you
ten years ago today the Cassini
spacecraft flawlessly executed a
nail-biting 96-minute burn to become the
first man-made object to go into orbit
around Saturn and Cassini carried with
it ESA’s Huygens probe which we later
sent down to the surface of Titan and so
we celebrate today because he needs
ten-year anniversary and I’ll share with
you just a few of the amazing findings
that we’ve made with Cassini what we
have here is one of my favorite pictures
of Saturn in the Rings it’s a view that
you won’t see from the earth Cassini is
high above Saturn’s North Pole looking
down in the Rings form a giant bullseye
around the planet and you can actually
see Saturn’s shadow going out across the
Rings up on the north pole you see a
greenish six-sided area we call this the
hexagon very interesting and intriguing
kind of storm Saturn is the second
largest planet in our solar system it
only has pretty much a hydrogen
atmosphere no solid surface underneath
it and if you could build a bathtub big
enough to hold Saturn Saturn would float
so how big is Saturn really well if we
put the earth and the moon to scale next
to Saturn along with the distance
between them we can see that Saturn is
indeed huge in fact it would take 764
earths to fill up the volume of Saturn a
giant planet indeed well let’s look a
little bit more closely at that north
polar hexagon if you look at the image
on your left you can see this greenish
area surrounded by a six-sided Jetstream
Voyager 30 years ago saw this Jetstream
with these six sides and it’s still
there today it’s a very interesting
puzzle greenish in color that’s it’s
winter hemisphere as the Sun continues
to shine in the north will see that
greenish color become more the golden
color were used to for Saturn’s
atmosphere tiny white clouds circle
inside the hexagon and Cassini
discovered at the very
the hexagon a giant hurricane that
hurricane would span half the
continental United States it would go
from Washington DC to Tulsa Oklahoma a
giant storm the sun is shining from the
right and you can actually see shadows
from the eye wall of that giant
hurricane we study the hexagon in the
hurricane net Saturn to get a better
understanding of the weather here on the
earth let’s move on to Saturn’s rings I
actually started working on rings and on
the Voyager days and so they hold a
special place in my heart there’s a lot
of intricate detailed structure inside
of the Rings the Rings are made up of
billions upon billions of icy particles
orbiting Saturn in an intricate cosmic
dance and every once in a while these
particles jostle and run into one
another the Rings have very simple names
as you go outward you can have you can
see you have the a ring on your far
right then there’s a gap the very bright
B ring most of the particles are there
the particles range in size from tiny
marbles to giant mountain sized
particles that grayish ring is the C
ring and then finally the innermost ring
the D ring and at the end of the mission
Cassini is going to dive in between
Saturn’s D ring in the top of the
atmosphere for some remarkable brand new
science you’ll notice that there’s a
black gap in between the a ring and the
B ring that’s the Cassini division named
after the astronomer Cassini who first
discovered it and our mission is named
in honor of that astronomer well Cassini
had a rare opportunity in 2009 we were
actually able to observe the Rings when
the Sun was edged on to them and
anything that would cast a shadow would
be visible and seen so let’s look at the
outer edge of the B ring and see what
Cassini saw in 2009 here’s the outer
edge of the B ring that bright ring with
all of those structures the Cassini
division on top the sun is shining from
the top down and you can see all sorts
of shadows here are particles that are
one or two miles in size
casting these long shadows at the edge
of the ring and the ring itself is only
about 30 feet thick a good analogy for
how we see these shadows imagine
yourself riding along on the space
station you look down on Egypt and you
want to find the pyramids but if you
look at noon you won’t see any shadows
and it’ll be very hard to pick them out
now imagine that you look for these same
pyramids at sunset and they’ll be
casting these long shadows and they’ll
be very easy to see on the desert in
Egypt and in the same way Cassini for
the first time could see that there were
big particles in the Rings at the outer
edge of the B ring these objects are
probably made of a glimmer a shion’s of
ring particles and the way these come
together and coalesce give us
information about how the planets in our
solar system actually came together and
formed as well this is a view of the
largest moon in the Saturn system this
is giant Titan it’s 3,000 miles across
about the size of the planet Mercury a
Titan has a liquid water ocean
underneath its icy crust and this is one
possible place that might Harbor life
Titan has a thick nitrogen atmosphere
it’s about four times as dense as the
atmosphere in this room and the surface
