All language subtitles for BBC.The.Farthest.Voyagers.Interstellar.Journey.1080p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org.nfo.[eng]

# I'm wishing on a star

# To follow where you are

# I'm wishing on a dream

# To follow what it means

# And I wish on
all the rainbows... #

When it was just recently announced
that Voyager 1 was in interstellar

space, it was like humanity had just
become an interstellar species,

knocking on eternity's door.

Voyager's on the other side of the
solar system and it's billions and

billions of miles from the nearest
other human-made object.

Voyager made it.

Accomplished something no-one
dreamed it could do.

Every second, it goes to another

place where we have never been
before.

It's on an escape trajectory.

It's not coming back.

It's just going to keep going

forever and ever out into empty,
empty space.

Voyager takes the cake.

It's the most audacious mission.

I mean, who'd have thought that we'd
actually be able to do that in 1977?

# I'm wishing on a star... #

We knew a little because you can

observe from the Earth with
telescopes.

It was big.

No, er, let's see, what did we know?

We knew they were all gas giants,

mostly made up of hydrogen and
helium and some methane on the outer

planets. We knew that there were
winds on Jupiter.

We knew about the great red spot on
Jupiter.

We knew that there was trapped
radiation.

So we knew there was a magnetic
field.

We knew, for example, at Jupiter,
that there were four moons.

Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

That's what convinced Galileo that
Copernicus was right and that the

sun is the centre of the solar
system.

For Saturn, we knew about the rings
and we knew about the major

satellites, but hardly anything more
than that,

and it was all very fuzzy.

And the same was true for Uranus and
Neptune. They're very far away.

I had been staring at these planets
through some of the best telescopes

on Earth, and yet all I could see
was fuzzy blobs.

Uranus was a small, blueish-green
dot in the telescope and Neptune was

an even smaller blueish dot,
and that's all.

Astronomers had worked pretty hard

to know what the physical make-up
was.

There were some basic
characteristics,

but their real nature, we had none
of that. Just little glimpses.

There's theory, but then there's
unknowns,

and we're researching the unknowns.

Human beings are a curious bunch.

We want to know what's around that
next bend in the road.

This desire to explore conveys an

evolutionary advantage, and I think
there

is a feeling that our survival as a
species is going to depend on our

learning how to live on other
worlds.

It's a very human thing to ask
questions.

It's a very childlike thing to ask a
million questions.

And some of us never grow up.

One of the key things that made this
mission possible was gravity assist.

That is when you fly by Jupiter,
you turn the corner and you take a

little bit of Jupiter's orbital
speed with you, like a slingshot.

So you better make sure Saturn's
in the right place.

We were very fortunate that we had
an alignment.

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune
would all line up.

It would go Jupiter, boom.

Saturn, boom. Uranus, boom.
Neptune, boom.

The planets had to be lined up in
just the right way to

allow one spacecraft to do that.

And that lining up only occurs
rarely.

That only happens once, like, once
every 100, more than 100 years.

175 years, something like that.

Once every 176 years.

It was named the Outer Planets Grand
Tour and the cost of the mission was

estimated to be in excess of
a billion dollars.

The Nasa administrator went to the

President and he said the last time
the

planets were lined up like that,

President Jefferson was sitting at
your desk, and he blew it.

So Mr Nixon laughed and he said,
"Oh, all right, just do two."

So only two planets and, of course,

the price tag consequently was
substantially less.

The mission's success was one
spacecraft past Saturn.

But we knew right from the get-go

that we were going to try as hard as
we

could to extend the mission to go to
Uranus and Neptune.

We designed that in from the
beginning.

We knew that we were endowing
Voyager

with the option if the chance was
there to use it.

We didn't want to build anything

into the design that would've
prevented

us from going further, so it was a
mission within a mission, yeah.

The Golden Record really is the kind
of heartbeat of the ship itself.

The reason why it's going there is
certainly exploring,

but it's the lifeblood, is that
record.

When do you expect someone to find
this record out there?

Is there something out there?

Well, nobody knows. One of the great
unsolved questions

is whether we're alone or...

Carl Sagan has become probably the
best-known scientist of

the late 20th century.

He played a key role in many of the
Nasa missions to the planets,

including the Voyager one.

But he also was the astronomer who,
as much as any one person,

made the study of extraterrestrial
life credible.

If they be inhabited, what a scope
for misery and folly.

If they be not inhabited, what a
waste of space.

Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft,

they had some line drawings of a
male and female form,

and it caused a lot of commotion,
but I thought that was great.

And I called him up and said, "Hey,
would you be willing to undertake

"to come up with something for us to
put on the Voyager spacecraft?"

And he says, "Yes, sure."

They'd figured, don't let this
opportunity pass.

You're going to throw a message in a
bottle into the ocean -

put a message in it. And so they

decided to put time capsules in
those bottles.

And at first, Carl thought they'd
simply do another plaque,

but Frank Drake, he came up with the
idea that for the same amount of

weight and space you could send a
phonograph record.

The only difference is it's on
metal, so it will last a long time.

The people who actually did the

science part of Voyager are always
jealous

and mad because the Golden Record
gets more attention than all the

wonderful things they did,

exploring the outer planets of the

solar system except Pluto and all
that.

But the main attention goes to the
Golden Record.

Because of the aura that surrounds
anything to do with extraterrestrial

intelligent life,

any kind of effort to contact
extraterrestrial life

is more fascinating than knowing the

chemical make-up of a mineral on
Mars or something.

One of the first questions a lot of
people ask is,

"Well, they'll never figure out how
to play it."

And, in fact, we included a
cartridge and stylus

in the package with the record,

and the drawing on the cover of the
record shows the method by which the

stylus is to be placed on the
record.

Maybe what's written on it will seem
like kindergarten scribbles to them,

but they should be able to figure it
out.

If they've got some smart minds, or
whatever's in their heads -

if they even have heads.

What I find interesting is,
to protect it from the dust

and tiny particles of the journey,
they put a cover over it,

and on the cover was engraved the
location of Earth, our solar system,

in terms of its direction from
different pulsars.

A lot of people said, "Well,
why would you do that?"

I said, "What do you mean?"
And they said,

"Well, why would you announce where
you are,

"because there are aliens out there
that probably raid planets and use

"them for food or eat the people
or make them into slavery,

"and if they find that their
technology is probably more advanced

"than ours, they'll come here and
destroy us,

"so why would you do something like
that?"

So if somebody did find it, they
would be thinking that way,

and they'd say, "Why would these

"people expose themselves to our
voracious appetite?"

They must be very altruistic,
you know?

The chance that advanced
intelligence

beyond us would detect -

"Oh, hey, there's a radiating body
coming into our area.

"Let's go out and find out what this
bottle in the ocean,

"what message it might have."

Now, is that a grand mystery?

Whoa.

Well, that brings up the whole
question -

is there anybody out there?

Listen, there are,

give or take, 200 billion stars in
the Milky Way galaxy.

There are about 200 billion galaxies
in the universe,

or at least in the universe we know
about.

It's a pretty small spacecraft, and
it's a pretty big universe.

If you take a piece of sky the size
of a soda straw,

up there in the Big Dipper,

in that tiny piece of what we
thought was blank sky

was thousands of galaxies,

and each one of those galaxies is
filled with billions of stars.

That's just a soda straw,

and now you imagine the whole sky
filled with thousands upon thousands

upon thousands of galaxies,

each of which is billions and
billions of stars.

There's a lot of possibility out
there.

