Hi. Good evening, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us.
The Oxford University Aeronautical Society, in partnership with the physics department,
are very pleased to welcome you all to our first event of the new year.
Well, we'll be hearing from Professor David Southwood,
who will be sharing his memories and his work on the Cassini-huygens mission to Saturn and Tyson.
David's been involved in the mission for quite some years now.
First is the principal investigator on the magnetometer team based at Imperial College London.
And that was the instrument that made many remarkable discoveries about the Saturn system, including of an atmosphere around the moon,
Enceladus, and more recently, trying to determine the actual rotation rate of the planet.
Dave We've not yet done so.
Someone should really ask how long a day is on Saturn at the end of the talk.
I think David's also served as the chief scientist at ESA for some ten years
and more recently has become the chair of the UK Space Agency Steering Group.
He's also a senior research investigator at Imperial College London and a past president of the Royal Astronomical Society.
So we're very grateful to him for having such a distinguished speaker come to give our opening talk of the term.
We're going to hand over just for a couple of minutes to Colin Wilson from the physics department here,
who would like to talk to you a little bit about one of the instruments on Cassini that was built right here in Oxford.
And then David will get started. There'll be plenty of time for questions at the end.
So on behalf of the aeronautical society and of the physics department, thank you very much for joining us.
Well, Ben stolen a lot of the introduction already, so I'll keep this brief.
But just to mention that we've been had the pleasure of working with the Cassini mission and with David and his Isa Rolf for many years.
So while David was busy working on magnetometers and getting getting them delivered to the launch pad here in Oxford,
we also had a role in this mission, which you can think of when you see some of the pictures we built,
part of the infrared spectrometer on Cassini and I have some of the bits we built right here.
So this is built just across the road. So this is the heart of the infrared spectrometer,
which is looking at gaseous compositions and surface temperatures and salaries and things like that.
And so that was launched in 97, a long, long time ago.
But you'll hear far more about that from David. So I'll hand back over to you.
Thank you, Colin. It's a great pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me.
And you know that it's a great pleasure to be invited by the Aeronautical Society.
There are things I've done in my life that seem very unlikely.
I'm being invited by the Aeronautical Society of the University of Oxford is something I wouldn't have predicted.
And I'm extremely proud to be here because I'm going to talk about something that's a mixture of engineering.
There's aeronautics in it and also a lot of physics.
I basically was a physicist when I was a scientist.
Are we not going to do any really hard science?
I'm going to try and explain. And there are other people here who know what this is like,
how it feels to be involved in a long term space mission and to see it gradually come to life, to work.
And the most incredible thing sometimes find things you've predicted and sometimes find things that you haven't predicted.
It's advisable. I would always advise having both of those.
If everything you haven't predicted, then somehow you've swindled the people who provided the finance.
And if all you do is show what you found is what you predicted, then why did you bother to do it?
So somewhere in between and I don't know, this particular mission, it's been just under half my life and two thirds of my career.
I've been involved with this mission, so you can imagine how I feel about it.
It's a very personal relationship. And indeed, I was just talking to Fred Taylor about the end of the mission, ten days or two weeks, three weeks ago.
I really at some point thought, why am I here? I feel very unhappy.
Well, you will have to put up with that, but it is a lovely story.
Okay. Well, let me start with I'm also I didn't say this, but I'm also a patron of the British science fiction foundation.
Okay. Amazing Saturn. There is a little baby that landed on Titan Wiggins.
What's interesting about this is the absence of the ESA logo.
This was a joint mission the previous year,
and ASA and some of you who are interested in science fiction will recognise what's being plagiarised here.
Amazing stories. And I have to say my predecessor at ISA, he learned his lesson.
But when this poster was made, he refused to have the ISA signature on it, so to speak.
I think something he totally regretted because for me this sums it up.
It was science fiction when we started.
It's turned into science fact. And I absolutely love this.
This poster is from I think around 1990, so really when the mission was just being kicked off by Nasser.
To me we've learnt a lot in Europe in terms of communicating with the person in the street and so on,
and also explaining that when we were exploring the planets, frankly, we are doing at times turning science fiction into science fact.
And so there we are.
How did it all begin? Well, it began in the early eighties.
