All language subtitles for 30A8DFB31FAD879C922B1F9AFB70173A_eng

In the 1970s, we
sent them to the outer

planets, thinking they
might last five years.

Forty years later, two little machines
called Voyager, with hearts of gold,

are still going strong.

I have to say, you know, Voyager is sort
of the love of my life.

Now, more than 10
billion miles away, they're

waving a long goodbye
to our solar system.

A solar system that we hardly knew before
their fantastic journeys.

Facing harsh radiation, crazy
temperatures, hails of particles,

whiplash speeds.

They faced mission-ending
catastrophes, failed, and were

reborn, thanks to the
ingenuity of their human parents.

The stunning payoff?

Close encounters with our giant outer
planets and their moons.

Completely unknown worlds with massive
volcanoes, some of lava, some of ice,

internal seas, and lakes of methane.

Places where life might take hold.

And now, they're creatures of deep space.

The Voyagers will be our silent
ambassadors to the Milky Way galaxy.

And they're still phoning home with new
answers to our cosmic questions.

These are the stories of a lonely blue
marble.

Sending its intrepid little machines to
places no human can yet go.

To the far ends of the solar system and
beyond.

Landing a man on the moon and returning
him safely to the Earth.

In 1964, as the world was riveted by the
race to the moon, a graduate student named

Gary Fladro noticed something that would
ultimately take us far beyond the moon.

The planets of the outer solar system were
spinning towards a rare alignment that

would make it possible, in theory,
to hurl something off of Earth and have it

slingshot past all the outer planets of
the solar system.

Best of all, the craft could be sent close
enough to each planet to get whipped by

gravity to higher and higher speeds using
almost no fuel.

It was called the Grand Tour.

And it wouldn't happen again for quite a
while.

The Grand Tour was an opportunity that
happens once every 176 years when Jupiter,

Saturn, Uranus and
Neptune were all lined up so a

spacecraft could fly
by all four in its journey.

It was a chance NASA couldn't pass up.

The Grand Tour itself was
a very ambitious journey

with four spacecraft flying
by all the outer planets.

But it was much too
expensive for everything

that was trying to be
done by NASA at the time.

And they scaled it back to just a
four-year mission to Jupiter and Saturn.

Unofficially, they never
gave up on the idea

of a full Grand Tour
to Uranus and Neptune.

They just kept their heads
down and tried to engineer

the living daylights out of
the Voyagers, just in case.

And so they would kind of fudge things
here and there or buy different parts that

might cost a little bit more but would
make the mission last longer.

So in some sense they went against what
their management would say, tell them they

need to do, but they never told their
management.

They just went and did
that and made that selection

so the Voyager could
fly as long as possible.

Voyagers 1 and 2 are identical spacecraft
made up of 65,000 separate parts.

Each is equipped with instruments to
conduct 10 different experiments including

television cameras,
infrared and UV

sensors, magnetometers
and particle sensors.

Each could radio
information directly to Earth or

record data for sending
later on an 8-track tape.

How 70s is that?

Each Voyager also carried
a radical new computer

that was self-testing
and self-repairing.

Each craft weighed about the same as a
two-seater smart car, one that would have

to be accelerated to 25,000 miles per hour
to escape the Earth's gravity.

So, weeks apart in late summer 1977,
Titan Centaur rockets prepared to tear

away from Cape Canaveral with their little
charges aboard.

Voyager 2 left first.

But Voyager 1 was sent on
a more direct route, meaning

it would reach the outer
planets weeks ahead of its twin.

Let us learn together and laugh together.

Jimmy Carter was president.

Star Wars had taken the world by storm.

And two dropouts in a garage had invented
a personal computer named Apple.

The Voyagers had
mothers who would be in

charge of their day-to-day
care and feeding.

Actually, the minutely detailed lines of
code telling them exactly what to do.

Among them, Linda Spilker.

I felt very maternal toward Voyager.