If you took a grain of sand and put
it on a table,

and if that were the size of the
sun,

then the Earth would be about an
inch away,

and it would be microscopic,

and the entire solar system would
fit on a table six feet across.

Think about the next star. The next
star would be another grain of sand.

How far away from that solar system
would you have to put that?

And it turns out to be about seven
and a half miles away.

The distances are almost
unfathomable.

These were the fastest spacecraft

that had ever been built and
launched and flown,

and they're travelling at ten miles
per second.

You wouldn't even see it, right?

And yet, even at those

unfathomable-by-Earth-standards
speeds,

it takes decades, decades,

to get out there into the outer
solar system.

If you want to realise how empty our
galaxy is,

the nearest galaxy to our own is
Andromeda.

It's about two million light years
away.

It is on a collision course with us
right now.

And in five billion years, that
galaxy's going to collide with our

own, and you might say, "Oh, no, oh,
no!" Well, it turns out

space is... Even in our galaxy, it's
mostly empty space.

When our two galaxies collide,

almost no stars will hit any other
star.

It's mostly empty space. There's
just a lot of room out there.

A lot of room.

So this adventure for this little
spacecraft is really just

exploring the tiniest,
closest neighbourhood,

when you start thinking about cosmic
scales.

The spacecraft were built at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory.

It's a federal research centre
that's part of Caltech,

and they build spacecraft.

One of the things I just admire most

about the engineers who built
Voyager

is that they're always thinking

about the most improbable things
happening.

You know, you want to take those
people on a camping trip with you,

because they will think of
everything.

"Well, you've got to bring..."
"What if these bugs come out?"

"What if the tent gets flooded?"
"What if we run out of gas?"

"What if you can't start the fire?"

You know. They're the "what if"
people.

And when you're sending something
out into space,

you can't go do a service call,
you can't bring it back.

So your "what if" list had better
be, like, that long,

or you're not going to be able to
survive.

These projects begin with a
conceptualisation period.

How feasible is it for us
to do thus and so?

We didn't know what the spacecraft
was going to look like.

How do we arrange the spacecraft?

How do we take the communications
system in this large,

12-foot diameter fixed antenna

and arrange it relative to
the propulsion system?

The spacecraft took on the dimension
of being a child,

and our design teams, you know,
were like parents.

This was actually a nurturing
process,

bringing that child, if you will,

into reality.

All spacecraft are made basically of
the same things,

silicon and aluminium.
That's probably 95% of it.

The spacecraft, of course, is quite
primitive by modern-day standards.

We have three computers onboard.

Their total memory is about, oh,

240,000 times less than in your
smartphone.

1972 was when you had the technology
freeze.

Remember, we launched in '77,

so you'd freeze technology several
years earlier.

And at the time, the biggest

computers in the world were
comparable to the

kinds of things we have in our
pockets today,

and I'm not talking about a
cellphone.

I'm actually talking about a key
fob.

What's wrong with '70s technology?

I mean, you're looking at me - I'm a
'30s technology, right?

I don't apologise for limitations

that we were working with at the
time.

We milked the technology for what we
could get from it.

Voyager is about 800 kilograms.

Its main antenna is 12 feet in
diameter,

which is the largest we could
launch.

There's this body, this ten-sided
can called the Bus,

and that's got all the electronics
and computers.

And it's got these arms and
these appendages that stick out,

and there's these feet that
connected it to the rocket.

And then a really long arm with a

magnetic field sensor on it over
here,

and another arm over there with this

plutonium power supply to give it
its electricity.

You can't keep that too close to the
spacecraft because it'll

radiate the spacecraft.

And another arm with this device
that had the cameras and other

instruments on it that could point
around, kind of like the eyes,

and the big antenna was the ears.

When everything is fully extended,

it's comparable in size to sort of a
small school bus.

A strange-looking being for our
planet,

but perfectly happy in space.

MUSIC: Symphony No. 5 in C minor,
Opus 67 by Beethoven

I became the producer of only one
record in my career,

and only two copies of it were made

and they were both hurled off the
Earth,

so I don't know that's a credential
or not.

The launch window for Voyager was
set.

It had to do with an alignment of
the outer planets.

They sure as hell weren't going to
wait for the record.

We had six weeks to do it. That's
what always draws the biggest gasp.

Figure out a way to explain the
world to aliens and, by the way,

it has to be finished in six weeks.

We had two goals in making the
Voyager record.

We wanted the music to represent

many different cultures around the
world,

and not just the culture of the

society that had built and launched
the spacecraft.

The other criteria was we wanted it
to be a good record.

It's a very idiosyncratic message.

It doesn't seem like something made
by a committee. It's too quirky.

MUSIC PLAYS: The Magic Flute,
K. 620, Act II, Hell's Vengeance
Boils In My Heart by Mozart

If you listen to the Voyager
record,

it would be remarkable if you
didn't hear some pieces of music

that were quite unlike anything
you'd heard before.

The Japanese Shakuhachi piece,

or the 16-year-old pygmy girl
singing -

it was called an initiation song,

kind of puberty song -

in the Ituri Forest of Africa is
just unbelievably beautiful.

It was a terrific, mind-expanding
adventure.

Always the criterion was that we
were trying to describe our culture,

and something we wanted very much
was the music of the Beatles,

and they said, "No way," and we
said,

"Well, this is all going in outer
space.

"It will never be heard on Earth."

"No, we don't do it."

They don't license for outer space.

I would have loved to have had a
Bob Dylan piece,

but really there was only room for,
at most,

one contemporary rock piece.

But, you know, you're up against
Chuck Berry's Johnny B Goode,

which Bob Dylan himself would admit
is an awfully good single.

It may be just four simple words,

but it is the first positive proof

that other intelligent beings
inhabit the universe.

What are the four words, Cocuwa?

Send more Chuck Berry.

LAUGHTER

The world is full of fantastic
music,

and it goes without saying there's a
lot more great music that's not on

the Voyager record than there is on
it.

Which is a good thing, too. I mean,
it'd be...

Imagine living on planet that was so

pathetic that it only had 90 minutes
of decent music.

Flight control to launch enable.
Roger.

The countdown will begin at ten
minutes before midnight tonight.

The journey, which will take the

technology of Earth out of our solar
system...

When it was launched, it was, of
course, all folded up.

It was like origami.

Here was this almost unexpected
encapsulation.

I mean, we knew that we were going
to be encapsulated,

but the emotional effect on that was
kind of surprising.

I noticed that in just looking
around me.

I realised that this was the last
time any of us were going to see

this spacecraft with eyes, and...

..that's a fairly moving experience.

Environmental control ready. Roger.

We actually launched Voyager 2
first, and this gave the media...

Drove them nuts. We launched
Voyager 1 later,

but it was launched on a faster
trajectory,

so it overtook Voyager 2 in
December 1977.

From that point on, Voyager 1 always
got to the planet before Voyager 2,

and the press was happy.
They understood it.

We have just had a report from
John Casani, the

Voyager project manager, that we'll
be able to countdown at 10:25.

They were launched on a Titan launch
vehicle,

which were intercontinental
ballistic missiles for a long time,

and some of them, as they were
decommissioned,

were turned into rockets to launch
spacecraft out to the planets.

Five, four, three, two, one.

We have ignition,
and we have liftoff.

You see the solids ignite,

and you're really not prepared
for what's about to occur.

The sound waves then catch up,

and then this...

forceful shaking -

the body has actually moved in
resonance with this energy,

shaking it, right?