Some of you look just about old enough to remember those days and.
I like to think of it. Over 30 years ago, actually 30 over 34 years ago.
A small group. Which actually involved me and Fred Taylor.
It's hard to believe, but 34 years ago, Europe was not really involved in planetary science at all.
There were people who wanted to change that. But there were also people who didn't want to change it because planetary science was expensive.
The planets were Terra Americana.
Or maybe Ruzicka, but not European.
European. And there was an awful lot of space astronomy to do.
There was a lot of solar physics. There was a lot of solar terrestrial physics and plenty of other things to do.
Let's leave it to the Americans. Happily went on to science,
has senior scientists in Europe thought otherwise and they looked around for junior scientists to
kind of envisage what the future might be in collaboration between Europe and the United States.
And I think I was involved in I just actually come back from the United States, which was important because the Research Council,
such as it was then actually vetoed any travel funds for me to go to the meetings of this small group.
But because I had just left the US had a little pool of money I could attach in the U.S. so that
allowed me to take part as a Briton in this collaboration between Europe and the United States.
So just I love America.
Thank you very much. That's very important. It's actually wonderful for me.
Now, nobody doubts that Europe is out there on what I think of as the final frontier out there in the solar system.
But it's hard to believe. But it was very difficult.
And I think, Fred, you can probably remember the feelings around that time Fred was involved in looking at terrestrial planet possible cooperation,
and I was involved in looking at the giant planets that was actually I had the easiest task, I think.
Anyhow, the result is that no.
This thing. It's now.
The most distant standing artefact of our civilisation is European.
In fact, I don't know if anyone here is British.
Yeah, if you're British. Yeah. Okay. Good. You have me also.
So it's actually had a remarkable amount of British technology in it.
And the team, the Horgan's team.
To my astonishment, when I joined, when I became their boss at ISA, I found half the team came from the British Isles.
I say the British Isles because it was an Irishman, but that was very unusual in the European team.
So it's something where, you know, you can take a little bit of national pride.
And of course, it was the large amount of British industrial work that led a few years later.
Beagle two two seem something that the UK could do.
And of course, whatever one thinks about the loss of Beagle two,
what I would point out to an aeronautical society is that it landed, did the whole entry, descent and landing successfully.
And nobody has done that miles before.
So again, those of you who have the good fortune misfortune to be British, it's a little bit of pride to be held there.
Okay. So giant planets already.
By 1982, 83, the Americans were committed to going to Jupiter with a probe to go into the Jupiter atmosphere.
In a way, the task of identifying what we could do was obvious.
Saturn was the obvious target. It's an absolutely.
It really is an extraordinary system.
I mean, it's anyone who's ever looked at Saturn through a telescope and I trust some of you have done that,
will immediately see what a beautiful thing it is. Those rings are actually particularly good at this particular season.
I mean, this season of Saturn in season, it's extraordinary.
We live in the same solar system as that. But then when you look at the rest of the Saturn system, you also very much taken aback.
There are 62 moons, at least there were last time I checked, which was a couple of days ago because I thought should have some credibility here.
It's a solar system in its own of its own.
But then it has this remarkable object in the solar system, in its in the Saturn system, that is.
If Titan weren't captured by the gravity of Saturn's orbit about Saturn, if it weren't, it would be a planet.
There's no doubt about that.
But it's actually, even then, a very special object, because in this room here on Earth, what's the major constituent of what permeates this room?
It's nitrogen. We live in a nitrogen atmosphere with a little, you know, some oxygen, 20% oxygen and some CO2 and H2O and so on.
Titan is the only object in our solar system with anything resembling our atmosphere.
The surface pressure is about 50% higher on the pressure right now on the surface of the earth, but it's primarily nitrogen.
There's hydrogen, there's carbon and of course compounds of those things in the atmosphere.
It's orange discovered by Christiaan Huygens.
It's the Orange Moon. The reason it's orange is the compounds of carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen,
which make things that we would normally find in smog in on in the terrestrial environment.
I remember we used to say that the atmosphere on Titan is not unlike the atmosphere somewhere over JPL, which is in Los Angeles, in California.
And what's missing in the atmosphere is not much.