is a chilly – 290 degrees Fahrenheit
there’s also methane in the atmosphere
of Titan and that methane at the top is
broken apart by sunlight forms these
long smoggy hydrocarbons and gives Titan
that sort of golden colored haze and we
can’t really see through the haze and it
took ESA’s Huygens probe to parachute
down through to the surface of Titan to
give us our first view of an amazing
world it turns out that methane plays
the same role on Titan that water plays
here on the earth with the same kind of
weather only now you have methane clouds
methane rain methane flowing through the
river channels and methane filling the
lakes and seas in fact if you look at
this image behind me that topmost black
smudge that’s like Geum RA the second
largest sea on Titan and if we look up
close at that particular sea
here’s the radar view at the long
wavelengths you can penetrate down
through the haze you can see the river
channels of methane flowing into this
particular Lake and even even tiny
islands in this particular see this this
seal IG MRI is about 50 percent bigger
than Lake Superior here on the earth and
it’s about 500 feet deep that’s
something we found out with Cassini and
if you take the seeds and you add up all
the hydrocarbons that are present in the
Seas it turns out there’s about a
hundred times more hydrocarbons on Titan
than all the reservoirs here on the
earth it’s just too bad Titan so far
away or our hydrocarbon problems would
be solved and the Seas themselves are
very interesting because you wonder with
liquid methane could a form of life
exist that would use liquid methane
rather than water to form and move about
so very intriguing to think about that
for Titan now we move on to another
world another moon around Saturn this is
Enceladus Enceladus is only about 300
miles across so one tenth the size of
Titan and what you see here is an icy
white surface with very few craters and
the brightness and the absence of
craters tell us that this is a very very
young surface and Cassini was the first
to see at the South Pole you can see
these bluish fractures down here at the
bottom we nicknamed them tiger stripes
they kind of reminded us of tiger
stripes and we were really amazed to see
what was coming out of these tiger
stripes on this tiny moon I was amazed
as everyone else when we first took a
look and saw and this is in a backlit
view coming out of those tiger stripes
were Jets Jets of water vapor and water
ice with some other compounds mixed in
we saw dozens and dozens of these Jets
actively going off some of the tiniest
particles escape and actually go on to
form a ring which in sulle this is orbit
the e ring so just so intriguing to see
in fact Cassini actually flew through
those Jets and sampled their composition
and we found carbon dioxide
we found ammonia we found salts we found
the kinds of ingredients that you’d need
to find to have life and it turns out
there’s a liquid water ocean underneath
Enceladus South Pole supplying these
Jets and vents and in a sense we have
free samples we just don’t know if there
might be life inside of these free
samples so we have two worlds Titan and
Enceladus that might possibly have life
and finally another iconic backlit image
this image was taken when Cassini was in
Saturn’s shadow this doesn’t happen very
often in the mission we took this mosaic
that blueish ring around the outside
that’s the e ring created by tiny
particles coming from Enceladus now if
you look at that white ring completely
around Saturn sunlight is refracted
through the atmosphere and that’s every
sunrise and sunset on Saturn seen all at
the same time there’s actually three
other planets in this image if you look
at the upper left there Mars and Venus a
little bit difficult to see and if you
just look here right here that tiny pale
blue dot is actually the earth actually
the earth and the moon and when in the
20 minutes when we’re taking those
pictures of the earth in the moon we
actually ask people go outside wave at
Saturn
so your photons can be captured by
Cassini in these pictures of the earth
and the moon and while you’re at it out
there weigh me in fact how many people
here waved is Saturn on that particular
day well that’s great yeah my husband
Tom and I were out there waving as well
and we asked people to take pictures of
themselves selfies and send us those
selfies and we took all of those selfies
and we recreated the Saturn backlit
mosaic here it is made up of thousands
of selfies so we were really happy to
see all of the interest that the public
had and we’re very grateful to NASA for
continuing to fund the extended missions
it’s been 10 years we hope to have
another three years to our mission as
well and very recently we had a naming
contest we asked people you know we’ve
got this exciting 22 orbits at the end
of our mission help us name those orbits
and we got 2,000 different entries
sorted through those and we came up with
the winning entry and I’m pleased to
present for the very first time tonight
the winner of that naming contest
Cassini grand finale so thank you so
