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Hi. Good evening, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us.

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The Oxford University Aeronautical Society, in partnership with the physics department,

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are very pleased to welcome you all to our first event of the new year.

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Well, we'll be hearing from Professor David Southwood,

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who will be sharing his memories and his work on the Cassini-huygens mission to Saturn and Tyson.

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David's been involved in the mission for quite some years now.

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First is the principal investigator on the magnetometer team based at Imperial College London.

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And that was the instrument that made many remarkable discoveries about the Saturn system, including of an atmosphere around the moon,

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Enceladus, and more recently, trying to determine the actual rotation rate of the planet.

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Dave We've not yet done so.

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Someone should really ask how long a day is on Saturn at the end of the talk.

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I think David's also served as the chief scientist at ESA for some ten years

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and more recently has become the chair of the UK Space Agency Steering Group.

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He's also a senior research investigator at Imperial College London and a past president of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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So we're very grateful to him for having such a distinguished speaker come to give our opening talk of the term.

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We're going to hand over just for a couple of minutes to Colin Wilson from the physics department here,

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who would like to talk to you a little bit about one of the instruments on Cassini that was built right here in Oxford.

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And then David will get started. There'll be plenty of time for questions at the end.

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So on behalf of the aeronautical society and of the physics department, thank you very much for joining us.

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Well, Ben stolen a lot of the introduction already, so I'll keep this brief.

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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.

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So while David was busy working on magnetometers and getting getting them delivered to the launch pad here in Oxford,

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we also had a role in this mission, which you can think of when you see some of the pictures we built,

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part of the infrared spectrometer on Cassini and I have some of the bits we built right here.

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So this is built just across the road. So this is the heart of the infrared spectrometer,

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which is looking at gaseous compositions and surface temperatures and salaries and things like that.

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And so that was launched in 97, a long, long time ago.

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But you'll hear far more about that from David. So I'll hand back over to you.

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Thank you, Colin. It's a great pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me.

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And you know that it's a great pleasure to be invited by the Aeronautical Society.

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There are things I've done in my life that seem very unlikely.

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I'm being invited by the Aeronautical Society of the University of Oxford is something I wouldn't have predicted.

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And I'm extremely proud to be here because I'm going to talk about something that's a mixture of engineering.

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There's aeronautics in it and also a lot of physics.

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I basically was a physicist when I was a scientist.

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Are we not going to do any really hard science?

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I'm going to try and explain. And there are other people here who know what this is like,

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how it feels to be involved in a long term space mission and to see it gradually come to life, to work.

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And the most incredible thing sometimes find things you've predicted and sometimes find things that you haven't predicted.

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It's advisable. I would always advise having both of those.

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If everything you haven't predicted, then somehow you've swindled the people who provided the finance.

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And if all you do is show what you found is what you predicted, then why did you bother to do it?

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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.

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I've been involved with this mission, so you can imagine how I feel about it.

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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.

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I really at some point thought, why am I here? I feel very unhappy.

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Well, you will have to put up with that, but it is a lovely story.

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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.

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Okay. Amazing Saturn. There is a little baby that landed on Titan Wiggins.

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What's interesting about this is the absence of the ESA logo.

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This was a joint mission the previous year,

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and ASA and some of you who are interested in science fiction will recognise what's being plagiarised here.

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Amazing stories. And I have to say my predecessor at ISA, he learned his lesson.

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But when this poster was made, he refused to have the ISA signature on it, so to speak.

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I think something he totally regretted because for me this sums it up.

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It was science fiction when we started.

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It's turned into science fact. And I absolutely love this.

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This poster is from I think around 1990, so really when the mission was just being kicked off by Nasser.

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To me we've learnt a lot in Europe in terms of communicating with the person in the street and so on,

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and also explaining that when we were exploring the planets, frankly, we are doing at times turning science fiction into science fact.

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And so there we are.

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How did it all begin? Well, it began in the early eighties.

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Some of you look just about old enough to remember those days and.

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I like to think of it. Over 30 years ago, actually 30 over 34 years ago.

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A small group. Which actually involved me and Fred Taylor.

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It's hard to believe, but 34 years ago, Europe was not really involved in planetary science at all.

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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.

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The planets were Terra Americana.

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Or maybe Ruzicka, but not European.

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European. And there was an awful lot of space astronomy to do.

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There was a lot of solar physics. There was a lot of solar terrestrial physics and plenty of other things to do.

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Let's leave it to the Americans. Happily went on to science,

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has senior scientists in Europe thought otherwise and they looked around for junior scientists to

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kind of envisage what the future might be in collaboration between Europe and the United States.

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And I think I was involved in I just actually come back from the United States, which was important because the Research Council,

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such as it was then actually vetoed any travel funds for me to go to the meetings of this small group.