And I know if anything would go wrong with
Voyager, we'd all worry until we got that

signal back and the sign that everything
is okay and we're ready to go on.

And later, Susie Dodd.

It was super exciting.

This is my first job out of college.

And during the time of the encounters,
all the scientists came.

Carl Sagan was here.

And they would all come to JPL and look at
the data as it was coming down.

The beginnings were not auspicious.

Voyager 2 had computer glitches on the
launch pad.

It appeared to get vertigo during lift-off
and almost didn't make it out of orbit.

The first stage of the launch vehicle
underperformed.

And the upper stage was just barely able
to do anything.

It had to fix it on its own by literally
burning itself out of fuel.

There's nothing you can do when that
happens.

Then, just two hours
into the flight, Voyager 2

seemed determined not to
speak to her human handlers.

Her primary radio receiver failed.

Very shortly after launch, we lost one of
the command receivers.

So that's the way you can send a command
to let the spacecraft get new instructions.

The other remaining command receiver was
tone-deaf.

It could not tune to the frequency that we
were sending.

And so that meant we had to learn on the
ground how to send the right frequency.

So when it got to the spacecraft, it
was the one the spacecraft could listen to.

And we learned how to do that.

We flew the whole mission, our flying
mission today, always knowing where to

find that frequency that is needed for
Voyager to actually hear it.

The Voyager's first
encounters with Jupiter would

take place during the
spring and summer of 1979.

Jupiter is a very dangerous place.

The massive planet emits incredibly harsh
radiation.

No human would have survived aboard
Voyager.

And during the approach,
Jupiter started attacking the

probes, invisibly and
potentially catastrophically.

The radiation was pinging the clock that
controlled the camera and putting it out

of sync with the clock that controlled the
exposure.

The engineers at JPL managed to come up
with a workaround.

And everyone held their breaths as Jupiter
got larger and larger in the images.

The Great Red Spot, discovered 300 years
earlier, turned out to be not one storm

but hundreds swirling
within and around a giant,

multicolored vortex more
than three Earths across.

As we started 30 days out from Jupiter,
began to make a movie of the very complex

storm systems in
Jupiter's atmosphere, the

Great Red Spot is just
the largest hurricane.

There are literally dozens of these storms
in this giant planet.

And that was our first taste of the
discovery that was waiting for us.

As Voyager 1 swung through
the system at 35,000 miles

per hour, JPL went wild
at the quality of the images.

But if Jupiter had amazed
them, the real shock

would come from the
giant planet's moons.

Io is Jupiter's innermost moon.

A close look at the images revealed the
driest object in the solar system.

But nobody was prepared for what showed up
next.

And it took a graduate
student who was looking in

the details of the images
and saw this big arc.

And she said, hey, come and look at this.

And people said, oh my God, volcano.

It had eight active volcanoes when Voyager
flew by.

It has ten times more
volcanic activity than

the Earth, even though
it's just a small moon.

And it had lakes of hot lava on its
surface.

Let's not forget that before the Voyager
encounter with Jupiter and its moons,

the only example of volcanoes we knew
about was Earth.

How was it possible that this moon,
so far from the sun, in the deep cold,

was erupting hot lava?

Scientists had just started theorizing
that the incredible push and pull of

Jupiter's gravity would squish and stretch
the moons, heating them up.

And boy, did they.

It turns out these moons are in orbit
around the giant Jupiter, and that creates

a tide in the moon, just like the moon
creates a tide in our ocean.

Well, Jupiter creates a tide in the moon
and deforms it.

And that deformation as it works around
heats the moon.

In the case of Io, it causes volcanic
activity.

The team didn't think
they would run across other

discoveries that were that
outrageous in the Jovian system.

But Voyager's images at Jupiter's
second-closest big moon, Europa,

were a shock as well.

It was smooth as a bowling ball,
but scratched.

It looked like the surface consisted of
millions of little plates, sort of what

you would see when an ice pack is breaking
up during the spring.