much for your contributions and that’s
that the name of the end of our mission
and I’m going to be showing you a short
movie that’ll show you something about
the science we’ll be collecting in the
last three years including a chance to
see what one of those orbits look like
in the grand finale and with Cassini we
had a rare opportunity and we seized it
now sit back and enjoy the movie
Cassini is there in the Saturn system
now has been making discoveries for the
last several years and there’s more to
come
by studying the satellites in the
Saturnian system we begin to understand
something also about the origin of the
solar system there is strong evidence
now that most of the surface of Titan is
in fact covered with organic material of
some kind we’re going to be looking at
lakes on the surface of this moon in
detail we’re going to be looking at the
atmosphere to see how the climate
changes over time
we have some global circulation models
that tell us – the winds pick up we
think there could be waves on the lakes
of liquid methane
can you imagine anybody thinking that we
would discover active cryovolcanism on
one of these moons geysers one of the
things that we’ll do in the next couple
of years is make the first ever flyby
through the plume when the plume output
is at its maximum and then of course
there’s the planet Saturn itself as we
go through our series of orbits and as
the seasons change it’s like having a
brand new mission one Saturn year is
nearly 30 earth years to be there for
nearly half of a Saturn year is
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity the Sun
now is coming up on the North Pole so
we’re getting to see territory that was
in darkness when we first arrived in
2004 pretty soon we’ll have the whole
hexagon and the hurricane inside of it
illuminated by the Sun and then of
course the missions end itself is
completely unique starting in 2016
ending in 2017 these orbits will take us
up and over the North and South Poles of
the planet we’re actually going to dive
in between the innermost edge of the
d-ring and the buffer atmosphere of the
planet itself from that we’re going to
learn how is Saturn constructed from
inside out we’ll also get the magnetic
field of the planet the mass of the
Rings for the very first time and get to
sample a place that no spacecraft has
ever flown before
this is a mission that cannot be
duplicated so we really want to take
advantage of this opportunity to observe
seasonal variation in the system
you
ten years ago today the Cassini
spacecraft flawlessly executed a
nail-biting 96-minute burn to become the
first man-made object to go into orbit
around Saturn and Cassini carried with
it ESA’s Huygens probe which we later
sent down to the surface of Titan and so
we celebrate today because he needs
ten-year anniversary and I’ll share with
you just a few of the amazing findings
that we’ve made with Cassini what we
have here is one of my favorite pictures
of Saturn in the Rings it’s a view that
you won’t see from the earth Cassini is
high above Saturn’s North Pole looking
down in the Rings form a giant bullseye
around the planet and you can actually
see Saturn’s shadow going out across the
Rings up on the north pole you see a
greenish six-sided area we call this the
hexagon very interesting and intriguing
kind of storm Saturn is the second
largest planet in our solar system it
only has pretty much a hydrogen
atmosphere no solid surface underneath
it and if you could build a bathtub big
enough to hold Saturn Saturn would float
so how big is Saturn really well if we
put the earth and the moon to scale next
to Saturn along with the distance
between them we can see that Saturn is
indeed huge in fact it would take 764
earths to fill up the volume of Saturn a
giant planet indeed well let’s look a
little bit more closely at that north
polar hexagon if you look at the image
on your left you can see this greenish
area surrounded by a six-sided Jetstream
Voyager 30 years ago saw this Jetstream
with these six sides and it’s still
there today it’s a very interesting
puzzle greenish in color that’s it’s
winter hemisphere as the Sun continues
to shine in the north will see that
greenish color become more the golden
color were used to for Saturn’s
atmosphere tiny white clouds circle
inside the hexagon and Cassini
discovered at the very
the hexagon a giant hurricane that
hurricane would span half the
continental United States it would go
from Washington DC to Tulsa Oklahoma a
giant storm the sun is shining from the
right and you can actually see shadows
from the eye wall of that giant
hurricane we study the hexagon in the
hurricane net Saturn to get a better
understanding of the weather here on the
earth let’s move on to Saturn’s rings I
actually started working on rings and on
the Voyager days and so they hold a
special place in my heart there’s a lot
of intricate detailed structure inside
of the Rings the Rings are made up of
billions upon billions of icy particles
orbiting Saturn in an intricate cosmic
dance and every once in a while these