There's no gaseous oxygen. However, the early earth, the prebiotic atmosphere of Earth didn't contain oxygen either, it emerged.
From the earth itself, from the rocks. As far as we know, there's plenty of oxygen in the interior of Titan because it's largely made of water ice.
So I will tell you my science fiction, not the science fiction story.
I always like to think a billion years from now, when the red giant phase of the sun has swallowed our earth,
titan will be warmer, the sun will be slightly cooler, but Titan will be warmer.
And as a result, you can expect oxygen to emerge into the atmosphere.
And I love to think of the little green men coming out of the slime bagging on the side
of polygons that will be our civilisation being passed to what may become another.
That is science fiction, but it's something I don't know.
For me, it's magical.
So Titan, the largest moon of Saturn and nitrogen atmosphere, like a surface pressure, one and a half bar temperature -179 Celsius.
Something I will ask you about in a minute. Methane, rich in the atmosphere, complex, organic, prebiotic chemistry at work.
There's an awful lot of nasty stuff involving C, H and M mixing together and doing.
Well, I'm a physicist, but that becomes chemistry. Yeah, somebody has to do it.
The thing about the -179 Celsius, that's the temperature at which we ship LNG from the Middle East to our shores.
And that's the reason that is is it's the other trip it gives you the triple point of methane and LNG is effectively liquid natural.
Liquid natural gas is effectively methane.
And here we have an atmosphere with methane in it as a significant minor constituent in our current atmosphere at Earth.
We have a significant minor constituent of our atmosphere called water vapour.
Okay. It's very important for us because meteorology on our planet really functions in large part by the capacity of water
to absorb and release energy as it switches between solid liquid and gas because there's heat coming in from the sun.
I could give you a lecture on meteorology, but this is what gives you the meteorology on earth.
And to be frank, this fact on the methane, we right from the start said this may give you we would expect on Titan, in fact,
because there is an atmosphere and so on, a methane driven meteorology, methane should appear solid, liquid and gaseous.
That was a prediction and it was true. I it was an immense I don't know.
Sense of relief that we haven't been lying all those years anyhow.
So so there you are. The interesting thing was we Europeans really felt we needed a challenge in order to,
if you like, make the case for Europe doing something in planetary science.
We needed a, you know, a central role.
And so very early on,
we started talking about Europe providing the lander because it was clear we would send a probe to Titan and not to Saturn on the grounds that
we knew eventually the Galileo probe would go into the Jupiter atmosphere and feeling that we didn't need to do that with another giant planet.
It was much more exciting to touch down on Titan, and I hope you can begin to feel why we saw this was something that was clear.
So we Europeans to say there were five Europeans and five Americans in the team and sadly, 34 years on, only five of us survived.
But we left. Well, we needed to get there.
And of course, you need a mother ship to get some of you look again will recognise down there pilot of the future.
I absolutely adored this when I was.
In the early fifties, I suppose when I was growing up, I just never thought I would be involved in going to Seattle.
It didn't occur to me it was a possibility. Much as I would love to.
I do remember always being troubled by the fact that I could get into the rocket, get up to the driving seat, and leave the car door open.
I have to say, I did query it and I was told just shows what a lousy Batman he have.
If you remember, Digby was his Batman. But the door should have been shut, shouldn't it?
But it's still a very bad place to leave a car. And at least I would have put a hard top on it before I left it there.
Okay. So let me now take you towards the story.
It's a long story. It began in the eighties, early eighties.
And in fact,
it seemed like an immensely long time between our first discussions in California and persuading both Israel and Nasser that we should go ahead.
In fact, when I look back, I realise it was incredibly fast.
It was only just over six years, which seemed a long time when you really wanted something.
But I look back now at how long people have to wait for space missions and I realise how lucky we were.
And it was because I think we just got the spirit of the time, right.
And in particular I think the idea of Europe providing the lander the Americans were very unsure about that was our American scientific friends.
What we knew was that France, which is, you know, a fairly powerful European space nation, would like the idea of building a lander for Titan.
Now people say, well, why would France? France has something called the force to France.
And here, without ever saying anything about it, they could demonstrate, let's call it re-entry technology.