We were sitting in bleachers,

and they keep you pretty far from
the launch vehicle because they can

explode, and it's... Basically, it's
a big bomb.

So there was a little bit of holding
your breath,

and wanting to make sure you see it
get that first little motion off the

pad, starting into space.

We were all thinking this thought -
there it goes.

And it's going to be out there to

represent us for the next five
billion years.

I was a seven-year-old child
watching it go and thinking, like,

"Oh, I had some small thing to do on
that."

But no real significance, but it was
like, "Oh, yeah, OK, goodbye."

There were outbursts of joy.

We were on our way.

And then we launched it, and then
other things went crazy.

The spacecraft began to do things

that we had no expectation that it
would have done.

Us poor people on Earth were like,
"What is it doing?"

As the launch vehicle leaves the
launch pad, it has to roll through a

certain angle to get to the right
direction for departure.

And the rate that it rolls at is a
much higher rate than the spacecraft

would never normally experience
flying,

and so the gyro hits the stops.

Voyager was not in control of
itself.

It's just riding this big rocket,

and that was shaking it in such a
way that it thought it was failing,

and so it started switching off
various boxes,

changing to the backup this, to the
backup that,

trying to figure out why all this
stuff was happening.

For a couple of days, it was a real
nail-biter

and people were asking us,
"Have you lost the spacecraft?"

And we would say, "We don't know for
sure,"

because we didn't know for sure.

And the headline read,
"Mutiny in Space."

The Voyager spacecraft had decided
it just didn't want to follow the

instructions that its human
controllers were giving it and it

was going to do what it wanted to
do.

Fortunately, the person who had
written that code was able to say,

"This is OK - it's doing this,
it tried that.

"It's doing this, it tried that."

And calm everyone else down.

All the time it was doing that crazy
stuff it was doing exactly what we

had designed it to do all along.

The limits were set simply too
tight.

It needed to be able to wiggle more
and vibrate more.

All of those things were solved for
Voyager 1.

When Voyager 1 lifted off, we're
thinking everything's OK,

and then we begin to hear this -
we call it chatter -

over the launch vehicle net

that something wasn't right.

I looked over at him and he looked

like he was a little worried,
you know,

and I said, "What's the matter,
Charlie?"

And he says, "I don't know. I don't

"think we're going to make it,"
you know.

There was a leak in the propellant
line,

and we were losing propellant
overboard.

So while it was burning, propellant

was escaping from the launch
vehicle,

and that's why its second stage

never got to deliver its full
thrust,

because it ran out of fuel.

And so the upper stage, which was a
Centaur

liquid hydrogen and oxygen stage,
had to make up for that.

And the Centaur is the stage that's
doing the guidance,

so the Centaur knows that it's not
reaching the required velocity,

because it has to burn longer to add
more velocity.

The Centaur had to use 1,200 pounds
of extra propellant.

Now we're all thinking,

"Is it going to have enough left in

"the tanks to make a normal
injection?

"Or is it going to run out of fuel?"

Fortunately, it had three and a half
seconds of thrusting left before it

had run to fuel depletion.

Three and a half seconds.

So Voyager 1 just barely made it.

It wouldn't have gotten enough

velocity to get to Jupiter, you
know,

so instead of getting to Jupiter,
you know,

we'd have gotten almost to Jupiter
and then it would come back towards

the sun, which would not have been
good.

# I watch the distant lights go down
the runway

# Disappearing through the
evening sky

# Oh, you know I'm with you
on your journey

# Never could say goodbye... #

And then, of course, you know,

there's the thought that it's out of
our hands.

Now the major reason for this
mission was about to unfold,

that is the science,
but our role as

keepers, as progenitors,

our role had been finished.

That was moving.

# Break away

# Fly across your ocean

# Break away

# Time has come for you

# Break away

# Fly across your ocean

# Break away

# Time has come... #

It's worth realising that a human
life ago,

less than 100 years ago,
87 years ago,

the universe consisted of one
galaxy, our Milky Way galaxy,

in a static eternal universe,
with eternal empty space.

We didn't know about the other

hundred billion galaxies
a single human lifetime ago.

You can never really imagine...
You can try,

but you can never really imagine

what Mother Nature will actually
have in store when you get there.

It seems like time really flew.

I don't think we really fully
understood,

before the first Jupiter encounter,
just how intense it was going to be.

No, we didn't.

We found out.

You start working on a mission in
1972, you launch in 1977.

All of that, there's no science.

It's all getting ready.

And then, March '79, the flood.

The encounters,
they creep up on you.

When we were approaching,

every picture was the greatest
picture ever taken of Jupiter.

In the beginning, it would be just a
little dot getting bigger on the

screen every day, and as we would
get closer and closer,

the images became more dramatic.

Incredibly strange and beautiful,

and now, by Voyager, revealed
in all of its splendour.

Would someone care to speculate what
you would say to Galileo Galilei if

he walked into the room today?

How are you able to live so long?

LAUGHTER

I think Galileo...

Jupiter is more than ten times the
diameter of Earth -

it's huge. And it's mainly hydrogen
and helium.

There's no solid surface on these
planets.

These planets are liquid -
gas and liquid - deep inside.

The gas is compressed the further
down you go,

and it gets very hot indeed.

And you would melt, vaporise in
fact,

if you tried to fly through Jupiter.

Let me first modify your statement -
not that it was wrong...

The atmospheric scientists got
long-range views,

because we weren't looking at tiny
moons,

we were looking at the big planet.

And so we could see things going on
before the other groups could see

things, and we were always the first
to start shouting.

Even to this day, we don't fly
colour detectors.

You get a much higher resolution
image in black and white,

and so when we want to make colour

we take them through different
filters

and then on the ground you put it

together and make a colour image out
of it.

That acceleration as you're

approaching encounters is really
something

that becomes very, very exciting.

We called it drinking out of a fire
hose.

You know, you're trying to take a
little sip,

and this torrent of data is coming
out.

You go to Jupiter and you have a

storm that's been around for more
than

300 years. That's the great red
spot.

You could fit two or three Earths
inside it.

When Voyager started getting

close-up images we realised that it
was very active,

and that deepened the mystery of how
these big storms could even

exist, with all this

turbulence going on.

It was swallowing up clouds and
spitting out others.

We knew that it was a vortex,
but to see it in action...

Every day, you're wondering, "Did we
build the spacecraft well enough?

"Did we anticipate all the possible
things that could go wrong?"

You're approaching this monster,
essentially.

This monster magnetic field, this
monster radiation environment,

on purpose, because you need to get
close,

because you want to see all the
little moons and the clouds and the

storms, and you want to slingshot
on to Saturn.

But you just don't know if you're
going to survive.

The thing gets fried, you lose the
mission.

Still out there physically intact
probably,

but unable to communicate with it -
the mission's over.

Two months before shipping to the
Cape for launch,

the scientists were predicting that
the magnetic fields around Jupiter

were intense enough that they would
accelerate particles.

Well, we were hearing initially
40,000 volts.

That would be the end of our
spacecraft.

Cabling on these appendages were
conductors that would take these

destroying pulses and just feed them
right into our systems and kill us.

So we needed to ground everything.

We didn't have time to go through
the normal design reviews,

so in order to get this protection
done quickly enough,

we did some things that were out of
the ordinary,

very out of the ordinary.

I can remember asking one of the

technicians to go out and buy
aluminium foil.

Normally our procurement of
spacecraft

hardware, supplies, materials,

are a much more sophisticated
process.