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But because I had just left the US had a little pool of money I could attach in the U.S. so that

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allowed me to take part as a Briton in this collaboration between Europe and the United States.

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So just I love America.

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Thank you very much. That's very important. It's actually wonderful for me.

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Now, nobody doubts that Europe is out there on what I think of as the final frontier out there in the solar system.

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But it's hard to believe. But it was very difficult.

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And I think, Fred, you can probably remember the feelings around that time Fred was involved in looking at terrestrial planet possible cooperation,

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and I was involved in looking at the giant planets that was actually I had the easiest task, I think.

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Anyhow, the result is that no.

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This thing. It's now.

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The most distant standing artefact of our civilisation is European.

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In fact, I don't know if anyone here is British.

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Yeah, if you're British. Yeah. Okay. Good. You have me also.

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So it's actually had a remarkable amount of British technology in it.

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And the team, the Horgan's team.

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To my astonishment, when I joined, when I became their boss at ISA, I found half the team came from the British Isles.

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I say the British Isles because it was an Irishman, but that was very unusual in the European team.

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So it's something where, you know, you can take a little bit of national pride.

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And of course, it was the large amount of British industrial work that led a few years later.

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Beagle two two seem something that the UK could do.

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And of course, whatever one thinks about the loss of Beagle two,

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what I would point out to an aeronautical society is that it landed, did the whole entry, descent and landing successfully.

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And nobody has done that miles before.

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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.

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Okay. So giant planets already.

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By 1982, 83, the Americans were committed to going to Jupiter with a probe to go into the Jupiter atmosphere.

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In a way, the task of identifying what we could do was obvious.

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Saturn was the obvious target. It's an absolutely.

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It really is an extraordinary system.

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I mean, it's anyone who's ever looked at Saturn through a telescope and I trust some of you have done that,

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will immediately see what a beautiful thing it is. Those rings are actually particularly good at this particular season.

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I mean, this season of Saturn in season, it's extraordinary.

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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.

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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.

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It's a solar system in its own of its own.

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But then it has this remarkable object in the solar system, in its in the Saturn system, that is.

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If Titan weren't captured by the gravity of Saturn's orbit about Saturn, if it weren't, it would be a planet.

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There's no doubt about that.

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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?

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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.

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Titan is the only object in our solar system with anything resembling our atmosphere.

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The surface pressure is about 50% higher on the pressure right now on the surface of the earth, but it's primarily nitrogen.

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There's hydrogen, there's carbon and of course compounds of those things in the atmosphere.

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It's orange discovered by Christiaan Huygens.

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It's the Orange Moon. The reason it's orange is the compounds of carbon, nitrogen and hydrogen,

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which make things that we would normally find in smog in on in the terrestrial environment.

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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.

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And what's missing in the atmosphere is not much.

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There's no gaseous oxygen. However, the early earth, the prebiotic atmosphere of Earth didn't contain oxygen either, it emerged.

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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.

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So I will tell you my science fiction, not the science fiction story.

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I always like to think a billion years from now, when the red giant phase of the sun has swallowed our earth,

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titan will be warmer, the sun will be slightly cooler, but Titan will be warmer.

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And as a result, you can expect oxygen to emerge into the atmosphere.

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And I love to think of the little green men coming out of the slime bagging on the side

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of polygons that will be our civilisation being passed to what may become another.

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That is science fiction, but it's something I don't know.

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For me, it's magical.

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So Titan, the largest moon of Saturn and nitrogen atmosphere, like a surface pressure, one and a half bar temperature -179 Celsius.

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Something I will ask you about in a minute. Methane, rich in the atmosphere, complex, organic, prebiotic chemistry at work.

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There's an awful lot of nasty stuff involving C, H and M mixing together and doing.

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Well, I'm a physicist, but that becomes chemistry. Yeah, somebody has to do it.

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The thing about the -179 Celsius, that's the temperature at which we ship LNG from the Middle East to our shores.

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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.

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Liquid natural gas is effectively methane.

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And here we have an atmosphere with methane in it as a significant minor constituent in our current atmosphere at Earth.

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We have a significant minor constituent of our atmosphere called water vapour.

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Okay. It's very important for us because meteorology on our planet really functions in large part by the capacity of water

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to absorb and release energy as it switches between solid liquid and gas because there's heat coming in from the sun.

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I could give you a lecture on meteorology, but this is what gives you the meteorology on earth.

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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,

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because there is an atmosphere and so on, a methane driven meteorology, methane should appear solid, liquid and gaseous.

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That was a prediction and it was true. I it was an immense I don't know.

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Sense of relief that we haven't been lying all those years anyhow.

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So so there you are. The interesting thing was we Europeans really felt we needed a challenge in order to,

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if you like, make the case for Europe doing something in planetary science.

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We needed a, you know, a central role.

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And so very early on,

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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But we left. Well, we needed to get there.