particles jostle and run into one
another the Rings have very simple names
as you go outward you can have you can
see you have the a ring on your far
right then there’s a gap the very bright
B ring most of the particles are there
the particles range in size from tiny
marbles to giant mountain sized
particles that grayish ring is the C
ring and then finally the innermost ring
the D ring and at the end of the mission
Cassini is going to dive in between
Saturn’s D ring in the top of the
atmosphere for some remarkable brand new
science you’ll notice that there’s a
black gap in between the a ring and the
B ring that’s the Cassini division named
after the astronomer Cassini who first
discovered it and our mission is named
in honor of that astronomer well Cassini
had a rare opportunity in 2009 we were
actually able to observe the Rings when
the Sun was edged on to them and
anything that would cast a shadow would
be visible and seen so let’s look at the
outer edge of the B ring and see what
Cassini saw in 2009 here’s the outer
edge of the B ring that bright ring with
all of those structures the Cassini
division on top the sun is shining from
the top down and you can see all sorts
of shadows here are particles that are
one or two miles in size
casting these long shadows at the edge
of the ring and the ring itself is only
about 30 feet thick a good analogy for
how we see these shadows imagine
yourself riding along on the space
station you look down on Egypt and you
want to find the pyramids but if you
look at noon you won’t see any shadows
and it’ll be very hard to pick them out
now imagine that you look for these same
pyramids at sunset and they’ll be
casting these long shadows and they’ll
be very easy to see on the desert in
Egypt and in the same way Cassini for
the first time could see that there were
big particles in the Rings at the outer
edge of the B ring these objects are
probably made of a glimmer a shion’s of
ring particles and the way these come
together and coalesce give us
information about how the planets in our
solar system actually came together and
formed as well this is a view of the
largest moon in the Saturn system this
is giant Titan it’s 3,000 miles across
about the size of the planet Mercury a
Titan has a liquid water ocean
underneath its icy crust and this is one
possible place that might Harbor life
Titan has a thick nitrogen atmosphere
it’s about four times as dense as the
atmosphere in this room and the surface
is a chilly – 290 degrees Fahrenheit
there’s also methane in the atmosphere
of Titan and that methane at the top is
broken apart by sunlight forms these
long smoggy hydrocarbons and gives Titan
that sort of golden colored haze and we
can’t really see through the haze and it
took ESA’s Huygens probe to parachute
down through to the surface of Titan to
give us our first view of an amazing
world it turns out that methane plays
the same role on Titan that water plays
here on the earth with the same kind of
weather only now you have methane clouds
methane rain methane flowing through the
river channels and methane filling the
lakes and seas in fact if you look at
this image behind me that topmost black
smudge that’s like Geum RA the second
largest sea on Titan and if we look up
close at that particular sea
here’s the radar view at the long
wavelengths you can penetrate down
through the haze you can see the river
channels of methane flowing into this
particular Lake and even even tiny
islands in this particular see this this
seal IG MRI is about 50 percent bigger
than Lake Superior here on the earth and
it’s about 500 feet deep that’s
something we found out with Cassini and
if you take the seeds and you add up all
the hydrocarbons that are present in the
Seas it turns out there’s about a
hundred times more hydrocarbons on Titan
than all the reservoirs here on the
earth it’s just too bad Titan so far
away or our hydrocarbon problems would
be solved and the Seas themselves are
very interesting because you wonder with
liquid methane could a form of life
exist that would use liquid methane
rather than water to form and move about
so very intriguing to think about that
for Titan now we move on to another
world another moon around Saturn this is
Enceladus Enceladus is only about 300
miles across so one tenth the size of
Titan and what you see here is an icy
white surface with very few craters and
the brightness and the absence of
craters tell us that this is a very very
young surface and Cassini was the first
to see at the South Pole you can see
these bluish fractures down here at the
bottom we nicknamed them tiger stripes
they kind of reminded us of tiger
stripes and we were really amazed to see
what was coming out of these tiger
stripes on this tiny moon I was amazed
as everyone else when we first took a
look and saw and this is in a backlit
view coming out of those tiger stripes
were Jets Jets of water vapor and water
ice with some other compounds mixed in
we saw dozens and dozens of these Jets
actively going off some of the tiniest