Could they possibly be skating over an
ocean?

Europa essentially has a shell of ice that
could be as deep as 20 kilometers or more.

And underneath that, however, there is
liquid water.

And the ice itself is not absolutely
impermeable because we see cracks.

We see stuff that has come from underneath
at various times.

The implications were stunning.

Life on Earth probably arose in a
primitive ocean.

Did Europa have one?

Later mission Galileo showed that it did
indeed.

The largest ocean in the solar system.

You have all the ingredients that we now
know constitute the elements of life.

You have water.

You've got apparently organic material.

And you've got the source of energy,
which is the heat generated by the

gravitational pull from
Europa and Jupiter and Io that

continuously charms this
underground under-ice ocean.

And the other moons followed suit.

Europa, Ganymede, and possibly even
Callisto appear to have vast oceans of

liquid water under relatively thin shells
of ice.

Where scientists had expected dark,
dead cratered moons like our own,

they found mysteriously dynamic worlds.

And those tiny moons that
were basically points of light and

telescopes from the ground
suddenly started to be revealed.

First Callisto, ancient and cratered,
then Ganymede with its grooves and

tectonic activity, bright white icy
Europa, and then active Io.

So these points of light became worlds in
their own right.

There was little time to celebrate.

In just 16 months, the Voyagers were
hurtled by the crown jewel of our solar

system, Saturn, which
turned out to be more beautiful

than anyone could have
imagined and nearly as dangerous.

It was a time of Pac-Man, Reagan,
and the birth of the 24-hour news cycle.

In November 1980, Voyager 1 swung through
the Saturnian system, around behind the

rings, and made a beeline for its largest
moon, Titan.

Earth-based telescopes
had shown that Titan had an

atmosphere, making it the
must-see destination for scientists.

Voyager 1 could not see through the haze
to the surface, but it could register that

the atmosphere was largely nitrogen,
just like Earth's.

There was methane as well.

Methane, we'd later discover, was so cold
that it probably snowed on Titan's surface.

Enceladus, Saturn's sixth
largest moon, was brilliant

white, the most reflective
body in the solar system.

It was another candidate for having a
liquid ocean beneath its icy surface.

And later, the Hubble telescope would catch
it in the act of actually erupting water.

Voyager also found that Saturn didn't have
three rings.

It had thousands.

Some with spokes.

Some that twisted, and braided,
in ways that stumped the scientists.

The shimmering rings were made up of three
rings.

Full of tiny grains of water ice.

And were unbelievably thin.

For comparison, if Saturn were shrunk down
to the size of a basketball, then the

thickness of the rings would be about
1,250th the width of a human hair.

We didn't know what the rings would look
like.

We thought we'd see bland sheets of
material separated by gaps.

But instead we found incredible,
wonderful detailed structure.

And I remember in those days you didn't
have a computer screen where you could

call up a picture of the
rings and instead you had to

get the data and plot it
out in this long roll of paper.

And I remember taking those rolls and
unrolling it in the hall and just walking

slowly, looking down thinking,
I'm walking through the rings of Saturn.

And what a wonderful feeling.

Having finished its official
mission, Voyager 1 was

slung up and out of the
plane of the solar system.

This cleared the way for what everyone had
in mind.

That Voyager 2 could complete the grand
tour and visit more planets after Saturn.

But only by sending it
careening dangerously close to

Saturn's surface to make
a hard left toward Uranus.

Then Voyager 2 slipped into the shadow of
the planet.

And the images suddenly went dark.

Had they come this far?

With Uranus and Neptune in their sights?

Only to have lost their robotic eyes.

After the Saturn flyby, the Voyager 2 scan
platform got stuck.

And it just wouldn't move.

And so we just saw outbound these pictures
of Saturn.

We wondered, could we fix it in time to
get to Uranus?

Voyager 2 emerged from behind the planet.

Directly on course.

And accelerating like mad.

Thanks to the gravity boost from the close
flyby.

