01x08 - The Sacrifice of Cassini

[bunniefuu]

MAN (over radio):

Systems this is prop.

I read you 500, do you read me?

TYSON: These people are watching

their life's work come to an end.

MAN (over radio): The

team is on its way to point.

TYSON: On another world.

MAN (over radio):

All right. Roger that.

TYSON: They were all young

when they sent her on her way.

These men and women

have been traveling

vicariously with her for

more than two decades.

And now, her work is

done, so she must die.

But before she

takes the fatal plunge,

they've given her one

final, epic challenge.

(theme music plays)

♪♪

♪♪

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TYSON: Gravity has

a big bag of tricks,

none lovelier than the

ring systems of worlds.

Our own solar system,

alone, has four ringed planets.

This one, with the

romantic name J-1407B,

is the first we've found

circling another sun.

Why haven't we found more

ringed planets in our galaxy?

Is it that the rings

are so unusual,

or are the methods we use

to find exoplanets not very

good at seeing the ring

systems that may surround them?

J-1407B's ring

system is so vast,

that it eclipsed

its star for days.

These rings extend across an

astonishing 112 million miles.

They would more than fill the

distance between Earth and the sun.

But as enormous as they

are, they're shockingly thin.

If the ring system of J-1407B

were the size of a dinner plate,

it would have to be

100 times thinner,

as thin as a human hair.

This surprising contrast

between the immense territory

of a ring system,

and its thinness,

is just as striking in

our own solar system.

The outermost ring of

Neptune is so dainty,

that it was first thought to

be the fragments of a ring.

Not a ring, but a

collection of arcs.

That was, until NASA's

Voyager 2 spacecraft revealed

that the so-called

arcs were clumps,

the thicker parts of a

fainter, complete ring.

It's funny that the weirdest

planet in the solar system has

attracted the least attention.

Voyager 2 is the only

spacecraft that has ever been

sent on a reconnaissance

mission to Uranus,

one of the two ice giant

planets that circle the sun.

During its 20-year-long summers,

the sun never sets on Uranus.

The winters are equally as long,

20 years of unbroken night.

Unlike its fellow gas planets,

Uranus is cold-hearted.

It doesn't generate

any internal heat.

Uranus is one crazy world.

The outer edge of Uranus's

atmosphere is so hot,

it's hotter than 500

degrees Fahrenheit.

But Uranus also has the

coldest clouds in the solar system,

I'm talking nearly 400

degrees below zero.

What kind of ocean is this?

Is it made of ammonia?

Water?

Some scientists think it may

be an ocean of liquid diamonds.

Note to space agencies,

might be worth another visit.

Then there's that thing

about it being sideways.

Uranus revolves around the sun at a roughly

90 degree angle to its own orbital plane.

What could have happened to

Uranus that it got knocked on its a*s?

Our best guess is that it

went something like this.

Uranus was in a

terrible accident.

(crashing)

(crashing)

After the second blow, the rotational

axis of Uranus tipped 98 degrees.

There's another world in

our solar system that we don't

think of as having a ring.

The rings of Jupiter were

so dim that no ground-based

telescope ever saw them.

They were discovered when

Voyager I came flying by.

Our Saturn is graced

by the loveliest, largest,

and brightest ring system

of any around our sun.

It's the most distant planet that

can be seen with the naked eye,

and it made quite an

impression on our ancestors.

When I think of the Babylonians

of 3,500 years ago looking up

at the planets and stars,

I wonder how unlikely it would

have seemed that one of their

species would actually

send an emissary to that

distant point of light.

We are in the Deep Space Network

room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In this place, the most ambitious voyages

of discovery are directed and monitored.

Why are these

people so emotional?

They have committed

their professional lives to

a collaboration with this robot.

And now that partnership

of decades is about to end

in a most violent way.

The pathway from our

Earthbound helplessness to

our presence in Saturn's

skies is about to unfold.

TYSON: What is that shimmering,

unsteady thing we're looking at?

That's what Galileo Galilei

asked himself in 1610 when he

became the first human

to see Saturn as more than

just a point of light.

So, this is the telescope

that made the modern

scientific revolution possible.

You know, you really

started something.

You looked through that

thing and found the cosmos.

That's not to say you didn't

make your share of mistakes.

You guessed wrong at

what you thought you saw,

believing that Saturn sported

two symmetrical moons

on either side of it.

Two years later, when

you took a second look,

you were shocked to find that

your "moons" had vanished.

This was because both

worlds, Earth and Saturn,

were in motion, and the two worlds

had changed in position to each other.