We are all in bunny suits cutting
continuous strips,

cleaning them with alcohol,

and then finally wrapping these on

all of our exterior cabling but,
yeah,

same materials in your Christmas
turkey.

I don't think we created any
shortage, per se.

It may have been a local shortage in
the local grocery store for a few

days until they reordered, right?

And now fast forward.

You know, did we know
whether we'd done enough?

Amazingly, we heard all kinds of
sounds.

If you had the right kind of
antennas on your ears,

you could go out and hear what we
record.

Whistlers - whistlers mean
lightning.

That was the first detection of

lightning on a planet other than
Earth. Much more intense.

There are lightning flashes at
Jupiter that would go halfway from

the East Coast of the United States
to the West Coast,

so it's fascinating what you hear
in space.

When you're on a flyby mission,
there ain't no second chance.

We were getting pictures - they were
getting better and better,

and you could begin to see detail,
as these moons got bigger.

You know, the dread you have is that
you don't want to see a lot of

worlds that look like Earth's moon.

Let's face it - it's dull.

Our mind's eye was, "Oh, yeah, we're
going to see battered ice balls,

"like the highlands of the moon,
nothing but impact craters."

When we saw Callisto, basically it's
totally hammered, right?

It's saturated with impact craters.

Ganymede shows a lot of interesting
grooves and ridges,

but it's pretty blasted with impact
craters.

And then as we went into the inner
two...

You could not see craters on either
one of them.

Well, this was encouraging,

because now we think maybe this

mission is going to find a lot of
diversity.

Discovering this...

billiard ball-smooth icy crust
of Europa, with cracks in it,

and what looked like plates of ice

that might be moving
relative to each other.

The best explanation for that
is that there's a thick ocean of

liquid water, salty water,
underneath that icy crust.

More ocean water than on the entire
Earth.

Probably two or three times.

It's the largest ocean in the solar
system.

And a moon around - going round
Jupiter.

And then, of course, kind of the

show stopper for Voyager, we get to
Io.

Io, of course. Io was the star of
the show,

and we didn't learn that until after
the encounter.

Everyone had gone home,
and Linda Morabito,

an engineer whose job was to find

out the positioning and the orbit of
the

spacecraft, noticed some bumps
on images of Io.

I was on the mission as a mission
navigator,

and our job involved just looking

back over the shoulder of the
spacecraft

to say OK, one more picture of the
realm of Jupiter.

So it wasn't high-priority work.

It was an optical navigation image,

and Linda saw this strange thing on
the limb.

An enormous object emerged.

Enormous. And the first thing I
said to myself - "What is that?!"

And I'm like,
"It looks like another satellite

"in the picture, emerging from
behind Io."

An object that size, at that range,
at that distance,

would have been seen from Earth.
It was sufficiently large.

I felt, with certainty -
it was the only thing I knew -

that I was seeing something that had
never been seen before.

This was an umbrella-shaped plume
rising 250 kilometres

above the surface of Io,
with volcanic activity.

I found the very first evidence of

active volcanism
on a world beyond Earth.

It was so hard to believe that
a little moon could have ten times

the volcanic activity of Earth,

which was the only known active
volcanoes in the solar system,

were here on Earth. And then there's
Io.

Suddenly we had realised this
was a different journey we were on.

I wanted to say one other thing.

We've been saying that perhaps
there's some funny way in which

Jupiter gobbles up all the things

that are coming in and doesn't let
Io be hit by any.

Well, we aimed a spacecraft and went
very close,

and had we missed, we would have
made the first impact crater.

LAUGHTER

The flyby is basically a week-long
affair that's 24 hours a day.

It's intense.

There will be a Voyager report
in 30 seconds.

Instant science, because there's
going to be a press conference that

night. This picture comes down,

and you've got three hours to figure

out what's going on and then tell
the world about it.

No pressure there, right?

The confines of being a piece of
biology got in the way of that.

I mean, you got hungry, you got
tired, you know,

you had to go to the bathroom.

I mean, you're going to miss
something.

But you don't want to miss anything,

because every 48 seconds a new image
would come down.

No-one got any sleep during one of

these flybys when the spacecraft
would go zooming past.

The photo labs were working day and
night,

and people were sleeping in their
cars.

It was just way too exciting
to sleep.

This is the first picture ever of
Jupiter's ring.

Jupiter was really just wonderful.

It was just discovery after
discovery.

Jupiter was a game changer.

Jupiter reset all the registers.

Now we're really up for something.

And to know that this was just the

very, very beginning of this
journey.

If we're blown away by Jupiter,
just wait until we get to Saturn.

Voyager, to me, was Homeric.

It was years of passing across the
solar system from one planet to the

other, and then it was a week or two
of frenzied activity and discovery

and conquest, and then it was, well,

back in the boats,
oars in the water,

and then on to the next conquest.

My father was Carl Sagan, and my
mother is Linda Salzman Sagan,

and she's writer and an artist,

and she designed the iconic Pioneer
plaque. She actually drew it,

and she's the one who got all of the

greetings for the
Voyager Golden Record.

I like to think of her that she kind
of put together a choir of voices of

greetings to the stars.

OVERLAPPING VOICES
IN VARIOUS LANGUAGES

My parents wanted a child

to have one of the voices, and they
just came to me one day and said,

"Nick, if you'd like to leave a
message to aliens,

"if they happen to exist, what would
you like to say to them?"

Hello from the children of planet
Earth.

Oh, "Hello from the children
of planet Earth,"

that's what I would say to aliens.

They loved that, and said,
"Great, let's record you."

It's a bit of a blur.

The only thing I know that I

remember from that time is those
knobs and

the little recording level that goes
into the red if you speak too much,

'70s kind of...

So, I remember that, and I remember
watching the needle move as I spoke

and seeing, like, where it...
"Oh, that got close to the red,

"but that actually didn't go into
the red. OK, that's probably good."

And that was that.
And then I, you know,

drank my apple juice
and went back to my books.

It was really not until considerably
later that the enormity of what that

meant actually hit me.

The reason I was chosen was not
because I'm something special.

I happened to be there at the right
time, at the right place,

and people knew that I speak Arabic,

so I was lucky.
I said, "Why me?" They said,

"Because you speak fluent
Portuguese."

I didn't get any instructions about

what to say except that it needs to
be short.

The greetings to the universe
are almost like proto tweets,

the first tweets -
keep it short, keep it simple.

It's not like there's a rule book
for what you should say when you're

greeting the universe.

Paz e felicidade todos.

Which means peace and happiness to
everybody.

It seemed like a safe thing to say
if you ran across some aliens,

rather than saying, "Take me
to your leader," or whatever.

Because the equipment is cold,
the spaceship is inanimate,

even the record itself is metal,

and I just wanted my voice to convey
warmth and to make contact.

SHE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

Greetings to our friends in the sky.

We long to meet you someday.

There is some piece of me that is
a traveller on that ship.

It's just gone, it's just going,
it continues to go.

It's going to keep going. When I'm
long, long gone, it'll keep going.

And it's like a little piece
of magic.

Hello from the children
of planet Earth.

# In your mind you have capacities
you know

# To telepath messages through the
vast unknown

# Please close your eyes

# And concentrate with every thought
you think

# Upon the recitation we're about to
sing

# Calling occupants of
interplanetary craft... #

I'd like to know the
answer - are we alone?

I'd like to know the answer to that
question.

There has to be other civilisations.

The numbers just compel it.