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And of course, you need a mother ship to get some of you look again will recognise down there pilot of the future.

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I absolutely adored this when I was.

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In the early fifties, I suppose when I was growing up, I just never thought I would be involved in going to Seattle.

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It didn't occur to me it was a possibility. Much as I would love to.

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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.

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I have to say, I did query it and I was told just shows what a lousy Batman he have.

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If you remember, Digby was his Batman. But the door should have been shut, shouldn't it?

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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.

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Okay. So let me now take you towards the story.

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It's a long story. It began in the eighties, early eighties.

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And in fact,

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it seemed like an immensely long time between our first discussions in California and persuading both Israel and Nasser that we should go ahead.

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In fact, when I look back, I realise it was incredibly fast.

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It was only just over six years, which seemed a long time when you really wanted something.

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But I look back now at how long people have to wait for space missions and I realise how lucky we were.

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And it was because I think we just got the spirit of the time, right.

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And in particular I think the idea of Europe providing the lander the Americans were very unsure about that was our American scientific friends.

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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.

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Now people say, well, why would France? France has something called the force to France.

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And here, without ever saying anything about it, they could demonstrate, let's call it re-entry technology.

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But of course, it was used for entry into an earth like atmosphere, and it showed that France really did have an ICBM capability.

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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,

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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.

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Right. I mean, the key thing is you don't bounce off or you don't burn up.

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But we really felt we were on the engineering, was on the shield was going to be fine.

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Okay. So you can see the launch came also again, compared with current days, it seemed like forever launched in 1997.

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So about seven years after the selection of the scientific team.

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So building you build, we built the instruments and of course, you know,

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it's not building the instruments so much as testing the instruments and making

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sure that you've thought of every possible thing your instrument has to survive.

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One of the worst bits is, of course, going up on the rocket right at the very beginning.

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And we then flew classic what's now classic solar system exploration for robots.

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You fly to other places in the solar system and the place you want to go and pick up gravity use gravity assists.

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So we went to Venus and then to Earth. Then a Jupiter flyby finally kicked us out to Saturn.

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The problem then is you've got to stop when you get to Saturn,

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or you will just go past Saturn at a very high speed and continue out of the solar system.

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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.

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It went on to 2017. I have absolutely no shame about that.

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I think it's absolutely wonderful. So it's about greater than 35 years.

199
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So I have a bit of credibility myself. And you please close your eyes if you find things difficult at this point.

200
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Here is me. Very good.

201
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I can't believe I really looked like that.

202
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But there you are. Anyhow, it was me in 1990, the first PSG ever as a science group for the mission.

203
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But waiting around the corner appointed the next year as Nasr administrator was nemesis for the mission.

204
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Anyone remember this man, Daniel Goldin? Yes.

205
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I had been trying to forget, but you just come here.

206
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A very interesting man. He is the Nazareth administrator who served the longest time, which is surprising.

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He survived several presidents appointed, I guess, by George H.W. Bush.

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And then he survived through the Clinton.

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He came in in 1992 with a slogan Faster, better, better, cheaper.

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To which we still say that, of course, but the you then ask, you can choose two out of the three.

211
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What you can get is all three at once. And I think that was proven.

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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.

213
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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.

214
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And unfortunately, we were going to be launched in 1996 at this time.

215
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So we didn't have we couldn't wait until 1999 for Nasser to learn the error of its ways.

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Oddly enough, I used to be hired visiting position at the University of California, Los Angeles,

217
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and at one time I was renting a house and he was my neighbour comes into the story because it meant

218
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I could write to him on a personal basis when he actually brought the mission up for cancellation.

219
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I was then involved with Isa and I wrote to him,

220
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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,

221
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any apparatchik below him would recognise. He'd better read it because it's clear I had some personal communication with them.

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I know that had an effect because a few day, probably about three or four weeks later after I got the letter a gong,

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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.

224
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So 93, I suppose. And she she was introduced me, France Cordova.

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And she said I had to sit with my boss whilst he read a letter from you.

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And I thought, Great. That's all I asked that he read the letter.

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And of course, in the end, he backed down from cancellation.

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And that was, I think, very critical. And now my role I'm not sure of at all.

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I suspect the the diplomatic effort of all the other members, member states of ISA in particular, was immensely important.

230
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Here's why you couldn't make it. You couldn't make it cheaper.

231
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Cassini was going to be a giant nearly seven metres high, so truly gigantic four metres wide and not simply to go inside.

232
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The largest fairing that's available for metres is the magic number seven electric generator, three thermoelectric generators.

233
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So incredible amounts of power and also political problems associated with the launch of that.

234
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But we survived and 30 kilograms of plutonium, which is why Cassini had to die.

235
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It wasn't just that we might have taken human.

236
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Oh, well, we might fling anything from Earth that might get mixed up with places where life might evolve in the Saturn system.