But of course, it was used for entry into an earth like atmosphere, and it showed that France really did have an ICBM capability.
Now, nobody said anything about it at the time. It gave us the quiet confidence, since we had very little faith that the French could do this,
that we were in any doubt that we would get the ablation right when hurricanes hit the atmosphere, as long as we got the angel of attack.
Right. I mean, the key thing is you don't bounce off or you don't burn up.
But we really felt we were on the engineering, was on the shield was going to be fine.
Okay. So you can see the launch came also again, compared with current days, it seemed like forever launched in 1997.
So about seven years after the selection of the scientific team.
So building you build, we built the instruments and of course, you know,
it's not building the instruments so much as testing the instruments and making
sure that you've thought of every possible thing your instrument has to survive.
One of the worst bits is, of course, going up on the rocket right at the very beginning.
And we then flew classic what's now classic solar system exploration for robots.
You fly to other places in the solar system and the place you want to go and pick up gravity use gravity assists.
So we went to Venus and then to Earth. Then a Jupiter flyby finally kicked us out to Saturn.
The problem then is you've got to stop when you get to Saturn,
or you will just go past Saturn at a very high speed and continue out of the solar system.
So we'll come to that in a minute. Finally, the mission was supposed to last for four, four years, so we should have finished in 2008.
It went on to 2017. I have absolutely no shame about that.
I think it's absolutely wonderful. So it's about greater than 35 years.
So I have a bit of credibility myself. And you please close your eyes if you find things difficult at this point.
Here is me. Very good.
I can't believe I really looked like that.
But there you are. Anyhow, it was me in 1990, the first PSG ever as a science group for the mission.
But waiting around the corner appointed the next year as Nasr administrator was nemesis for the mission.
Anyone remember this man, Daniel Goldin? Yes.
I had been trying to forget, but you just come here.
A very interesting man. He is the Nazareth administrator who served the longest time, which is surprising.
He survived several presidents appointed, I guess, by George H.W. Bush.
And then he survived through the Clinton.
He came in in 1992 with a slogan Faster, better, better, cheaper.
To which we still say that, of course, but the you then ask, you can choose two out of the three.
What you can get is all three at once. And I think that was proven.
But unfortunately, it took seven years to prove it. So it wasn't till 1999 that I would say Nasser put faster, beat, better, cheaper to death.
They they finally recognised that they were cutting too many corners and that did not lead to better if it did, even if it did lead to cheaper.
And unfortunately, we were going to be launched in 1996 at this time.
So we didn't have we couldn't wait until 1999 for Nasser to learn the error of its ways.
Oddly enough, I used to be hired visiting position at the University of California, Los Angeles,
and at one time I was renting a house and he was my neighbour comes into the story because it meant
I could write to him on a personal basis when he actually brought the mission up for cancellation.
I was then involved with Isa and I wrote to him,
but at the end I could ensure that he read the letter I wrote because I gave him some personal greetings so he could have anyone,
any apparatchik below him would recognise. He'd better read it because it's clear I had some personal communication with them.
I know that had an effect because a few day, probably about three or four weeks later after I got the letter a gong,
along with a lot of diplomatic effort on the part of many European countries, I met the chief scientist of Nasser on the Hubble repair mission.
So 93, I suppose. And she she was introduced me, France Cordova.
And she said I had to sit with my boss whilst he read a letter from you.
And I thought, Great. That's all I asked that he read the letter.
And of course, in the end, he backed down from cancellation.
And that was, I think, very critical. And now my role I'm not sure of at all.
I suspect the the diplomatic effort of all the other members, member states of ISA in particular, was immensely important.
Here's why you couldn't make it. You couldn't make it cheaper.
Cassini was going to be a giant nearly seven metres high, so truly gigantic four metres wide and not simply to go inside.
The largest fairing that's available for metres is the magic number seven electric generator, three thermoelectric generators.
So incredible amounts of power and also political problems associated with the launch of that.
But we survived and 30 kilograms of plutonium, which is why Cassini had to die.
It wasn't just that we might have taken human.
Oh, well, we might fling anything from Earth that might get mixed up with places where life might evolve in the Saturn system.
Far worse would be to have Cassini end up colliding with somewhere where Earth might were.