You were now looking

at Saturn's rings, edge-on.

The Saturn ring system

is 175,000 miles across,

but on average only a

few hundred feet thick.

They were too thin for your

fledgling telescope to see.

But two years after

that, you took a third look.

Now, you thought that

the planet had arms.

♪♪

40 years passed, until a

Dutch astronomer named

Christiaan Huygens took

another look at Saturn with

his own greatly

improved telescope.

Huygens was the first

to know that worlds could

be circled by rings, and

Saturn was one of them.

He also discovered

Saturn's largest moon,

which would later

be known as Titan.

When it finally came time

for us to visit that world,

our spacecraft bore

Huygens's name.

In science, there are

the Galileos, the Newtons,

the Darwins, the Einsteins.

And then there's another

kind of great scientist.

Not the kind that paints a

whole new picture of nature,

but, like Christiaan Huygens,

someone who has

much to contribute,

filling in a blank or

two on that vast canvas.

Such a scientist was

Giovanni Domenico Cassini.

He was born early in the 17th

century in the town of Perinaldo,

in what is now Italy.

Cassini didn't start

out as a scientist.

He began his career as a

pseudo-scientist, an astrologer.

Astrology is a collection of

ideas based on the notion that

worlds have certain

human personality traits,

and that the influence

of these distant worlds,

depending on which are

rising and falling at the time

of your birth, will

determine who you are and

what your fate will be.

It's another form of prejudice,

making unfounded

assumptions about who a person

is without bothering

to get to know them.

Astronomy and astrology

used to be the same thing,

until there was a

great awakening to our

actual circumstances

in the cosmos.

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus,

a Polish cleric

demonstrated that,

contrary to popular belief,

we were not the

center of the universe

the Earth and the other

planets traveled around the sun.

Demoting the Earth from

the center of the universe

was a severe blow

to human self-esteem.

More than a century later,

some people still

hadn't gotten over it,

and Giovanni Cassini

was one of them.

Cassini accepted

a terrific job offer,

an appointment by Louis the XIV,

the legendary

sun King of France,

Louis believed himself to be an absolute

ruler whose dominion was God's will.

But he was also the first

monarch in Europe to recognize

the great power of science.

He knew it was vital

to national security.

Louis the XIV was

inventing the first modern,

governmental, scientific

research institute,

The Paris Observatory.

Cassini told the absolute

ruler that he would not be

staying long in Paris,

a year or two, at most.

But when the King placed his new

observatory at Cassini's disposal,

he lost all interest in returning

home to Italy ever again.

For the next 125 years,

the Paris Observatory

would be led by a Cassini.

Cassini rewarded his

patron with a map of the Moon

that remained

cutting-edge for a century.

King Louis financed a research

expedition to South America

to obtain more accurate

measurements of longitude,

intel of enormous value to

the captains of his far-flung

fleet and to astronomers.

Cassini took all these data

and became the first person

to calculate the scale of

the Copernican solar system

that he had once rejected.

With his increasingly

powerful telescopes,

he discovered the

length of a day on Jupiter

and the bands and spots

on that planet's surface.

Cassini discovered Jupiter's

Great Red Spot independently

of Robert Hooke in

England, and to this day,

they share the credit.

Cassini went on to determine

the length of the day on Mars.

He was only off

by three minutes.

When he returned to his

observations of Jupiter,

he was stumped by the

contradictions in them.

The eclipses by Jupiter's moons did

not begin when they were supposed to,

they varied from

observation to observation.

Could it be that it was due

to changes in the distance

of the Earth from Jupiter, as the two

worlds moved through the solar system?

If that were true, then

light could not travel at

an infinite speed because it

was taking longer to reach Earth.

Was the speed of light finite?

This idea was just too crazy

for Cassini, too revolutionary.

He rejected it out of hand.

If he had followed the

evidence wherever it led,

he would have given us the

yardstick for the cosmos that

we still use 350 years later.

But Cassini, ever

the conservative,

dismissed the idea as

being just too wacky.

Several years later,

a Danish astronomer,

Ole Romer, became Cassini's

assistant at the Paris Observatory.

Romer made his own

observations of the eclipses

of some of Jupiter's moons and

found the same discrepancies

in the data that

Cassini had dismissed.

But Romer recognized

them for what they were,

Pieces of evidence for

the finite speed of light.

There was a time, however,

when Cassini's faithfulness

to the data was so extreme,

that he was willing to risk the

displeasure of King Louis.

The monarch asked Cassini to

calculate the exact area of his realm.