237
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Far worse would be to have Cassini end up colliding with somewhere where Earth might were.

238
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Life might be evolving simply because of that plutonium.

239
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I think you probably know plutonium is highly poisonous to people like us.

240
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We aren't the only organisms that do not want to be hit by plutonium.

241
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So that was really the absolute killer. Literally the killer argument.

242
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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.

243
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Well, something might be going on that might lead to life.

244
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Okay. So, okay.

245
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There was no way to make Cassini going faster. The cheaper.

246
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I've convinced you. I'm sure. This just gives you.

247
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Might be better. Yeah. You get an idea of the scale.

248
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Those are real people. We're. I all the images from this come from Maza or ISA videos.

249
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The music was attached by somebody.

250
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I don't know. I found this on the web and have never been able to identify who put it together.

251
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This the launch. If you get to a night launch with a cloud, it's wonderful.

252
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The whole sky lights up as you go through the cloud. Absolutely perfect.

253
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Launch. Titan four. Be the largest rocket available at the time.

254
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Only the Saturn five has been bigger than that. In other words, bigger than a shuttle launch.

255
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The Earth does move, I can assure you. So there we are, bouncing around the solar system, past the earth.

256
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Venus. Looks like Venus, actually.

257
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I think that must be Mars. We should have the asteroid belt.

258
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And of course, we'll come to Jupiter. And then finally continuously calling back.

259
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We had almost continuous data during the cruise until on June the 30th, 2004.

260
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We arrived above the rings of Saturn.

261
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Anyone recognise the music? Okay.

262
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It's, I think, Rocky five.

263
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Okay. And those of you with an iPhone with the appropriate app perhaps could check.

264
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But for I, I, I think the way the music fits at least gets my feelings about this very well.

265
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So I'm afraid getting to subtle is only the beginning for the scientists.

266
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It's a major achievement for the operators.

267
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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,

268
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stop to make sure you don't continue out of the system.

269
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And so the edge of the solar system, the 400 Newton engine, was fired, actually an asymmetric firing,

270
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partly because of the magnetometer, because we wanted to take and take measurements.

271
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In fact, I can assure you the one time we fired the 400 Newton engine does make the whole spacecraft wobble.

272
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I measured it with the magnetometer, but a nail biting situation.

273
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Ah, of course there is the problem of light speed.

274
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Basically when that engine fires and we didn't know for more than an hour and a half whether it had fired.

275
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I got to say, I'm a scientist. I very cool.

276
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And you are nervous waiting and this is very strange feeling when not really understanding relativity,

277
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you realise something has occurred but you don't know what it is, it's already occurred, you can't stop it.

278
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And anyhow, to take you through the rings of Saturn, because to get close to Saturn you have to do something about the rings.

279
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We went through the rings of Saturn where there was not much dust, relatively speaking,

280
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and then above the rings of Saturn during this rocket engine firing that is represented now with real data.

281
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The pictures are an animation, but here there are big antennae and they're being hit by dust.

282
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But noise is an acoustic signal from the dust hitting the antennae, the radio antennae.

283
00:35:36,870 --> 00:35:42,060
And here we have to do it twice, crossing the ring plane again.

284
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And the last time on the nightside, which is sort of slightly more frightening, you can't see the light.

285
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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.

286
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And so mayhem breaks out when the signal pops up.

287
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You may have noticed we Europeans are trying to copy this, but Americans do it with real conviction.

288
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And what's particularly nice, this lady, Julie Webster, was in command.

289
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She was the flight director for the insertion into orbit for the Saturn in 2004.

290
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She was also in command for dropping Cassini into the atmosphere of Saturn 13 years later.

291
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And she's, as you can see, she's happy.

292
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I've got to say, there's somebody in the back row there with white hair going a bit negative with the high five.

293
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I mean, I got to say, oh, that's Charles Elachi and I are delighted.

294
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We were both principal investigators on Cassini, so we both had a very personal involvement.

295
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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,

296
00:37:11,100 --> 00:37:19,499
we both kind of shirked our responsibilities as principal investigators, you should say.

297
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We passed on to others, but what a feeling.

298
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The next thing to come to is the landing on Titan.

299
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And I always you know, I had thought landing on Titan was a European probe.

300
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Was really fundamental psychologically for us Europeans to feel we were out there on the final frontier with our American colleagues.

301
00:37:53,700 --> 00:38:04,200
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.

302
00:38:04,950 --> 00:38:13,170
You've got angle that you have to get right or you will bounce off the atmosphere or you will burn up.

303
00:38:14,040 --> 00:38:17,280
And we only got one close look of the atmosphere.

304
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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.

305
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We got in October 2004.

306
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We got a close look. We did a flyby of Titan and that gave us our first close look at the atmosphere of Titan,

307
00:38:41,430 --> 00:38:48,810
ably helped with the contribution of the infrared device, which from the University of Oxford.