It would be almost statistically
impossible for there not to be

other life forms and other life
forms that have

evolved to a state of intelligence
and beyond.

# Calling occupants of
interplanetary craft... #

I'll tell you, I think that
intelligent life,

if we can include ourselves in that
categorisation,

is so prevalent that I'll bet you,
at this very instant,

there are two people,
probably one male and one female,

having exactly the same conversation
that you and I are having right now.

They're probably trying to contact
us at this very minute.

I predict, passing through this room
right now,

radio messages that we could detect
with equipment we could build

if we knew where to aim that

detector and what frequency to tune
to.

And it's right here in this room,
and that's mind-boggling.

You know, they're here, they're
right in the room right now.

The big division with

extraterrestrial life is not space,
it's time.

It depends on how long civilisations
last,

because you've got to get them to
overlap for us to communicate.

In our galaxy, our sun is relatively
young.

The galaxy is about 12 billion years
old.

Our sun's 4.5 billion years old.

There are many stars that are a lot
older.

Therefore, you could imagine some
civilisation around such a star that

might have watched our Earth form
over the last four and a half

billion years. Well, over that last
four and a half billion years,

the only evidence of intelligent
life would have been in the last 50

or 60 years, by watching Star Trek

or I Love Lucy or whatever signals
we sent out.

So, even if someone told you, look
at that star,

and then look at the third rock from
that star,

and that's where you're going to
find life, there's only a 50 year

period over five billion years,
almost,

where you'd be able to find
intelligent life.

If we're alone, then we're truly
unique,

and how did that happen? And why us?

And how are we so special and yet in
such a kind of far-flung,

humdrum part of the universe?

And if we're not alone, how did we
all get here,

and can we learn about ourselves by
these other groups out there?

What are they like? And are they the

creatures of our dreams or our
nightmares?

I think what's going to save us is

that interstellar travel is much
harder

than we think, and we're safe for
quite a long time from the aliens,

cos they don't know how to travel
very far either.

We're all sort of stuck on the
planets we've got.

Jupiter to Saturn went just like
that. It was really quick.

We started off with images that were
probably no better than what you can

get from the ground, and then it
keeps getting better and better and

better as you get closer and closer.

What are we going to see when we get
really close?

Having seen Saturn in your telescope
with the rings,

just looking like these little tiny
ears on either side,

we're now seeing detail and the
beauty of Saturn's rings,

looking almost like the grooves on
a phonograph record.

The rings of Saturn. What are they?

Billions of icy particles, some the
size of the house.

They're enormous, much wider than
many Earths strung together,

but less than a kilometre thick.

We get there and we find that it's a
blizzard of features throughout the

rings, and it got very complex.

We'd become junkies.

This is how you become a planetary
flyby junkie,

because you've gone through one of
them,

and you just know it's the greatest

feeling and you want to keep doing
it again and again.

At some point,

perhaps a year or so from now,

it may be possible to put all this
into perspective,

but right at the moment,

I cannot recall being in such a
state of euphoria for any previous

planetary encounter, including our
two

remarkable Voyager encounters at
Jupiter.

The largest moon of Saturn, Titan,
is the most extraordinary place.

There is a dense methane atmosphere

where a complex organic chemistry
has

been going on for perhaps billions
of years.

And we are in a moment of
extraordinary discovery.

We had both spacecraft programmed to
do identical mission at Saturn,

and that was the prime mission.

And it involved Titan.

There's a huge amount of scientific

interest in Titan because many
people

think that early in our own history
our own planet may have been like

that. So, if you want to understand
the starting conditions,

go study Titan.

If Voyager 1 was successful at
Titan,

Voyager 2, which is nine months
behind going to Saturn,

would be free to continue to Uranus
and to go on to Neptune.

But it depended upon Voyager 1
succeeding at Titan.

Because Voyager 1 had to be in a

certain place in order to pass
Titan,

it couldn't go on to Uranus and
Neptune.

There was just no way to bend the
trajectory to go anywhere else.

Voyager 2 would have done exactly

that same thing if Voyager 1
had failed.

We would have gone like this.
No more planets.

That would have been really tough.
You're going to try for Titan again

and give up two other worlds, Uranus
and Neptune.

So, there was a lot of pressure on
Voyager 1.

Mostly what we looked at was a giant

ball of brown smog with some sort of

electric blue hazes above it.

Titan did not reveal itself
to the cameras of Voyager.

But the radio signal from the
spacecraft passed through the

atmosphere of the planet and that
gave them

a measure of the pressure at the

surface and also the temperature at
the surface.

And so we learned a lot about Titan
from that radio signal.

We had gathered what we could
with Voyager spacecraft.

Shortly after that,

Nasa headquarters agreed that we

should continue with Voyager 2
on its Uranus trajectory.

So Voyager 1 had succeeded.

We almost didn't have that mission
to Uranus and Neptune if not

for the success of Voyager 1 at
Titan.

We're getting pictures and other
data back from Voyager 2,

but at some point in time it had to
go behind the planet.

And that blocks us from getting
radio signals to the Earth.

And that happened to be in the
middle of the night.

It was a period of time,
several hours that everybody knows

we're going to be out of contact
with the spacecraft.

Everybody's expecting to pop
champagne corks and say,

"Hey, we made it!" And all the
data's on the tape recorder because

it couldn't be transmitted to the
Earth.

And instead, it popped out of the

other side and there's all these
crazy

error signals coming from the
spacecraft.

Something bad has happened.

Something happened right around the
ring plane crossing.

And the images that were coming back
were blank.

People thought maybe it crashed
into the rings of Saturn.

Is this it? Is it dead?

Ladies and gentlemen, we can start
the briefing.

I wanted to make a very brief
statement.

We do have a problem on board the
Voyager 2 spacecraft.

The spacecraft has a problem.

The scan platform operating
mechanism is not operating properly.

To make sure we understand where
we're headed,

the following instruments are
mounted on the platform -

the wide angle camera,
the narrow angle camera,

the infrared instrument,

the ultraviolet instrument
and the photopolarimeter.

Yeah, that was the darkest, the
darkest day of the whole mission.

There is circumstantial evidence...

I came into the auditorium and there

was just gloom on everybody's
face....

You're beginning to speculate.

I quickly learned what had happened.

The scan platform had frozen.

A frozen scan platform could be
a fatal, crippling event.

We have our speakers up...

The rest of the Saturn mission and
Uranus and Neptune were dead,

and seeing everything that we were
planning just gone.

Just suddenly gone.

The problem is not with the camera,

it's with the articulated platform
that moves all of the instruments.

Our cameras, as far as we know,
are working just fine.

It's just that we're taking lots of
pictures of black space.

All of the science that we had hoped
to do on Uranus and Neptune,

there was no other spacecraft that
were going to be going there.

It was up to Voyager to do it,
and all of a sudden it looked as

though Voyager is not going to do
it. It was devastating, it was.

It took a couple of days while the
engineering team went to work

diagnosing the problem.

It turns out the scan platform has
small motors to rotate it.

We, of course, wanted to look at
lots of places,

so we had the thing looking at lots
of places.

And the lubrication wasn't adequate,
and it just jammed.

It was frozen sort of like a car
stuck in the snow.

You tried to go forward or backward
a little bit and keep working on

it and try to get it out.

And that's what we did with the
scan platform.

We would try to push it a little bit
in one direction and it would yield

a little bit, and then we'd push
it in the other direction,

and it would yield a little bit
more,

and then we kept doing that back and
forth, back and forth.

And, finally, that was enough to get
the lubrication into the gears.