Life might be evolving simply because of that plutonium.
I think you probably know plutonium is highly poisonous to people like us.
We aren't the only organisms that do not want to be hit by plutonium.
So that was really the absolute killer. Literally the killer argument.
It had to be destroyed in the atmosphere of Saturn and have it collide with either Titan or Enceladus or indeed somewhere as yet unknown.
Well, something might be going on that might lead to life.
Okay. So, okay.
There was no way to make Cassini going faster. The cheaper.
I've convinced you. I'm sure. This just gives you.
Might be better. Yeah. You get an idea of the scale.
Those are real people. We're. I all the images from this come from Maza or ISA videos.
The music was attached by somebody.
I don't know. I found this on the web and have never been able to identify who put it together.
This the launch. If you get to a night launch with a cloud, it's wonderful.
The whole sky lights up as you go through the cloud. Absolutely perfect.
Launch. Titan four. Be the largest rocket available at the time.
Only the Saturn five has been bigger than that. In other words, bigger than a shuttle launch.
The Earth does move, I can assure you. So there we are, bouncing around the solar system, past the earth.
Venus. Looks like Venus, actually.
I think that must be Mars. We should have the asteroid belt.
And of course, we'll come to Jupiter. And then finally continuously calling back.
We had almost continuous data during the cruise until on June the 30th, 2004.
We arrived above the rings of Saturn.
Anyone recognise the music? Okay.
It's, I think, Rocky five.
Okay. And those of you with an iPhone with the appropriate app perhaps could check.
But for I, I, I think the way the music fits at least gets my feelings about this very well.
So I'm afraid getting to subtle is only the beginning for the scientists.
It's a major achievement for the operators.
And the key the key thing is you have to get as close to something as you can and then fire the main engine 400 Newton Engine two,
stop to make sure you don't continue out of the system.
And so the edge of the solar system, the 400 Newton engine, was fired, actually an asymmetric firing,
partly because of the magnetometer, because we wanted to take and take measurements.
In fact, I can assure you the one time we fired the 400 Newton engine does make the whole spacecraft wobble.
I measured it with the magnetometer, but a nail biting situation.
Ah, of course there is the problem of light speed.
Basically when that engine fires and we didn't know for more than an hour and a half whether it had fired.
I got to say, I'm a scientist. I very cool.
And you are nervous waiting and this is very strange feeling when not really understanding relativity,
you realise something has occurred but you don't know what it is, it's already occurred, you can't stop it.
And anyhow, to take you through the rings of Saturn, because to get close to Saturn you have to do something about the rings.
We went through the rings of Saturn where there was not much dust, relatively speaking,
and then above the rings of Saturn during this rocket engine firing that is represented now with real data.
The pictures are an animation, but here there are big antennae and they're being hit by dust.
But noise is an acoustic signal from the dust hitting the antennae, the radio antennae.
And here we have to do it twice, crossing the ring plane again.
And the last time on the nightside, which is sort of slightly more frightening, you can't see the light.
So I tell you, it's on the opposite side most. Anyhow, 30th of June, we came through, you know, Americans are very lively people.
And so mayhem breaks out when the signal pops up.
You may have noticed we Europeans are trying to copy this, but Americans do it with real conviction.
And what's particularly nice, this lady, Julie Webster, was in command.
She was the flight director for the insertion into orbit for the Saturn in 2004.
She was also in command for dropping Cassini into the atmosphere of Saturn 13 years later.
And she's, as you can see, she's happy.
I've got to say, there's somebody in the back row there with white hair going a bit negative with the high five.
I mean, I got to say, oh, that's Charles Elachi and I are delighted.
We were both principal investigators on Cassini, so we both had a very personal involvement.
Charles Elachi was head of the Jet Propulsion Lab. By the time we got to Saturn and I was head of the ISA science program,
we both kind of shirked our responsibilities as principal investigators, you should say.
We passed on to others, but what a feeling.
The next thing to come to is the landing on Titan.
And I always you know, I had thought landing on Titan was a European probe.
Was really fundamental psychologically for us Europeans to feel we were out there on the final frontier with our American colleagues.