308
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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.

309
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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.

310
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And that was that probably I was most nervous about. I Beagle had failed by then the year before, almost exactly one year before.

311
00:39:26,760 --> 00:39:31,060
On Christmas Day, we learned Hogan's go.

312
00:39:32,280 --> 00:39:37,709
Actually, my instrument checked that it had gone because it had a magnetic field.

313
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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.

314
00:39:46,770 --> 00:39:52,380
And that was sort of Christmas Day, 2004.

315
00:39:53,310 --> 00:39:56,280
We then have three weeks to wait.

316
00:39:57,540 --> 00:40:11,100
And in the previous Christmas, some of you may remember Colin Pillinger on television having lost Beagle two again on Christmas Day.

317
00:40:11,340 --> 00:40:16,620
We didn't get the signal back. Terribly emotional.

318
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Needless to say, somebody has to be guilty and is the person in charge of the European programme.

319
00:40:24,390 --> 00:40:32,970
I mean, we Britons always know the Europeans are guilty for a start and the person in charge of the Mars Express program.

320
00:40:33,270 --> 00:40:43,379
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,

321
00:40:43,380 --> 00:40:48,720
had the same experience in France. Except they objected to me.

322
00:40:48,720 --> 00:40:57,270
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.

323
00:40:57,270 --> 00:41:00,659
But I feel wonderful that it landed in the end.

324
00:41:00,660 --> 00:41:03,690
We found out a year or two ago successfully.

325
00:41:04,690 --> 00:41:13,800
I didn't know that in 2004. I didn't sleep very well for three solid weeks until we got to Titan.

326
00:41:15,180 --> 00:41:25,470
We it was again quite a complicated sequence coming down because the main interest,

327
00:41:26,130 --> 00:41:38,700
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.

328
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Organs was designed to float, or rather I would should say, to sink slowly.

329
00:41:47,730 --> 00:41:53,460
But we have no idea, because nobody had ever seen through the smog.

330
00:41:54,120 --> 00:42:02,940
Nobody had ever seen the surface of Titan. But we were aware there was a very strong likelihood of a liquid surface,

331
00:42:03,300 --> 00:42:08,790
just as if you were coming to earth without having seen the surface of earth, you wouldn't be too surprised.

332
00:42:09,060 --> 00:42:12,960
Randomly choosing a point on the surface if it had a liquid surface.

333
00:42:13,920 --> 00:42:27,150
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.

334
00:42:28,710 --> 00:42:37,350
In fact, it worked beautifully. What was remarkable, though, is we did land in a dry riverbed.

335
00:42:37,620 --> 00:42:40,430
I'll show you in a minute. And we got.

336
00:42:41,760 --> 00:42:52,350
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.

337
00:42:53,180 --> 00:42:58,020
We'll talk about that in a minute and I'll try and give you the ride down.

338
00:43:04,660 --> 00:43:09,850
It's very complicated. And don't imagine I'm expecting you to understand this.

339
00:43:10,510 --> 00:43:16,630
This is a way of trying to get on top of the data. And remember, Hoynes is spinning like crazy.

340
00:43:17,500 --> 00:43:23,620
And so you're not just looking down, you're looking sideways and you're whizzing around.

341
00:43:24,220 --> 00:43:27,580
So, of course, when you've got all the data back,

342
00:43:28,120 --> 00:43:37,390
you can reconstruct what it would have been like to slowly descend without rotating, without bumping and smoothly as possible.

343
00:43:37,960 --> 00:43:39,260
So I'm going to give you that.

344
00:43:39,310 --> 00:43:51,670
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.

345
00:43:56,410 --> 00:44:05,399
January the 14th. 2005. Directly in between the sun and centre opposition.

346
00:44:05,400 --> 00:44:08,680
So perfect that it's early.

347
00:44:09,150 --> 00:44:17,190
I think it's probably just as this one is a process.

348
00:44:18,460 --> 00:44:26,440
Sure. So it was almost as large as the rock music will survive outside the weather centre.

349
00:44:27,040 --> 00:44:30,450
Okay. This evidently is animation.

350
00:44:31,060 --> 00:44:35,380
Down in the corner, you've got the altitude relative to Titan.

351
00:44:36,070 --> 00:44:42,820
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.

352
00:44:43,990 --> 00:44:50,530
So it increases your quarter. You go in very fast, 20,000 kilometres an hour.

353
00:44:53,650 --> 00:44:59,920
That's the protein restriction. Then you release the parachutes, parachutes made not far from Oxford,

354
00:45:00,490 --> 00:45:08,860
actually in Uxbridge, you take the Oxford tube, you can doff your hat as you go through.

355
00:45:09,340 --> 00:45:12,510
So we're going to pass.

