreds of kilometers." "The by-product of billions of years of production from the chemical smog factory in the upper atmosphere, the grains in Titans dunes may literally fall from the sky." "Like a rain of flash frozen coffee grounds, they are swept by the wind into deep piles that cover" "20% of the surface." "And like a good coffee, these Titanian dunes are dark and rich." "RALPH LORENZ:" "The dunes represent a massive inventory of organic material, hundreds of times larger than all the coal for example, on the Earth." "NARRATOR:" "You're not likely to be hauling this alien coal home, but the liquid hydrocarbons lapping on Titanian shorelines could be very useful for the return trip." "JONATHAN LUNINE:" "There's more," "Iets call it fossil fuel type energy than we actually have known reserves on the Earth, by factor perhaps of ten or even hundred." "NARRATOR:" "Thats a lot of gas in anyone's language." "But something even more valuable might be found among the storehouse of organic molecules." "The answer to life, the universe and everything." "BOB BROWN:" "How do you go from such simple material" "like carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen, to something, which asks questions about where it came from?" "That's a huge leap." "And on Titan there's a real good possibility that some of those difficult intermediate stages actually occur, it hasn't gone to completion at" "least we don't think it has, though there's some people who think if we go to one of Titans lakes we will discover Titanian bacteria that have figured out how to metabolize" "liquid methane." "CHRIS McKAY:" "That's not a liquid that we," "Iife-forms on Earth like, but maybe a life form on" "Titan that grew up with liquid methane would be perfectly comfortable there and would look at shock that the thought that organisms would live in water, oh, my god, those things on Earth" "living in water." "Pity those poor EarthIings." "We live in liquid methane." "Much more pleasant." "NARRATOR:" "Titan is the ultimate test for life in our solar system." "If life exists under these alien conditions then you might find it anywhere." "NARRATOR:" "The Huygens mission will not be our only trip to Titan." "Nor Cassini our last visit to Saturn." "These are just bold first steps on a journey that's lust begun." "Even before the mission is over," "Cassini has left a thirst for a return trip." "Planetary explorer Jonathan Lunine and aeronautical pioneer Julian Nott think they know the perfect way to do it:" "a robotic hot air balloon." "JONATHAN LUNINE:" "So what were flying over now is very much like the Huygens landing site." "And I would love to see those ravines on Titan, those steep valleys where the methane is flowing and carving out the hills, very much like what were seeing now." "NARRATOR:" "The dream is to return to Titan and drop a robotic balloon into the atmosphere." "A radioisotope generator will provide the electrical power and the waste heat to give the balloon lift in the chilly atmosphere." "JONATHAN LUNINE:" "Titan has a dense atmosphere, its cold, the gravity is low, the winds are gentle so ballooning is very easy." "JULIAN NOTT:" "I think this flight just makes the point so beautifully why a balloon is a wonderful way to explore Titan." "If you're over an interesting area, its very easy to come down, maybe even land on the surface," "lower instruments down." "JONATHAN LUNINE:" "One could cover with a robotic hot air balloon the entire circumference of Titan in a space of perhaps six months." "NARRATOR:" "You shouldn't think of Titan as a place lust for robots." "With a thick protective atmosphere and plenty of frozen water, Titan could be a more user-friendly destination for Earthlings than Mars." "JONATHAN LUNINE:" "When humans do finally move out in to the solar system and I think they will." "Titan will be seen as a somewhat distant but very attractive place to go play." "You don't need a pressure suit on Titan." "You don't have that feeling as the astronauts describe it of trying to work with a beach ball between you arms." "NARRATOR:" "Breathing from a souped up scuba unit and out fitted in a cross between a super-ski suit and a hazmat coVerall, future Titanauts could explore with confidence." "JONATHAN LUNINE:" "You just need that thermal protection and oxygen and then you can go play on the surface and take a balloon ride." "It will be a place where people will want to go to see a truly exotic and alien world." "NARRATOR:" "Not Even a minor rip in the suit will be life threatening." "RALPH LORENZ:" "I did a calculation once of whether the small amounts of carbon monoxide would kill you before the hydrogen cyanide did." "actually it turns out that both are only enough to give you a headache." "The place would probably smell like oil finery." "NARRATOR:" "Speaking of refineries, re-fuelling for the return trip could be as simple as pulling up to the nearest lake to fill up your methane rocket, now under test development on Earth and if you reach as far as Titan," "why not a side trip to Enceladus as well?" "CHRIS McKAY:" "So on EnceIadus we are many steps ahead of where we are in terms of Mars or Europa." "We already know that there's organics." "We already know where they are." "We already know how to get them." "Its time to bring them back to Earth and look at them and ask the next level of questions, are they biological?" "CAROLYN PORCO:" "It may not happen for a very long time but I really think that's a must do for us in taking the next step and to me the question of whether or not life has gotten started elsewhere in the solar system is the reason why we do this," "you know, because we want finally, ultimately we want to come to understand why the" "Earth has been the successful abode of Iife that it has become." "NARRATOR:" "moving now into the extended extended mission, the Cassini team met recently in London to take stock of where they'd been, and to plan the road ahead." "It was the 58th time they'd met and fitting that they chose the Royal Observatory in Greenwich to celebrate." "The prime meridian here is the longitude, the mark on the ground, from which all great voyages are measured." "This is the view back to our remarkable home planet that the first human out here can look forward to." "A distant blue dot lost in the beauty of Saturn's backlit rings." "Its a real image." "Another perfect postcard from Cassini urging us into the heavens." "JONATHAN LUNINE:" "Humans have looked out from the shores of seas and oceans and imagined great adventures." "Now think about standing on the shore of an alien sea and we know those shores are there, we just have to go experience it." "I would Iike to go land in a balloon, step out, pick up one of those rounded pebbles and toss it at Huygens." "KEVIN BAINES:" "Maybe we have to talk about a planetary park down the road and where should we preserve for future generations." "You know, do we want to go in and mine Titan for its methane?" "Maybe well go mess up other places perhaps but" "Saturn is just an exquisite place and we should probably just leave that alone you know." "NARRATOR:" "With so many interesting moons in its flight path, NASA is making plans for what to do when Cassini's mission comes to an end around 2017." "LINDA SPILKER:" "We want to make sure that the space craft doesn't hit one of these bodies and so what were going to do, is put it into the atmosphere of Saturn." "TODD BARBER:" "Crash it into Saturn and burn it in a blaze of glory after a rich twenty years of exploration in space." "BOB MITCHELL:" "AII the molecules that currently make up the Cassini spacecraft would still be at Saturn and in fact would be there forever." "NARRATOR:" "A fitting fiery funeral for one of the greatest interplanetary voyagers of all time." "It might be a ball of gas and float in water, but Saturn is a Very solid destination both for science and for viewing spectacular sights ." "We've only begun to realize the riches it offers, and only because we sent a spacecraft to stay." "Its the same story everywhere in the Solar System." "You'll never, know what your missing if you never venture to go." "AtZLIT 2010"