No one had ever attempted

to make an accurate map,

much less a topographical

one that would feature all

the mountains and rivers

and valleys of France,

or of any other

country for that matter.

Cassini rose to the task,

but discovered results that

could not possibly

please the King.

(sighs)

Cassini told the King,

"I have some rather disappointing

news for you, Your Highness."

We all thought that France was a whole

lot bigger than our studies, revealed.

"I'm afraid, Your Majesty, your kingdom

is much smaller than heretofore thought."

(grunts)

(gasps)

TYSON: The King surprised

everyone with his great good humor,

saying, "Why, Cassini,

you've robbed me of more land

than all the armies of

my enemies combined."

(laughing)

TYSON: And then, there

is his work on Saturn.

He was the first person to know

what the rings of Saturn really were.

He proposed that

they were not solid,

but instead composed of

countless satellites orbiting

the planet, and he

observed that there was

a division between the rings.

Cassini filled in some of the big

blanks in our understanding of Saturn,

but how could we

possibly ever get there?

Accomplishing that mythic

quest was left to one whose

tragic life would have

been completely forgotten,

if not for what you

are about to see.

TYSON: Weighing in at more

than 12,000 pounds at launch,

NASA's Cassini spacecraft

is the size of a bus.

That figure included 70

pounds of plutonium 238 fuel,

enough to last her

for more than 20 years.

But that's not what

powered her mythic odyssey.

She rode gravity's rainbow all

the way to the outer-solar system.

The lineage of the greatest of

human achievements stretches

further back than

we might assume.

Some of their roots are buried

deep inside the tomb of lost hope.

But somehow, dreams rise.

The epic missions of the first

golden age of space exploration,

and likely the next,

were made possible by

a man whose two names,

one real, one fake,

are equally forgotten.

(knocking)

(grunts)

(knocking)

Alexander Shargei's early

years are not well-documented,

but it is believed that his

mother, a political activist,

was taken from him when

he was only five years old.

He took refuge in his father's

physics and mathematics textbooks.

But by the time

Alexander was 13,

the boy had lost

his father, too.

He lived with his grandmother,

and despite great hardship,

he managed to be accepted at

the most prestigious high school,

and afterward

gained admission to the

best engineering

institute in the Ukraine.

But only two months after

he arrived there, in 1914,

he was drafted into

the Czar's army to fight

in the First World w*r.

[EXPLOSIONS, g*nf*re]

[EXPLOSIONS, g*nf*re]

In the hell of w*r at the front,

Alexander Shargei

conceived a scientific strategy

for exploring the Moon,

not intended as fiction,

but as blueprint.

(engine blast)

(engine blast)

(engine blast)

But Shargei's hell

didn't end with the w*r.

Now, Shargei was forced

to navigate the treacherous

political mine fields of

revolutionary Russia.

He was much better at figuring

out how to get to the Moon.

Former officers in the

Czar's army and those,

such as Shargei,

who were forced to join

the counter-revolutionary

White Army,

were assumed to be

"enemies of the people."

(shouting in russian)

TYSON: Shargei could find

no peace in the Soviet Union,

so in desperation he

tried to escape to Poland.

Shargei, weakened by

illness, was stopped by guards

and turned back from the border.

TYSON: These were

dangerous times,

and there was no telling what

would get you into serious trouble.

No one knows where Shargei

spent the next three years.

He simply vanished.

When at last he emerged,

Alexander Shargei was no more.

In his desperation

to be left alone,

he took the name of a dead man.

He was now Yuri Kondratyuk.

He finally published the

book he had been dreaming

about since his

time in the trenches.

No publisher was interested,

so he printed it at

his own expense.

It was Kondratyuk's letter to

a future no one else could see.

He wrote it "To Whoever Will

Read This Paper in Order to

Build an Interplanetary Rocket."

In the late 1920s,

Kondratyuk was enlisted

to design a grain elevator.

The Soviet Union was going

through a metal shortage,

so Kondratyuk's challenge

was to build the largest grain

elevator possible without

using more than a single nail.

It ended up being so big,

they named it "the Mastodon."

Such was the nightmare

logic of Stalin's Soviet Union.

You could do the heroic

in service to the state,

successfully execute the

seemingly impossible order

to build a colossus

with but a single nail.

And when it was done,

you could be

imprisoned for sabotage.

Who but an enemy of the state

would do such a reckless thing

as building a colossal grain

elevator with only a single nail.

It made no difference to

Kondratyuk's fate that the

grain elevator functioned

for another 60 years,

until it burned down.

Kondratyuk was sentenced to

three years in a special prison camp,

something new,

called a sharashka,

where scientists and engineers slaved away

on the nation's most ambitious projects.