356
00:45:12,940 --> 00:45:16,719
Okay, so now we're about 50 kilometres.

357
00:45:16,720 --> 00:45:27,870
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.

358
00:45:31,800 --> 00:45:40,640
But Rose said he's seen the bright area of global trends.

359
00:45:42,180 --> 00:45:50,490
So a complicated system of drainage channels, so much salt rushing into the hillside.

360
00:45:51,180 --> 00:45:54,390
These are probably the result of the runoff from Russia.

361
00:45:55,220 --> 00:45:59,129
So European skills to the left to be prepared.

362
00:45:59,130 --> 00:46:10,530
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

363
00:46:10,530 --> 00:46:20,930
kilometres opportunity motion reverses into a backward motion in reverse together happens is that we move slower so these.

364
00:46:22,710 --> 00:46:27,960
Hang on. It's four years later by train service. It's called the bridge.

365
00:46:28,560 --> 00:46:29,790
I love your quest for the book.

366
00:46:29,790 --> 00:46:39,200
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.

367
00:46:40,830 --> 00:46:43,860
More opponents of your business.

368
00:46:45,440 --> 00:46:54,310
Spectrum. The service suggests that the brokerage. Are expected to take the carbon issue that's been introduced.

369
00:46:55,990 --> 00:47:04,240
The small authority overseeing or overseeing transport and water service will see the reversal of direction so far.

370
00:47:04,360 --> 00:47:07,750
Hard wired to reach your people.

371
00:47:08,920 --> 00:47:12,850
As we approach the service, our perspective brings the property to life.

372
00:47:13,510 --> 00:47:20,410
We see that although there are religious places dry below, we are seeing signs of emotion which.

373
00:47:22,370 --> 00:47:34,850
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.

374
00:47:35,340 --> 00:47:39,730
Is this the shadow of September?

375
00:47:40,520 --> 00:47:49,010
The shadow. Okay. I. These first images, of course, we didn't see that colour is much closer to real life.

376
00:47:49,790 --> 00:47:54,710
This was. These were the first images we saw. This is, for me, magical.

377
00:47:55,790 --> 00:48:07,130
When you see the dendritic structure of a system of rivers and I realised we really did have a methane driven meteorology magical moment.

378
00:48:10,190 --> 00:48:22,330
I don't know how one expresses it. There I am trying to talk, but totally overwhelmed the next day with John Onochie,

379
00:48:22,340 --> 00:48:27,770
who some of you will know from the Open University who built the surface science package.

380
00:48:29,390 --> 00:48:35,030
The two of us discussed dealing with our American colleagues.

381
00:48:35,390 --> 00:48:46,220
Americans are very good at emotion. My counterpart in Nassar had already burst into tears publicly when we landed.

382
00:48:46,800 --> 00:48:50,780
And, you know, somehow, if you're an American, that comes naturally.

383
00:48:51,200 --> 00:49:00,410
It doesn't to me. And John and I finally figured out we had to use art and in particular poetry.

384
00:49:00,950 --> 00:49:04,910
And in the 1950s, he and I both love loved this poem.

385
00:49:05,690 --> 00:49:10,970
Michael Gove has just started introducing learning of poetry again in school.

386
00:49:11,450 --> 00:49:15,620
Well, we had to do it in the fifties. I thought it was cruel and unnatural punishment.

387
00:49:16,040 --> 00:49:26,990
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.

388
00:49:27,440 --> 00:49:31,849
Or like Stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes, he stared at the Pacific,

389
00:49:31,850 --> 00:49:39,350
and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent on a peak in Darién.

390
00:49:39,710 --> 00:49:44,630
I'd always wanted to feel like wild surmise. This is what we felt.

391
00:49:46,340 --> 00:49:51,889
Anyhow, John and I decided this was the answer. Americans, they have poets.

392
00:49:51,890 --> 00:49:55,940
But most Americans don't know much about their poetry. We would.

393
00:49:56,360 --> 00:49:59,360
So I went in. You could Google in those days.

394
00:49:59,930 --> 00:50:09,800
I pulled up this poem, printed it out, made it crib sheet, and this is what I use to express something of a feeling.

395
00:50:10,280 --> 00:50:15,560
Unfortunately, I didn't bother to look who wrote the poem because I knew it was Shelley.

396
00:50:21,110 --> 00:50:24,870
All I can say is it's a way of getting a lot of mail.

397
00:50:27,230 --> 00:50:32,420
So there you are. The data kept coming.

398
00:50:34,700 --> 00:50:43,880
The it was an extraordinary effort by the Earth's radio astronomers, or at least half the Earth radio astronomers, ones in China, Australia,

399
00:50:44,180 --> 00:50:56,420
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.

400
00:50:56,870 --> 00:51:02,270
This was incredible. I was totally knocked out by it, and yet I paid for it.

