Original subtitles

Support from viewers like you, make this program possible.

Please give it to your PVS station.

This is a present from a small distant world,

a token of our sounds, our science, our images,

our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting

to survive our time, so we may live in yours.

PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER'S GOLDEN RECORD MESSSAGE JUNE 16th, 1977

It is really true

that you can only explore the solar system

for the first time once.

Ah, Voyager did that.

How could one be so lucky?

It's a dream and it came true.

Fifty years from now

Voyager will be the lead science project of the 20th century.

The mission. The big mission.

It opened our eyes to worlds,

to real worlds.

This may in the long run be

the only evidence that we ever existed.

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.

# I'm wishing on a star

# To follow where you are

# I'm wishing on a dream...

It is the little engine that could.

Nobody really knows how it does it, but everybody's rooting for it.

# And I wish on all the rainbows that I've seen...

Every second, it goes to another place

where we have never been before.

# Who really dream And I'm wishing on tomorrow

Voyager takes the cake. It's the most audacious mission.

Who'd have thought that we'd actually be able to do that in 1977?

# I'm wishing on a star

THE FARTHEST VOYAGER IN SPACE

In 1977, a team of scientists and engineers

launched a mission of staggering ambition.

Voyager.

The initial idea was a grand tour of the outermost planets,

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

What were their atmospheres like? Their moons?

At the time, our knowledge of these worlds was scant.

and piano music playing]

because you can observe

from the Earth with telescopes.

We knew for example at Jupiter

that there were moons

Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto going around.

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.

It was big.

No, 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.

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 rattling noise comes in]

I had been staring at these planets

through some of the best telescopes on Earth,

and yet all I could see was fuzzy blobs.

Astronomers had worked pretty hard

to know what the physical make-up was,

there were some basic characteristics,

but their real nature,

what they were really made of

and what the means, moons, were like,

we had none of that,

just little glimpses.

Human beings are a curious bunch.

We want to know what's around the corner.

We have to go past that next bend in the road,

of innate drive, I think,

that we have, as a species.

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

Like a slingshot,

Saturn's in the right place.

of the outer planets

presented an opportunity.

A rare alignment meant the time

needed to cross

the solar system

could be slashed.

Jupiter boom, Saturn boom,

Uranus boom, Neptune boom.

lined up in just the right way

to allow one spacecraft

And that aligning up

only occurs rarely.

once like once every hundred,

more than a hundred years.

something like that.

Once every

176 years.

The previous time

it happened,

wooden sailing ships.

"The Outer Planets Grand Tour",

and the cost of the mission

in excess of a billion dollars.

The NASA administrator

went to the President,

and he said the last time

were lined up like that,

President Jefferson was sitting

at your desk, and he blew it.

So, Mr. Nixon laughed

and said all right,

just do two.

So, only two planets.

Jupiter and Saturn

were officially a go.

It would be a less grand

but still ambitious tour.

Yet the Voyager team

wasn't ready to give up

on going farther.

spacecraft in a giant hangar,

some of them kept

a secret goal alive.

We knew right from the get-go

that we were going to try

as hard as we could

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 have prevented us

from going further.

So, it was a mission

within a mission, yeah.

A group of scientists

and visionaries realized

would leave the solar system.

They figured don't let

this opportunity pass,

you're going to throw a bottle

into the ocean.

Put a message in it.

to tell intelligent aliens

about our planet?

What would we want

to tell them about us?

The driving force

behind the message

was the astronomer Carl Sagan.

Would you expect

this record out there?

Is there something out there?

nobody knows.

One of the great

unsolved questions

is whether we're alone

Carl Sagan has become probably

the best-known scientist

of the late 20th century.

He was a working scientist,

in many of the NASA missions

including the Voyager one.

He was one of the scientists

on the Voyager imaging team,

but he also was the astronomer

who as much as any one person

extraterrestrial life credible.

A comment by Thomas Carlyle,

a somewhat crusty old fellow

who upon thinking

about the stars said,

"A sad spectacle.

If they be inhabited, what

a scope for misery and folly.

If they be not inhabited...

what a waste of space."

a good friend of mine,

and I called him up and said,

"Hey, would you be willing

to come up with something

on the Voyager spacecraft?"