Kondratyuk threw himself

into a wind power project,

but still he dreamed of

exploring the solar system.

Soon after that, he

met Sergei Korolev,

who also dreamed of leaving

Earth to explore the cosmos.

Korolev would later become the

father of the Soviet rocket program.

Korolev wanted to enlist

Kondratyuk in his fledgling

rocket program, but

Kondratyuk was so terrified

that any change in his status

might result in closer scrutiny by

the secret police, he declined.

If the authorities discovered that

Kondratyuk was really Shargei,

there was no telling

what they would do to him.

When Germany attacked Russia,

Kondratyuk volunteered

for armed service at the front,

where he led a

communications outfit.

His precise fate is unknown,

but he is believed to have

died in battle on a

February night in 1942.

Alexander Shargei, aka

Yuri Kondratyuk, was only 44.

That was the end of his story,

but not his dream.

In the early days of

the Apollo program,

the scientists and engineers

struggled to figure out how

a rocket could leave the Earth

and land directly on the Moon.

They were stymied.

They couldn't figure it out.

You need a big powerful

rocket to reach the Moon.

How could you land

such a thing on the surface

of another world

without crashing it?

Being able to guarantee

that it could take off again and

bring your crew safely home,

was even more of a long shot.

This approach, known

as "Direct Ascent,"

seemed like a dead-end to a NASA engineer

named John Houbolt and his colleagues.

One version of the story goes,

two space scientists had kept

the spark of

Kondratyuk's dream alive.

They delivered his 40

year-old manuscript to Houbolt.

KONDRATYUK: First of all,

to the question of the work,

let it not frighten you

Speaking about the possibility

of flight implementation,

just only remember that there

is nothing improbable on the

theoretical side of the

flight of a rocket into space

MAN (over radio): One, zero.

(engine blast)

(engine blast)

ASTRONAUT (over radio):

37 degrees.

MAN (over radio): It's

still looking very good.

You're go.

ASTRONAUT (over radio):

We got an alarm. Bravo One.

MAN 2 (over radio): Bravo

One. Rocket 1201 alarm.

MAN (over radio): 1201 alarm.

MAN 3 (over radio):

Standby for go, Flight.

MAN (over radio):

Okay, we're go.

MAN 2 (over radio): We're

go. Sync tight. We're go.

MAN 3 (over radio):

Altitude 1600.

MAN 2 (over radio):

Eagle looking great.

ASTRONAUT (over radio):

Tranquility base here.

The eagle has landed.

The surface appears

to be very fine grained

as you get close to it.

It's almost like a powder.

TYSON: NASA picked

up Kondratyuk's vision of a

Lunar Orbiter Rendezvous and

took it all the way to the Moon.

But Kondratyuk's horizon

extended far beyond.

Kondratyuk envisioned

the first reconnaissance of

the solar system by

swinging round the planets,

and using the force of

their gravity to slingshot

the craft farther

out into space.

He dreamt that we would

swing from world to world as

our ancestors had

done from tree to tree,

bending gravity to human

needs on a slightly grander scale.

But what gravity giveth,

it can also taketh away.

TYSON: Why do some worlds

have rings, and others don't?

Why no rings for Earth?

Or Mars?

We wouldn't recognize

Saturn without them.

He looks naked

without his rings,

but how did he get

them in the first place?

This is exactly what the French

astronomer Édouard Roche asked

himself when he looked at Saturn

through his telescope in 1848.

Roche speculated that Saturn's

rings were the debris of a moon,

or moons, that had

ventured too close,

and were pulled apart

by the massive planet.

♪♪

Roche was able to devise an

equation that applies to all worlds.

It tells you how closely a

body can come to a planet

before it's pulled apart by the

planet's tidal forces of gravity,

and is turned into a ring.

That's the Roche limit.

But until NASA's Cassini

spacecraft ex*cuted a series

of daredevil maneuvers

in the Saturn system,

there was a vigorous

scientific debate about

when his rings formed.

Some astronomers

suggested they were nearly

as old as the planet itself.

More than 4 billion years ago,

when the planet coalesced out

of the disc of gas and dust that

surrounded the newborn sun,

a moon, or moons, likely

violated Saturn's Roche limit

Others thought the

rings to be fairly recent.

Perhaps, only 100

million years old or so.

And the Cassini spacecraft

proved them right.

What is Earth's own Roche limit?

If the Moon were ever to

come closer than 12,000 miles,

which, by the way, it's

absolutely in no danger of doing.