But it looked like the camera
platform had balked at the sheer

speed of the commands it had
to execute to take stable images.

The engineers studied the phenomenon and
figured out a way of how to pulse it

enough to make the platform move at a
fairly constant rate.

And just the hours of people studying and
thinking and finding ways to fix it.

And then we were all cheering.

Yes, we found a way to keep the Voyager
mission going.

But how would they take
pictures at Uranus when

they'd be moving 20,000
miles per hour faster?

And the sunlight would be four times
fainter.

It would require the most ingenuity yet.

Susie Dodd joined the Voyager team in time
for the approach to Uranus.

So in order to make what
you want to look at bright

enough, you really have
to stare at it for a while.

But your spacecraft is
tracking so fast, it'd be like trying

to take a picture of a sign
as your car is whizzing by it.

You know, you have to track that.

And we designed attitude control software
so that we could track the target we were

looking at in order for the exposure not
to be smeared or to be too dark an image.

Five years after the Saturn flyby,
they were ready for Uranus.

Or so they hoped.

I'll do my utmost to be deserving of your
trust.

Uranus rolls around the Sun rather than
spins.

Voyager 2 would fly through the bullseye
of its system like an arrow at 51,000

miles per hour, passing close to the
innermost Moon.

Tiny Miranda.

As crazy as the Saturn flyby had been,
it had taken three days.

This time, they would have just ten hours.

Miranda turned out to be one of the most
geologically bizarre bodies in the solar

system, with crazy V-shaped grooves and
50,000-foot-tall ice cliffs.

To this day, we don't fully understand this
strange patchwork quilt of a mini-moon.

I kind of like Miranda, which is one of
Uranus's moons.

It's a small moon, and it has this big
checkmark in the middle of it.

It's like, okay, you know, I'm okay.

I'm here, Mom.

I'm here, planet Uranus.

The Uranus flyby and images completely
surpassed what JPL had hoped for.

Voyager 2 was now five years beyond her
original mission, all those years ago.

The engineers' secret
plans to keep the probe

going through the Grand
Tour were paying off.

And now, Voyager 2 was headed towards its
last planet, Neptune.

It arrived just 62 miles off its target,
just above Neptune, after traveling 4.

4 billion miles.

Something lead designer Charlie Culhays
estimated was roughly equivalent to a

golfer sinking a putt from Washington,
D.C.

to Phoenix, Arizona.

The movies of the approach are eerie.

There was a large, dark, oval-shaped
feature in Neptune's southern hemisphere,

similar in shape to Jupiter's great red
spot.

And when small white clouds came into
view, it confirmed another giant

Earth-sized storm system, which shouldn't
be there.

Neptune has about 900 times
less light than here on Earth,

yet it has the fastest winds
that we saw in the solar system.

Well, I think nobody knew that there was
this giant storm at Neptune.

Now, that storm doesn't exist anymore.

From 1990 to 2016, where
we are today, that storm has

dissipated and is no longer seen
in the atmosphere of Neptune.

That's kind of neat.

After swinging just 3,000 miles,
above the cloud tops of Neptune,

Voyager 2's trajectory would take it past
one final, glorious, unknown destination.

The moon, Triton.

And yet again, the scientists would be
greeted by an inexplicable object.

An explosive one.

Triton was a very big surprise.

It's very cold, only 40 degrees above
absolute zero.

The nitrogen is frozen into an icy polar
cap that's so cold.

And yet, we found several
active geysers erupting

from that surface at 40
degrees above absolute zero.

Another big surprise.

With that last flyby, Voyager 2 was hurled
slightly south of the plane of the solar

system, on its own search for interstellar
space.

For the team at JPL, it was a bittersweet
time.

We were all excited.

The press was here.

It was in the news all the time.

It was very thrilling.

And then the press kind of left,
and the news died down.

And you still had the spacecraft,
which was kind of sad.

It was now off, going out into the cold,
dark space on its own, alone.