It was freed up. And back came the
spacecraft and back came the imaging

system and there was Saturn on exit.

Yeah.

MUSIC PLAYS: Us and Them
by Pink Floyd

We're looking at the shadow of
Saturn on the rings,

and it was clearly from this wild,
crazy angle.

Wow. Holy cow, we're on the other
side of Saturn.

# Us

# And them

# And after all

# We're only ordinary men... #

We felt like we were there.

Nobody even thought about it.

Voyager was part of us. We.

# Me

# And you... #

All of planetary exploration to me
is a story about longing.

It's a longing to know ourselves.

It's a longing to understand the
significance of our own existence.

It's a longing to communicate, to
say to the universe, "We're here."

You know, "Know us." You know,
"Where are you?"

# "Forward," he cried from the rear

# And the front rank died... #

We have intelligent life on our own
planet, dolphins and whales,

that we cannot communicate with.

Other than tricks for fish.

It's a little conceited to think
that, you know,

it's going to be like Star Trek and
that we'll immediately sit down for

tea together or something.

It's not that... It's not going to
be that simple.

The Voyager Record has a set of
pictures on it that depicts our

civilisation. But we only had the
ability to do about 100 pictures.

That was as much data as we could
send, so that was kind of hard.

It was a process of distillation.

You can't describe the Earth in 100
pictures.

You can't describe the Earth in
1,000 pictures.

But what art is about is taking
something

that's small that can represent
the whole.

We thought it was very important to
pick some pictures of humans nude on

the record to show just what our
anatomy was really like.

Nasa had been seriously criticised
about the Pioneer plaque.

There were actually letters to the

editor in newspapers saying that
Nasa was sending smut to space.

How are we going to show pictures of

naked humans without it looking
salacious?

And the answer to that was,

"Why don't you put a pregnant woman
in the picture?"

Because pregnant women are not
considered salacious,

not appealing sexually.

So that's what we did.

And I figured if this doesn't get
past Nasa,

nothing's getting past Nasa.

And I guess the answer was nothing
was getting past Nasa,

because it was the only picture
that they made us take out.

Now it's five years
of cruising out to Uranus.

Uranus will be the most remote
object yet visited by a spacecraft,

and it's so remote that it was not
even known until 200 years ago.

It's a great distance out there, and

if we'd launched directly from
Earth,

it would have taken 30 years to get
there, so we were

very fortunate that we could swing
by Jupiter and Saturn on our way.

I've been trying to figure this
thing out for the past 25 years,

and it's very frustrating in a

telescope to look at that tiny
little disc,

so the next few days are going to be
very exciting.

Once we got beyond Saturn,

essentially the engineers threw out
the rule book and said,

"How are we going to make this
work?

"How are we going to take pictures
of planets this far from the sun?"

Voyager was the first of a class of
Nasa spacecraft that could be

reprogrammed. They could take what
was on the computer and just wipe it

away and give it a whole new set
of software.

They trained the spacecraft to
pirouette like a ballet dancer.

Basically, you want to take picture
of that thing,

and it's going past you really fast,

so you spin the whole spacecraft
and follow it like this.

And so, even though it was darker at
Uranus and really dark at Neptune,

you could leave the shutter open
without smearing,

and that was just beautiful.

We had all of the rich set of

goodies from Jupiter and from
Saturn,

but Uranus was unknown.

We just had the one spacecraft, so

we were more or less just flying
blind,

and we didn't get a second chance.

It was like taking something that
was almost fictional,

almost mythological, and then
seeing it as a real object.

The spacecraft flew through that
system like a bull's-eye,

cos Uranus is tilted on its side,

with this beautiful aquamarine
blue methane atmosphere.

And all these pictures, every single
one of them was like, "Whoa!"

You could hear people just...
"Whoa!" And everybody would be doing

something and somebody would go,
"Whoa!"

And everybody would turn and look
up - "Oh, my gosh, look at that!"

There was no internet, there was no

news stream going out live to CNN.

The only way to experience that

sensation of being one of only a
small

group of people who saw a point of
light become a world,

the only way to experience it was to
be in that room.

Well, just about two minutes ago,

Voyager 2 passed through its
closest approach to Uranus.

APPLAUSE

The new ring is

right here. Now, I don't...

You're telling me you can't see it.

I can. Dr Soderblom, as you whizzed
through your explanation,

I couldn't put it all together.

Could you try that again?

Slower?

Slower, and a few more details.
I thought that was pretty slow.

Every time we arrived at a new
planet, there were always surprises,

even though we had gotten a lot
smarter.

For instance, before Voyager,

all the magnetic fields have the

magnetic pole near the rotation axis
of the planet.

And that was true for Jupiter,
it was true for Saturn,

and then we flew by Uranus,
and the pole was near the equator.

There's been a lot of speculation
about the magnetosphere of Uranus.

Would there be one?
What would it be like?

And the magnetosphere of Uranus is
far more weird and wonderful...

VOICE-OVER: We found the planet's
tipped on its side,

but the magnetic field is then
tipped relative to the spin axis,

so you have this huge contortion in

the magnetic field as the planet
spins around.

Just bizarre.

Why on Earth the magnetic field was
so messed up, we had no idea.

At the time, the Voyager 2
spacecraft flew by Uranus,

one pole was pointing at the sun.

At that point in its orbit, its
atmosphere shuts down,

so the planet didn't look exciting,

and part of that is Uranus itself
holding its secrets back.

That had to be, I guess, one of
the...

Well, disappointments, in that

Uranus was not more photogenic than
it was.

It was actually pretty blah.

Poor Uranus.

Poor Uranus.

Uranus itself was not the character
that Saturn and Jupiter were.

The big stars of the Uranus
encounter were actually the moons.

The gravity assist aiming point at

Uranus just happened to be pretty
close to the orbit of Miranda.

If Uranus had been the last stop,

the scientists might have wanted to
go to a larger moon.

Which, ironically...

I don't see how anything could have

been any more interesting than
Miranda.

It looked like a jumbled up mess.

This moon looked like it had been

ripped to pieces and then just sort
of shoved back together again.

Whoa, come look at this.

Going up to the screen and pointing
and saying, "Did you...?

"Look at that, look at that."
Nobody was ready for Miranda.

There were enormous cliffs and
gashes.

One of them, you can see the edge of
a cliff.

It's got to be ten kilometres tall.

The gravity on Miranda is so weak
that if you jumped off that cliff,

you could read the newspaper on the
way down.

But when you hit the bottom, you'll
still be going at 100mph,

so it probably wouldn't...

It would be the last newspaper
you read.

We were just about to present all
our results,

we were all about to have the big
final finale press conference,

and we came back from breakfast,

and I went to go watch the shuttle
being launched.

We have main engines start.

Four, three, two, one...

And liftoff. Liftoff of the 25th
space shuttle mission,

and it has cleared the tower.

And we thought, "OK, great,
we'll watch the shuttle launch,

"and then we'll go to the press
conference."

But, of course, that was Challenger.

Engines throttling up.
Three engines now at 104%.

Challenger, go with throttle up.
Roger, go with throttle up.

People were just, like, astonished,
just gasping like, "Oh, my...

"Did you see that?
Did it really blow up?"

Because we had stopped in our
meeting so everyone could watch it,

and there was just silence,
people were crying.

Well, what can you say?

You knew right away that
a bunch of people were dead.

RADIO: ..reports vehicle exploded.

Copy.

And then, of course, they showed

replays and replays and replays over
and over and over again.