401
00:51:03,080 --> 00:51:08,480
I took my senior engineer aside and said, How are we doing this?

402
00:51:08,870 --> 00:51:12,770
It must be costing a fortune. He was sort of shifty.

403
00:51:13,970 --> 00:51:19,400
I said, Come on, how much are we paying? And he said, It was just under 750.

404
00:51:20,420 --> 00:51:30,380
Okay. I said, Jack, I knew we were doing something with the radio astronomers, but I didn't sign a single contract, he said.

405
00:51:31,520 --> 00:51:34,790
I said I sign contracts above a quarter of a million.

406
00:51:35,750 --> 00:51:41,030
He said, We have three contracts. So they all as a tip.

407
00:51:41,040 --> 00:51:45,870
Those of you who are aeronautical engineers, you take great care of that.

408
00:51:45,880 --> 00:51:49,470
Don't let. Don't let the boss sign the checks.

409
00:51:50,400 --> 00:51:53,700
Okay? You've got to all sorts of places.

410
00:51:53,940 --> 00:51:58,470
I was living in France, so of course I got invited to the Elysee Palace.

411
00:51:58,890 --> 00:52:07,710
And that, believe it or not, is the president of France, Roger Bond, and my successor, Jacques daughter and Pascal Cerise.

412
00:52:08,730 --> 00:52:15,980
In fact, he really was very knocked out by it.

413
00:52:15,990 --> 00:52:24,690
I mean, I know because the next day he went to Barcelona, which was in those days a peaceful place opened of Franco Spanish.

414
00:52:24,870 --> 00:52:29,340
Well, Franco Catalan, I don't know. Exhibition on technology.

415
00:52:29,910 --> 00:52:39,420
And he clearly tore up his notes because all he talked about, I saw it on the Alizee website, was the landing on Titan.

416
00:52:39,420 --> 00:52:52,590
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.

417
00:52:53,130 --> 00:52:59,730
I was really amazed because I had actually, until that point, a very low opinion of this politician.

418
00:53:00,180 --> 00:53:06,030
Suddenly he went up, in my estimation. In fact, I should show you that picture.

419
00:53:07,020 --> 00:53:10,440
There I am with President Chirac and the lady.

420
00:53:10,440 --> 00:53:12,720
Some of you know me. No, that isn't my wife.

421
00:53:13,140 --> 00:53:23,700
But of course, that's actually Pascal Cerise, the head of the TASS company, Thomas Alenia Space at the time.

422
00:53:24,150 --> 00:53:27,720
And so that's why we were there with President Chirac.

423
00:53:28,830 --> 00:53:34,979
Always tell people who know my wife. Well, of course, you never take your own wife to the Elysee somehow.

424
00:53:34,980 --> 00:53:38,480
That's. Okay.

425
00:53:38,990 --> 00:53:44,360
Well, not. I could talk for hours and I'm not going to do it because I realise we've run.

426
00:53:44,360 --> 00:53:45,500
We've run out of time.

427
00:53:47,090 --> 00:53:59,900
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,

428
00:54:00,800 --> 00:54:11,870
was the discovery of plumes of water from a moon called in some of us just outside the rings of Saturn.

429
00:54:13,130 --> 00:54:20,450
The discovery was made by my successor at Imperial, Michelle Daugherty, and the team.

430
00:54:20,450 --> 00:54:25,190
Of course, it was a team discovery and doesn't look terrifically exciting.

431
00:54:25,610 --> 00:54:31,280
What we got was a magnetometer signature here, three magnet magnetic fields of vectors.

432
00:54:31,280 --> 00:54:35,720
So you have three components black, green and red.

433
00:54:36,410 --> 00:54:41,540
As we pass through the magnetic field line that connects to the moon, Enceladus.

434
00:54:42,530 --> 00:54:53,239
We detected these glitches which are absolute ringers for something travelling up an alpha wave,

435
00:54:53,240 --> 00:55:00,080
travelling up the magnetic field associated with something disruptive happening in the vicinity of the moon.

436
00:55:01,070 --> 00:55:04,910
The moon itself, solid water ice.

437
00:55:04,910 --> 00:55:15,980
To a first approximation, it was not exactly a good conductor, but if it was throwing out water, liquid or gaseous,

438
00:55:16,790 --> 00:55:24,170
no doubt other things there would be ionisation and there would be a very strong conductivity which would give you a signature like this.

439
00:55:24,980 --> 00:55:27,770
Michelle had to use all of her charm, and in fact,

440
00:55:28,370 --> 00:55:36,529
I sometimes wonder if I'd stayed as principal investigator whether I mean, she is an absolute charmer.

441
00:55:36,530 --> 00:55:38,270
She knows how to get around people.