It's estimated that a total of 11,000 work
years were devoted to the Voyager Grand

Tour, equivalent to a
third of the labor force

needed to complete the
Great Pyramid at Giza.

The results were nothing short of
revolutionary.

The Voyagers really changed
our visions of the outer solar system

by showing it to be a far more
dynamic place than expected.

But the Voyagers weren't done yet.

Not by a long shot.

Now, both probes were
headed out of the plane of

the solar system, still
functioning perfectly.

There was a chance that if they could hold
on for another five or ten years,

they could reach interstellar space,
beyond the influence of our sun.

Well, Voyager flew very quietly.

And I would say very much sort of in the
background while we were landing

spacecraft on Mars and Cassini was up
taking great images of Saturn.

For another dozen years, the Voyagers,
now 30 years past their sell-by dates,

logged the diminishing force of the sun's
gravity, its magnetism, and the solar wind.

They found all kinds of bizarre
formations, including a magnetic bubbling

at the outer limits that protects us from
deadly cosmic rays, blasted out of the

hearts of supernovas throughout the
galaxy.

Today is a historic moment for NASA,
the Voyager team, and in fact, humankind.

Well, this is the spacecraft, the first to
interstellar space.

We made it!

It was tremendously exciting to think that
a spacecraft I had worked on, I had been a

part of, was actually now
leaving our solar system and

going out for the first
time into interstellar space.

Any of the particles that are hitting
Voyager now are coming from other stars.

They're not coming from our sun.

So we're actually measuring
for Voyager 1 particles

and dusts and winds that
are coming from other stars.

It's the very first time that humanity
sort of moved out of the cocoon of the

solar atmosphere to
venture beyond the solar

system and into the
source of the galaxy.

That only happens once, and it happened in
our lifetime.

The Voyagers are now flying blind,
feeling their way through the universe.

Their cameras shut down
to preserve the tiny bit

of power left in their
little nuclear power plants.

With a little luck and pluck, these will
keep generating energy for another decade.

So we think we can operate all the
instruments until 2020.

We should have enough power to do that.

But after that, we'll be turning off one
instrument at a time.

And probably by 2025, we won't be able to
have any more science instruments on.

But my personal goal is to operate the
spacecraft for 50 years.

So I want to see it operating at least
until 2027.

Remarkably, Voyager's controllers still
talk to the probes every day, despite the

fact that the signal
from so far away is

down to about a
billion billionth of a watt.

But it can't last forever.

Yeah, one day, it's going to be a very sad
day, but one day we will expect to hear

from the spacecraft, and we won't hear
from it anymore.

And we will send a lot of commands from
the ground to try and recover it,

and we'll try different things,
but eventually it won't have enough power

for the transmitter, and so it'll just
stop transmitting data.

And then it will just be
our silent ambassador

traveling around the center
of the Milky Way galaxy.

But it's still on a big adventure.

It's just that I won't get to know what
that adventure is.

It will be another 40,000
years before Voyager 1

drifts within shouting
distance of another star.

Just in case there's
intelligent life out there ready to

snag it, they'll discover
Voyager's message to the universe.

A 12-inch gold-plated record containing
greetings in dozens of languages.

Hello from the children of planet Earth.

Samples of music and sounds of nature.

Hints of an Earth and a people that may
long have perished.

That record has the
sights and sounds of the

Earth, pictures, songs,
people saying hello.

And so maybe someday some other
civilization will find Voyager.

And there's even
directions on the cover of

the record of how to
find us, where we are.

They will be orbiting
every 240 million years

around the center of
the Milky Way galaxy.

Year after year after year for billions of
years, carrying this plaque and record

saying we sent this to the Milky Way
galaxy.

This kind of adventure doesn't happen
often in human affairs, and I think

Voyager is the the Columbus, if you like,
of the space era of discovery.

Voyager is still doing
path-breaking science

as we speak, and it
continues to do so.

You can't do it any better than that.