We have no downlink.

OK, everybody, stay off
the telephones,

make sure you maintain all your
data, start pulling it together.

The Challenger accident happened
as we were receding from Uranus.

I have this vivid memory of picture
after picture of the crescent Uranus

coming back and the replay
of the Challenger explosion

and it was just devastating.

RONALD REAGAN: Today is a day
for mourning and remembering.

Nancy and I are pained to the core
about the tragedy of the shuttle

Challenger. We know we share this

pain with all the people of our
country.

This is truly a national loss.

I know it's hard to understand, but
sometimes painful things like this

happen. It's all part of the process
of exploration and discovery.

It's all part of taking a chance
and expanding man's horizons.

The future doesn't belong to the
faint-hearted.

It belongs to the brave.

Report from the flight indicate

the impact in the water
approximately

28.64 degrees north,
80.28 degrees west.

During these close approach
time periods,

we would have hundreds of reporters
come to JPL and it was a great

news atmosphere and when the

Challenger exploded...
everybody just left.

It was really a very sad time.

A sad ending to another great
mission.

Those cosmic questions we hope to
learn by sending our machines out

are the very same questions that you

and I and every child has asked
themselves. "Where do we come from?"

"Are we alone?"
"What's the universe made of?"

"How will it end?" All of these

basic questions are the questions
that drive science.

I do cosmology.

I study the beginning and end of
the universe and some people say,

"What's that good for?" And I always
say to them, "You know,

"you don't ask what's a Mozart
symphony good for,

"or a Picasso painting."

But science somehow seems,
in order to be useful for people,

it has to produce technology.

But the beautiful thing about
science is the ideas.

There it was, just sitting out on
the edge of our solar system,

waiting for somebody to come out and
appreciate its beauty,

just waiting for the day that humans
would get out there and go, "Wow!"

Neptune was photogenic right from
the beginning.

I had been taking pictures of

Neptune from the ground where we
couldn't see very much. You know,

in my head imagining what it might
look like and seeing that turned

into reality, it's a rush.

Looking at this blue, bright blue
orb, it was evocative of the Earth,

which was bizarre for the last
planet that we were flying by.

I was a meticulous log taker and I
would make little notations in these

logs and I would draw little
pictures and you can see,

"What's this little dark spot?"

"Bright clouds." I'm like, "Wow!"

Wow, exclamation point!

And I'd draw pictures and arrows.

The most surprising thing was a
giant dark spot.

Nobody had any idea
that would be there.

It's huge, it's like a hole in the
planet.

So we called it the great dark spot

because we're not very original
when it comes to names.

We had to basically make a forecast
of the storms on Neptune in order to

point the cameras during the last
day, and at the same time,

there was a hurricane off the

East Coast of the US and the weather
forecasters were

trying to forecast that hurricane.

But they were trying to forecast
it 12 hours in advance,

and they were having a lot of

trouble because the storm kept
changing position, and we were just

calmly plotting points on graph
paper and then say

"OK, two weeks from now this
storm's going to be right here."

And it usually was.

At Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus,

the goal was to do a flyby that

would take the spacecraft on
to the next planet.

When it came to Neptune,

we knew that that was the last

planet we were going to fly by and
so we

could take a different trajectory.

This allowed us to get a really

spectacular view of the rings and
then

look back on the system in a way
that was quite beautiful.

Think about imaging the rings of
Neptune.

They have reflectivity which is

twice as dark as soot and the light
that's

falling on them is 1,000 times

fainter than on Earth,
so you have one 1000th

of the light and you're trying to

image something which is twice as
dark

as soot against a jet black
background.

More than one ring could be seen,
even in the raw images,

the so-called ring arcs,

and it seemed reasonable that this
was indeed the lost arc that our

imaging team raiders were looking
for.

GROANING

LAUGHTER

Now you're going to turn on me,
are you?!

We knew at Neptune we wanted a close
flyby of Triton,

which was a huge world and a
retrograde orbit around Neptune.

If you looked at them on the way in,
they weren't lined up.

One's up here and one's down here,
so what are you going to do?

Well, there was a way to fly over

the north pole very close to Neptune
to

bend the spacecraft so it would go
down.

That meant getting to within just a

few thousand miles of the cloud
tops,

skimming the surface, and it had to
hit that, you know, exactly right.

There was a lot of concern that we
didn't know enough about Neptune's

atmosphere to really be sure that
the spacecraft would not tumble.

Just a slight error in the

calculations and instead of skimming
across the

cloud tops, you're skimming into the
clouds and the spacecraft burns up.

Slight error the other way, you go
a little too far,

you don't bend enough,

maybe you run right into Triton and
crash and that's the end of the

mission. You don't have enough time,

you have to make your last, best
guess, hit the send button...

It would have been just fascinating
to be hanging

on to that spacecraft, right?

Skimming over these beautiful blue

cloud tops of Neptune, and then as
you come

over the pole of Neptune, seeing
that big moon Triton rise up.

After several billion miles of
journey, to get us to within a few

kilometres of where we need to be,
it's just absolutely remarkable.

You know, threading an incredible
needle.

The Southern hemisphere of Triton

is entirely covered with nitrogen
ice

and as we flew past,
then we go again,

as we flew past, we were able to
look down at

markings on the surface of the polar
cap.

We were putting together a mosaic
of Triton's globe,

but we couldn't get things
to line up quite right.

Some of the dark streaks, two in
particular, would not line up.

He's, like, just scratching his
head, like,

"I have no idea what's going on
here."

This guy's one of the world's
experts on anything having to do

with planets and moons
and he can't figure this out.

The only crazy idea that's left
is eruptions.

I said, "Well, let's put it in a
stereo viewer" -

red and blue glasses.

And the images fused into a

three-dimensional model
and up popped these guys.

And I said, "Holy moly!"

And so we knew what we had.

These plumes. Black geysers
spewing out this stuff.

The plumes extending out of the
surface for, like, kilometres.

We were seeing eruptions on a world

which should have been just a frozen
cinder.

This is too much.

The last place we would have
expected to see further dynamics,

further eruptions, was in a moon
this remote in the solar system.

So there's solar-driven geysers on a

satellite that's 30 astronomical
units from the sun.

Who would have thought?

Just because an idea's crazy
it's not necessarily wrong.

This was the last planet Voyager
would explore before it headed on

for the rest of its journey and so I
think the times together as a team,

the times to look at the pictures,
talk,

meet together, became more precious.

I was passing by the secretary's
desk and she said,

"Oh, Candy, there's a reporter
that wants to talk to you."

And he said,

"The countdown clock just went from

"minus, counting down,

"to counting up.

"Voyager's now leaving Neptune."

And he said, "How does that make you
feel?"

And in that moment, I dissolved into
tears.

After the spacecraft went past,

I turned around and looked back and
there's this beautiful crescent,

Neptune and Triton, and people

realised that's the end of the
planetary

part of Voyager, that's the last
port of call,

the last thing that we'll see in our
solar system is now behind us.

And it went from the Voyager
planetary mission

to the Voyager interstellar mission.

We could have enhanced the colour a

bit to make a somewhat prettier
picture,

but out of respect to the Voyager
spacecraft,

we decided to show it to you just as
it is.

Wow!

APPLAUSE

So this was Voyager's farewell to us
and it's our farewell to you.

The way I looked at it was, "See,
we did something really great."

Very, very successful mission.

A little weepy. I mean,

there was a lot of energy put into
this mission.