particles escape and actually go on to
form a ring which in sulle this is orbit
the e ring so just so intriguing to see
in fact Cassini actually flew through
those Jets and sampled their composition
and we found carbon dioxide
we found ammonia we found salts we found
the kinds of ingredients that you’d need
to find to have life and it turns out
there’s a liquid water ocean underneath
Enceladus South Pole supplying these
Jets and vents and in a sense we have
free samples we just don’t know if there
might be life inside of these free
samples so we have two worlds Titan and
Enceladus that might possibly have life
and finally another iconic backlit image
this image was taken when Cassini was in
Saturn’s shadow this doesn’t happen very
often in the mission we took this mosaic
that blueish ring around the outside
that’s the e ring created by tiny
particles coming from Enceladus now if
you look at that white ring completely
around Saturn sunlight is refracted
through the atmosphere and that’s every
sunrise and sunset on Saturn seen all at
the same time there’s actually three
other planets in this image if you look
at the upper left there Mars and Venus a
little bit difficult to see and if you
just look here right here that tiny pale
blue dot is actually the earth actually
the earth and the moon and when in the
20 minutes when we’re taking those
pictures of the earth in the moon we
actually ask people go outside wave at
Saturn
so your photons can be captured by
Cassini in these pictures of the earth
and the moon and while you’re at it out
there weigh me in fact how many people
here waved is Saturn on that particular
day well that’s great yeah my husband
Tom and I were out there waving as well
and we asked people to take pictures of
themselves selfies and send us those
selfies and we took all of those selfies
and we recreated the Saturn backlit
mosaic here it is made up of thousands
of selfies so we were really happy to
see all of the interest that the public
had and we’re very grateful to NASA for
continuing to fund the extended missions
it’s been 10 years we hope to have
another three years to our mission as
well and very recently we had a naming
contest we asked people you know we’ve
got this exciting 22 orbits at the end
of our mission help us name those orbits
and we got 2,000 different entries
sorted through those and we came up with
the winning entry and I’m pleased to
present for the very first time tonight
the winner of that naming contest
Cassini grand finale so thank you so
much for your contributions and that’s
that the name of the end of our mission
and I’m going to be showing you a short
movie that’ll show you something about
the science we’ll be collecting in the
last three years including a chance to
see what one of those orbits look like
in the grand finale and with Cassini we
had a rare opportunity and we seized it
now sit back and enjoy the movie
Cassini is there in the Saturn system
now has been making discoveries for the
last several years and there’s more to
come
by studying the satellites in the
Saturnian system we begin to understand
something also about the origin of the
solar system there is strong evidence
now that most of the surface of Titan is
in fact covered with organic material of
some kind we’re going to be looking at
lakes on the surface of this moon in
detail we’re going to be looking at the
atmosphere to see how the climate
changes over time
we have some global circulation models
that tell us – the winds pick up we
think there could be waves on the lakes
of liquid methane
can you imagine anybody thinking that we
would discover active cryovolcanism on
one of these moons geysers one of the
things that we’ll do in the next couple
of years is make the first ever flyby
through the plume when the plume output
is at its maximum and then of course
there’s the planet Saturn itself as we
go through our series of orbits and as
the seasons change it’s like having a
brand new mission one Saturn year is
nearly 30 earth years to be there for
nearly half of a Saturn year is
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity the Sun
now is coming up on the North Pole so
we’re getting to see territory that was
in darkness when we first arrived in
2004 pretty soon we’ll have the whole
hexagon and the hurricane inside of it
illuminated by the Sun and then of
course the missions end itself is
completely unique starting in 2016
ending in 2017 these orbits will take us
up and over the North and South Poles of
the planet we’re actually going to dive
in between the innermost edge of the
d-ring and the buffer atmosphere of the
planet itself from that we’re going to
learn how is Saturn constructed from
inside out we’ll also get the magnetic
field of the planet the mass of the
Rings for the very first time and get to
sample a place that no spacecraft has
ever flown before
this is a mission that cannot be
duplicated so we really want to take
advantage of this opportunity to observe
seasonal variation in the system
you
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