That was quite a challenge. There's an awful lot of aeronautics to do because you're taking a blunt object and dropping it into an atmosphere.
You've got angle that you have to get right or you will bounce off the atmosphere or you will burn up.
And we only got one close look of the atmosphere.
We had some information from the voyages. I have to say, around about 1980, here we were in 2000 for rather a long time afterwards.
We got in October 2004.
We got a close look. We did a flyby of Titan and that gave us our first close look at the atmosphere of Titan,
ably helped with the contribution of the infrared device, which from the University of Oxford.
Thank you very much. With the next three months, there was a lot of you know, we really felt we had to get it right.
I learnt the tone more than I've ever dreamt I would about this business of getting a blunt object not to burn up and not to scatter.
And that was that probably I was most nervous about. I Beagle had failed by then the year before, almost exactly one year before.
On Christmas Day, we learned Hogan's go.
Actually, my instrument checked that it had gone because it had a magnetic field.
And so we use a magnetometer to check a that it's rotating at the rate it's supposed to be, but it's gone.
And that was sort of Christmas Day, 2004.
We then have three weeks to wait.
And in the previous Christmas, some of you may remember Colin Pillinger on television having lost Beagle two again on Christmas Day.
We didn't get the signal back. Terribly emotional.
Needless to say, somebody has to be guilty and is the person in charge of the European programme.
I mean, we Britons always know the Europeans are guilty for a start and the person in charge of the Mars Express program.
I got dragged in front of parliamentary committee in this country and told I didn't spend enough on Beagle two and believe it or not,
had the same experience in France. Except they objected to me.
Having spent as much as I did, I still feel I spent about the right amount and I still feel dreadful that it didn't work.
But I feel wonderful that it landed in the end.
We found out a year or two ago successfully.
I didn't know that in 2004. I didn't sleep very well for three solid weeks until we got to Titan.
We it was again quite a complicated sequence coming down because the main interest,
you didn't know whether you were going to land in a methane sea lake or indeed on solid ground, you knew it would be one or the other.
Organs was designed to float, or rather I would should say, to sink slowly.
But we have no idea, because nobody had ever seen through the smog.
Nobody had ever seen the surface of Titan. But we were aware there was a very strong likelihood of a liquid surface,
just as if you were coming to earth without having seen the surface of earth, you wouldn't be too surprised.
Randomly choosing a point on the surface if it had a liquid surface.
Two thirds of the earth's surface is liquid. So we thought the atmosphere was the primary target and so go down as slowly as possible.
In fact, it worked beautifully. What was remarkable, though, is we did land in a dry riverbed.
I'll show you in a minute. And we got.
Data from two and a half, well, 2 hours, 28 minutes of descent, and then a further hour and a quarter or so from the surface.
We'll talk about that in a minute and I'll try and give you the ride down.
It's very complicated. And don't imagine I'm expecting you to understand this.
This is a way of trying to get on top of the data. And remember, Hoynes is spinning like crazy.
And so you're not just looking down, you're looking sideways and you're whizzing around.
So, of course, when you've got all the data back,
you can reconstruct what it would have been like to slowly descend without rotating, without bumping and smoothly as possible.
So I'm going to give you that.
What you're going to see next, there's some animations, but most of what you're seeing is developed from the images taken on the Hurricanes probe.
January the 14th. 2005. Directly in between the sun and centre opposition.
So perfect that it's early.
I think it's probably just as this one is a process.
Sure. So it was almost as large as the rock music will survive outside the weather centre.
Okay. This evidently is animation.
Down in the corner, you've got the altitude relative to Titan.
You've got the speed. It's around 20,000 kilometres an hour at the moment and you have the time in universal time on earth.
So it increases your quarter. You go in very fast, 20,000 kilometres an hour.
That's the protein restriction. Then you release the parachutes, parachutes made not far from Oxford,
actually in Uxbridge, you take the Oxford tube, you can doff your hat as you go through.
So we're going to pass.
Okay, so now we're about 50 kilometres.
You start seeing the surface beyond the hills left to draw parallels here, which are later discovered to be part of a fast system of differentiation.
But Rose said he's seen the bright area of global trends.
So a complicated system of drainage channels, so much salt rushing into the hillside.