And it's a good thing, too,

because I like our

Moon right where it is.

There's only one other moon

in the solar system that moves

me like ours does.

Maybe it's because it's

the only one with a thick

atmosphere like Earth's, and

the kind of surface features,

lakes and mountains,

that remind me of home.

All of this was hidden

from view by a dense layer

of orange smog, until the

European Space Agency

collaborated with NASA

to send a spacecraft to land

on his mysterious surface.

Yes, that would be the

one named after you,

Christiaan Huygens, first to see

that world through your telescope.

After an interplanetary

voyage of seven years,

the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft

arrived in the Saturn system,

the fourth of our

ships to venture there.

But the first to send a probe to explore

the surface of Saturn's moon, Titan

and to reveal a moon of far

greater complexity and splendor

than our own rather

dull and lifeless Moon.

As Carl Sagan had predicted

more than two decades before,

there were seas of

methane, and ethane,

and there was water-ice.

When Cassini first

arrived in 2004 at Saturn's

northern hemisphere, it

was in the depths of winter.

And the Sun didn't come

out until five years later,

when Saturn's

northern spring began.

Is it just me, or is this

whirling hexagon at Saturn's

North Pole every bit as exotic

as the fantasies our ancient

ancestors had of these worlds?

The geometrically regular

hexagonal shape of this

feature brings to mind the

handiwork of intelligence,

terraforming, re-working the

surface for some unknown purpose.

But it's actually the result

of the sudden change in wind

speeds as vast upwellings of

ammonia rise near the poles.

It's the mother

of all hurricanes,

a frenzy of thunder

and lightning,

containing countless

hurricanes within it.

Spring can be a violent,

stormy season, on Earth, too.

But it was during Saturn's

seven year-long summer that

Cassini was commanded

to take her own life.

♪♪

TYSON: There's a human

conceit that at the moment of death,

we re-live our

greatest memories.

You are riffling through the

memory bank of a doomed robot,

about to carry out

the cruelest command.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

The mission planners at

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

call this the "ball of yarn,"

13 years of exploration

through the Saturn system.

From the time of her launch in

1997 and throughout her epic voyage,

she has used the gravity assist conceived

100 years before by Yuri Kondratyuk.

But it was her supply

of rocket fuel that made it

possible for her Earthbound

controllers to steer her into

new trajectories of exploration.

In April of 2017, Cassini

was running low on that fuel.

It was time for her most

daring maneuvers of all,

before she was to be

sent into a final death dive.

These are the mission

scientists of Cassini,

some of whom have been

working on the project since

the 1990s, when it was

no more than a dream.

They know that Cassini must die.

It's too dangerous to

let her wander aimlessly.

She might crash into one of

the moons in the Saturn system

where life might be hiding.

This would violate

NASA's planetary protection

conventions on quarantine

in the book of space laws.

If left to chance,

Cassini could alter the

possible biological destiny

of Titan or Enceladus.

A terrible command

must now be given.

Cassini is so far away,

it will take the message,

traveling at the speed of light,

more than an hour to reach her.

Every microchip in her has

been programmed to resist

the commands

she's now receiving.

The inner-turmoil of the

loyal robot commanded to defy

her own instincts

must be fierce.

The same engineers who

ordered her to protect herself

in every situation now force

her to plunge to her death.

They must be obeyed.

MAN (over radio):

System lead ace.

We have telemetry

AOS at zero one.

One, niner. One two.

TYSON: She fights off the

immense forces by struggling

to right herself one last time.

She fires her thrusters at 100%,

all the while faithfully

sending back more data than

her designers ever

hoped she would.

WOMAN (over radio): Project

Manager. Flight Director.

MAN (over radio): Go ahead.

WOMAN (over radio): Okay.

We'd call loss of signal at 11:55:4.

TYSON: She fights the brutal

atmospheric resistance until

her fuel tanks are empty,

and there's no

more fight left in her.

MAN (over radio): Project manager

on, maybe a trickle of telemetry left, but,

just heard the signal

from the spacecraft is gone

and within the next 45

seconds so will be the spacecraft.

♪♪

TYSON: Official time of

death: 11:55 universal time.

There are all kinds of stories in the

struggle to understand the cosmos.

Sometimes your

dreams die with you,

but sometimes the scientists

of another age pick them up,

and take them to the

Moon, and far beyond.

The name of Yuri

Kondratyuk was forgotten,

but there was one

who remembered.

When Neil Armstrong returned

from his trip to the Moon,

he made a pilgrimage to the

childhood home of the man

who made his mythic

voyage possible.

♪♪