We have ignition and we have
liftoff.

Years of intense effort.

It was the end of a sentimental
journey.

We did it. We pulled it off.

And that's important. It is.

MUSIC PLAYS: Johnny B. Goode
by Chuck Berry

# And he could play a guitar just
like a-ringing a bell

# Go go
Go Johnny Go... #

We had a big party at JPL.

Chuck Berry was there, so that was
a good send off for Voyager.

# Go go
Go Johnny Go

# Go
Johnny B Goode... #

Rock star moment and sail on,
Voyager.

And I'm going to go and get some

sleep or maybe I'll do a little more
dancing. Thank you very much.

CHEERING

Meanwhile, Voyager 1 is still kind

of cruising out there, getting
farther

and farther out, and a number of
folks on the team,

including Carl Sagan,

had this idea that before we had to
shut the cameras down let's turn

around, look back towards the sun,
and let's take a picture of our

solar system unlike any that had
ever been taken before.

And there was actually opposition to
it.

They just didn't want to do it.

They couldn't get their heads around
what would be the point of taking a

picture of the Earth and Jupiter and
so on because they're just going to

be little points of light.

So Carl being Carl actually went all

the way to the Nasa administrator
and

got the Nasa administrator to direct

the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to
take this series of pictures.

Absolutely zero science in it,
absolutely none.

People have been taking selfies of
our planet for as long as the space

programme's been going on.

No-one had ever taken one like this.

And they ended up on
Valentine's Day, 1990,

taking this beautiful
family portrait.

When we did our portrait of each of
the planets,

I was the first person to look at
he pictures,

and I knew every blemish and so I
could pretty

quickly go, "Blemish, blemish,
blemish," and I thought,

"Well, where's the Earth? How could
we...?" You know.

And then I realised there was a lot
of...

There were a lot of streaks of light
in that image

and I realised finally that the

Earth was sitting in one of those
rays of light.

You know, I just sat there for a
while just kind of realising,

"Wow, that's the Earth," you know.

"That's Voyager looking back
at the Earth."

And so this is a different kind of
milestone than the scientific

milestones we've had.

One, it is really symbolic...

I'm an imaging scientist so I first
realised

"Oh, this didn't turn out the way we
thought it was going to turn out,"

and my first impulse is to take my

hand and wipe away the dust because
there was some dust on it.

Well, one of the pieces of dust
that I wanted to wipe

away was the Earth!

But it didn't matter because in the
hands of Carl he turned it into an

allegory on the human condition.

And the next slide...

The Earth in a sunbeam.

In this colour picture, you can see

that it is in fact less than a
pixel,

and this is where we live, on a blue
dot.

On that blue dot,

that's where everyone you know and
everyone you ever heard of and every

human being who ever lived...

lived out their lives.

I think this perspective underscores

our responsibility to preserve and

cherish that blue dot, the only home
we have.

My father talks about this little,

tiny speck in this vast cosmic
night,

and that we're part of something
bigger

and we're also, you know, alone.

There's a great thing where he
says, "There's no sign that any

"help is going to come here to save
us from ourselves. It's up to us."

HEARTBEAT

After Neptune, the project
continued,

but it continued in quite
a different way.

The Voyagers didn't have any
more encounters,

they were just sailing on out into
interstellar space,

which people didn't really

understand how far that was going to
be.

At the time we were designing
Voyager, interstellar space,

where the boundary was, was totally
unknown.

We had our eyes on an interstellar
mission.

Are we going to push the spacecraft
to get out of our solar system and

into the galaxy?

It was a shot in the dark because
nobody knew how far.

Uncharted waters.

Goldstone. Voyager.
Voyager to Goldstone.

Please turn command modulation on at
1800.

Goldstone, copy, 1800 for command.

We know the sun has this

gravitational influence that goes
way out,

almost halfway to the nearest star,

so in terms of gravity at the edge
of the solar system,

it's going to take Voyager tens of
thousands of years to get there.

But the magnetic field of the sun
can only extend so far.

It's a bubble around our star.

We can see the bubbles round other
stars out there.

Where's our bubble end?

Where does the influence of the sun
give way to the galaxy?

We kept going, and years went by and
years went by,

and we don't detect the interstellar
medium.

Throughout the 1990s, still didn't
find the edge of the bubble.

Throughout the 2000s, still didn't
find the edge of the bubble.

And then finally Voyager 1,
which is going the fastest,

which is the farthest,

started to see these funny things
happen to the squiggly lines.

A crazy spike and everybody goes,
"Oh, is that it?"

And then it goes back to normal.

And then there was just literally
one magical day in August 2012 that

everything changed and it was like

it just popped out of the bubble.

Voyager 1 has left our solar
system.

It's the first thing built by

humans that has left our solar
system.

Now it's in interstellar space.

Major historic announcement by Nasa
just a short time ago confirming the

Voyager spacecraft,

Voyager as in the thing that

launched way back in 1977, exploring
the moons, exploring the planets,

well, it has entered interstellar
space.

We've slipped the outermost grasp

of our solar system with Voyager 1,

the first human-made object to
venture into interstellar space.

It's a wonderful achievement,
actually, when you think about it,

it's as historic as our first step
out of our bubble, which, you know,

has been around all the planets and

around the Earth essentially
forever,

and now finally some little thing

that we have built has left that
bubble

and is in the space between the
stars.

We all feel like Voyager has carried
a bit of us into the galaxy.

There's never going to be another
mission like it.

It was the first and last of its own
kind.

Is the universe any different than
it was then?

No. But are we different?

Absolutely.

The thrill of the discoveries,

completing the Grand Tour,
I mean, man,

our child just made it.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will be
orbiting the centre of the Milky Way

galaxy with all the stars and every
200 and, roughly,

50 million years it will complete an

orbit around the centre of the
galaxy.

There's no wind, water, rain,
weathering.

There's no planets it's going to run
into,

there's no asteroid belts or comets
that they're going to run into.

And over billions of years, they're
predicted to remain pretty intact.

We're the generation that sent

something out into space that's not
only

going to outlive us, it's going to
outlive our star.

Four billion years from now, when
our sun turns into a red giant,

Voyager's still going to be trucking
out there through the stars,

and the songs of our time are going
to be out there.

Chuck Berry is still out there.

We'll still be out there.

When the Voyager's power sources go
dead and when

the spacecraft can no longer send
back any useful information,

that's really the point at which the
Golden Record becomes the primary

function of those missions,

still floating somewhere in

interstellar space, completing
the last part of the mission.

All of the human tragedies and the

greatest triumphs in our existence
as a

species, all of that's going to be

forgotten and the universe doesn't
care about it.

But it is possible that at least one
thing we've created will be

out there, and who knows,
maybe someday, with an

infinitesimally small chance,
another being might

find it and at least know of our
existence.

It's highly unlikely, but it's not

impossible and that small
possibility

surely gives us hope.

We will continue to get signals back
from Voyager and we will continue to

try and get signals back from
Voyager as long as we can.

There will be a day

when the antennas are listening to
Voyager

and we don't hear anything.

And that will be the day that

we stop communications with Voyager.

And that will be very sad.

Because it will have gone silent and

we really won't have a chance to say
goodbye.

# We've won the race

# We've claimed our place forever

# Cold and lost in space

# We've won the race

# We've claimed our place forever

# Cold and lost in space

# I've found this inner dance

# Our thoughts will start to fray

# Forever cold and lost in space

# I feel I'm going down

# There's no more solid ground

# Forever cold and
lost in space... #