These are probably the result of the runoff from Russia.
So European skills to the left to be prepared.
So 200 metres tall, well features of about 4 to 7 metres in height for most of the descent eastward twice titan's surface however velocity of
kilometres opportunity motion reverses into a backward motion in reverse together happens is that we move slower so these.
Hang on. It's four years later by train service. It's called the bridge.
I love your quest for the book.
If you look at it from 41 kilometres shows the area takes taking over, which is just this enormous group of people that are introduced to.
More opponents of your business.
Spectrum. The service suggests that the brokerage. Are expected to take the carbon issue that's been introduced.
The small authority overseeing or overseeing transport and water service will see the reversal of direction so far.
Hard wired to reach your people.
As we approach the service, our perspective brings the property to life.
We see that although there are religious places dry below, we are seeing signs of emotion which.
For you. It's 6:00. Okay. What I love is seeing the parachute shadows go over the surface reveals an amazing earthquake picture of a dry riverbed.
Is this the shadow of September?
The shadow. Okay. I. These first images, of course, we didn't see that colour is much closer to real life.
This was. These were the first images we saw. This is, for me, magical.
When you see the dendritic structure of a system of rivers and I realised we really did have a methane driven meteorology magical moment.
I don't know how one expresses it. There I am trying to talk, but totally overwhelmed the next day with John Onochie,
who some of you will know from the Open University who built the surface science package.
The two of us discussed dealing with our American colleagues.
Americans are very good at emotion. My counterpart in Nassar had already burst into tears publicly when we landed.
And, you know, somehow, if you're an American, that comes naturally.
It doesn't to me. And John and I finally figured out we had to use art and in particular poetry.
And in the 1950s, he and I both love loved this poem.
Michael Gove has just started introducing learning of poetry again in school.
Well, we had to do it in the fifties. I thought it was cruel and unnatural punishment.
But I always loved this poem. And it's by John Keats, then felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his can.
Or like Stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes, he stared at the Pacific,
and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent on a peak in Darién.
I'd always wanted to feel like wild surmise. This is what we felt.
Anyhow, John and I decided this was the answer. Americans, they have poets.
But most Americans don't know much about their poetry. We would.
So I went in. You could Google in those days.
I pulled up this poem, printed it out, made it crib sheet, and this is what I use to express something of a feeling.
Unfortunately, I didn't bother to look who wrote the poem because I knew it was Shelley.
All I can say is it's a way of getting a lot of mail.
So there you are. The data kept coming.
The it was an extraordinary effort by the Earth's radio astronomers, or at least half the Earth radio astronomers, ones in China, Australia,
India and the Western United States and Canada to pick up the signals from hurricanes after the mother ship had gone over the Titan horizon.
This was incredible. I was totally knocked out by it, and yet I paid for it.
I took my senior engineer aside and said, How are we doing this?
It must be costing a fortune. He was sort of shifty.
I said, Come on, how much are we paying? And he said, It was just under 750.
Okay. I said, Jack, I knew we were doing something with the radio astronomers, but I didn't sign a single contract, he said.
I said I sign contracts above a quarter of a million.
He said, We have three contracts. So they all as a tip.
Those of you who are aeronautical engineers, you take great care of that.
Don't let. Don't let the boss sign the checks.
Okay? You've got to all sorts of places.
I was living in France, so of course I got invited to the Elysee Palace.
And that, believe it or not, is the president of France, Roger Bond, and my successor, Jacques daughter and Pascal Cerise.
In fact, he really was very knocked out by it.
I mean, I know because the next day he went to Barcelona, which was in those days a peaceful place opened of Franco Spanish.
Well, Franco Catalan, I don't know. Exhibition on technology.
And he clearly tore up his notes because all he talked about, I saw it on the Alizee website, was the landing on Titan.
As President Chirac, we extend Paris for about ten, 15 minutes to camera about this after we've given him a briefing, probably not much longer.
I was really amazed because I had actually, until that point, a very low opinion of this politician.
Suddenly he went up, in my estimation. In fact, I should show you that picture.
There I am with President Chirac and the lady.
Some of you know me. No, that isn't my wife.