442
00:55:38,690 --> 00:55:47,390
She had to fight with the other scientists who cared about the spacecraft and didn't want to take it too close to something,

443
00:55:48,020 --> 00:55:51,440
especially if there was a suspicion it was spewing things out.

444
00:55:52,280 --> 00:55:58,670
And with the engineers who really had similar feelings about protecting their baby,

445
00:55:59,930 --> 00:56:08,240
she managed to present it a bit like we did with the original idea of Europe during the Holocaust as a challenge.

446
00:56:08,930 --> 00:56:17,570
And once she got the engineers seeing it as something she she even suspected they were frightened of doing, they did it.

447
00:56:18,170 --> 00:56:25,190
And I give this as a hint because I don't think I would have had the gall to try that Michelle did it.

448
00:56:25,190 --> 00:56:37,610
And for me, it's something where I think was incredibly important because you had to fly by and solve this.

449
00:56:37,610 --> 00:56:47,839
They adjusted the orbit to fly by, but also to get a backlit arrangement to see whether there was anything spewing out.

450
00:56:47,840 --> 00:56:51,050
And here you can see geysers. Geysers.

451
00:56:51,920 --> 00:56:59,059
I don't know what the correct pronunciation is. And for me, seeing is believing.

452
00:56:59,060 --> 00:57:03,530
Perhaps I'd already believed it when I'd seen the magnetometer data.

453
00:57:05,750 --> 00:57:09,140
The rest of the world believed it when they saw the imaging.

454
00:57:09,560 --> 00:57:13,820
We wouldn't have had these images had with Michelle.

455
00:57:14,090 --> 00:57:18,380
Not really worked her magic.

456
00:57:21,050 --> 00:57:32,180
I mean, there was all sorts of publicity. I love Cold, Faithful and this idea, this tiny little moon hardly anyone knew of,

457
00:57:32,180 --> 00:57:36,770
it's you know, it's not a moon whose name immediately leapt into one's mind.

458
00:57:37,370 --> 00:57:43,400
It was the moon that Freeman Dyson wanted to take an atomic spacecraft to.

459
00:57:44,540 --> 00:57:49,040
There's a book about that, and he thought it would be a very good place, you know,

460
00:57:49,040 --> 00:57:54,620
with an atomic powered spacecraft to land, because you would just outside the rings of Saturn.

461
00:57:55,070 --> 00:58:00,650
I've not seen anyone else who'd even heard of an solidus before this called Faithful.

462
00:58:00,710 --> 00:58:05,990
There it is. I'm afraid that some I could talk for hours about what else we discovered.

463
00:58:07,760 --> 00:58:15,380
Unfortunately, it's finished. It's gone. There was the thing that I think we all.

464
00:58:17,660 --> 00:58:20,989
I don't know, maybe you don't get as excited as I do by the sight of that.

465
00:58:20,990 --> 00:58:26,450
But I've done it once or twice before. That's the signal coming out of the noise.

466
00:58:27,020 --> 00:58:32,210
A magical thing. And of course, it's an inverse arrangement.

467
00:58:33,290 --> 00:58:39,840
What was particularly beautiful? Wasn't our little baby a rather big baby.

468
00:58:40,410 --> 00:58:48,060
Cassini, of course, was designed to lock when it was in transmission mode on the earth.

469
00:58:48,990 --> 00:59:02,490
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.

470
00:59:03,060 --> 00:59:07,830
I love that idea of desperately trying to keep in communication with us.

471
00:59:07,860 --> 00:59:13,169
I'm sorry. For me, this is, you know, I'm anthropomorphic, I realise.

472
00:59:13,170 --> 00:59:18,420
But I, you know, I honestly think that's the best way to approach machinery.

473
00:59:18,430 --> 00:59:28,350
I have a very personal relationship with it, so I think we should probably finish with that.

474
00:59:28,830 --> 00:59:34,320
Goodbye, Cassini. Thank you very much for listening.

475
00:59:34,920 --> 00:59:44,190
And this gives you just a few pictures indicating the enormous variety of the science.

476
00:59:44,790 --> 00:59:52,290
And I have to say the length of the day isn't even mentioned, but we're still working on that.

477
00:59:54,000 --> 01:00:10,860
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.

478
01:00:10,890 --> 01:00:17,760
For me, Saturn always found ways to astonish us.

479
01:00:18,600 --> 01:00:25,860
And I, for one, feel, you know, there's all sorts of exciting things I've done in my life,

480
01:00:26,580 --> 01:00:33,210
but nothing matched being involved with this particular mission.

481
01:00:34,290 --> 01:00:38,790
So there you are, this beautiful planet.

482
01:00:40,200 --> 01:00:45,090
It was actually the first object I ever looked at through a telescope.

483
01:00:46,140 --> 01:00:50,540
And I'm so grateful to have been there.

484
01:00:51,540 --> 01:00:53,610
Thank you very much.