But of course, that's actually Pascal Cerise, the head of the TASS company, Thomas Alenia Space at the time.
And so that's why we were there with President Chirac.
Always tell people who know my wife. Well, of course, you never take your own wife to the Elysee somehow.
That's. Okay.
Well, not. I could talk for hours and I'm not going to do it because I realise we've run.
We've run out of time.
The most wonderful discovery for me and I think for many people at Saturn, although just so many discoveries you could talk for hours about,
was the discovery of plumes of water from a moon called in some of us just outside the rings of Saturn.
The discovery was made by my successor at Imperial, Michelle Daugherty, and the team.
Of course, it was a team discovery and doesn't look terrifically exciting.
What we got was a magnetometer signature here, three magnet magnetic fields of vectors.
So you have three components black, green and red.
As we pass through the magnetic field line that connects to the moon, Enceladus.
We detected these glitches which are absolute ringers for something travelling up an alpha wave,
travelling up the magnetic field associated with something disruptive happening in the vicinity of the moon.
The moon itself, solid water ice.
To a first approximation, it was not exactly a good conductor, but if it was throwing out water, liquid or gaseous,
no doubt other things there would be ionisation and there would be a very strong conductivity which would give you a signature like this.
Michelle had to use all of her charm, and in fact,
I sometimes wonder if I'd stayed as principal investigator whether I mean, she is an absolute charmer.
She knows how to get around people.
She had to fight with the other scientists who cared about the spacecraft and didn't want to take it too close to something,
especially if there was a suspicion it was spewing things out.
And with the engineers who really had similar feelings about protecting their baby,
she managed to present it a bit like we did with the original idea of Europe during the Holocaust as a challenge.
And once she got the engineers seeing it as something she she even suspected they were frightened of doing, they did it.
And I give this as a hint because I don't think I would have had the gall to try that Michelle did it.
And for me, it's something where I think was incredibly important because you had to fly by and solve this.
They adjusted the orbit to fly by, but also to get a backlit arrangement to see whether there was anything spewing out.
And here you can see geysers. Geysers.
I don't know what the correct pronunciation is. And for me, seeing is believing.
Perhaps I'd already believed it when I'd seen the magnetometer data.
The rest of the world believed it when they saw the imaging.
We wouldn't have had these images had with Michelle.
Not really worked her magic.
I mean, there was all sorts of publicity. I love Cold, Faithful and this idea, this tiny little moon hardly anyone knew of,
it's you know, it's not a moon whose name immediately leapt into one's mind.
It was the moon that Freeman Dyson wanted to take an atomic spacecraft to.
There's a book about that, and he thought it would be a very good place, you know,
with an atomic powered spacecraft to land, because you would just outside the rings of Saturn.
I've not seen anyone else who'd even heard of an solidus before this called Faithful.
There it is. I'm afraid that some I could talk for hours about what else we discovered.
Unfortunately, it's finished. It's gone. There was the thing that I think we all.
I don't know, maybe you don't get as excited as I do by the sight of that.
But I've done it once or twice before. That's the signal coming out of the noise.
A magical thing. And of course, it's an inverse arrangement.
What was particularly beautiful? Wasn't our little baby a rather big baby.
Cassini, of course, was designed to lock when it was in transmission mode on the earth.
And we got this signal and then as it was being shaken apart, it turned back and we got a few more bits of data until it went dead.
I love that idea of desperately trying to keep in communication with us.
I'm sorry. For me, this is, you know, I'm anthropomorphic, I realise.
But I, you know, I honestly think that's the best way to approach machinery.
I have a very personal relationship with it, so I think we should probably finish with that.
Goodbye, Cassini. Thank you very much for listening.
And this gives you just a few pictures indicating the enormous variety of the science.
And I have to say the length of the day isn't even mentioned, but we're still working on that.
So I don't know. I love the fact there's the north polar vortex and then you see the South and the South has a perfect hexagon structured flow.
For me, Saturn always found ways to astonish us.
And I, for one, feel, you know, there's all sorts of exciting things I've done in my life,
but nothing matched being involved with this particular mission.
So there you are, this beautiful planet.
It was actually the first object I ever looked at through a telescope.
And I'm so grateful to have been there.
Thank you very much.