He says, "Yes, sure."

And he told me he could do it

for 25.000 bucks,

so I authorized him

to go ahead and do it,

and I sort of was hands-off

followed in the footsteps

of a project called

the Pioneer plaque.

The Pioneer spacecraft

had some line drawings

of a male and female form,

and some people went

absolutely bonkers.

I don't know if you've seen it,

but it's the most innocent

thing you can imagine,

a lot of commotion.

But I thought that was great.

At first Carl thought

another plaque,

some more information,

but Frank Drake,

theoretical physicist

but also a very hands-on

he came up with the idea

that for the same amount

of weight and space,

a phonograph record.

did the science part of Voyager

are always jealous and mad

because the Golden Record

than all the wonderful things

exploring the outer planets

except Pluto and all that.

But the main attention goes

to the Golden Record.

that surrounds anything to do

with extraterrestrial

intelligent life,

any kind of effort to contact

extraterrestrial life

is more fascinating

the chemical makeup

of a mineral on Mars

or something.

an old-style LP recording.

The only difference is

and that's so it will last

recorded at half-speed

so that gave us two hours

An hour and a half of it

was devoted to music

half hour contains

all of the other data

the natural sounds of Earth,

and the encoded photographs

questions a lot of people ask

is, well, they'll never

figure out how to play it.

And in fact, we included

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

but they should be able

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.

well, why would you do that?

I said what do you mean?

They say, well, why would you

announce where you are,

you know, because there

are aliens out there,

that probably raid planets

and use them for food

or eat the people

or make them slaves.

You know, if they find it,

their technology is probably

more advanced than ours,

they'll come here

and destroy us,

so why would you do

something like that.

Why would these people

to our voracious appetite?

They must be very altruistic,

you know?

for the mission got underway.

Other great journeys

by Magellan, Columbus,

all involved more than

And so would Voyager.

Two spacecraft would be built,

two chances for success.

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...

well, you've got to bring...

what if these bugs come out,

what if the tent gets flooded,

what if you run out of gas,

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,

had better be like that long

or you're not going to be able

These projects begin

with a conceptualization

period.

How do we arrange

the spacecraft,

the communications system,

this large 12-foot diameter

and arrange it relative

to the propulsion system?

the dimension of being a child,

and our design teams, you know,

were like kind of parents.

This was actually

a nurturing process.

Bringing that "child",

if you will, into reality.

All spacecraft are

made basically of the

silicon and aluminum,

You know, that's probably

Silicon and aluminum is cheap

until you start making stuff

out if it, you know.

and low bass drum beats]

you had the technology freeze,

remember we launched in 1977,

so you freeze technology

several years earlier,

and at the time the biggest

computers in the world

to the kinds of things

we have in our pockets today,

and I'm not talking

about a cell phone.

I'm actually talking

about a key fob.

with 70s technology?

I mean, you're looking at me,

I'm a 30s technology, right?

I don't apologize

for the limitations

that we were working with

for what we could get from it.

about 800 kilograms.

is 12 feet in diameter,

which was the largest

There's this body,

this ten-sided can

called The Bus,

electronics and the computers.

And that's got these arms and

that stick out.

that connected it to the rocket

and then a really long arm

with a magnetic field sensor

and another arm over there

with this plutonium

to give it its electricity.

You can't keep that too close

because it will radiate

the spacecraft.

And another arm

with this device

and other instruments on it

that could point around,

kind of like the eyes,

and the big antenna

scientific instruments

peeking out to see

what's out there.

When everything

is fully extended

to its greatest dimensions,

to sort of a small school bus.

A strange-looking being

but perfectly happy in space.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony

was one of twenty-seven

chosen for the Golden Record.

I became the producer

record in my career,

and only two copies of it

and they were both hurled

so I don't know if that's

a credential or not.

The launch window

for Voyager was set.

and they sure as hell weren't

going to wait for the record.

We had six weeks

that's what always draws

that you had to figure out

a way to explain the world

and by the way it has to be

finished in six weeks.

in making the Voyager record,

we wanted the music

many different cultures

and not just the culture

that had built and launched

the spacecraft.

The other criterion was we

wanted it to be a good record.

idiosyncratic message.

It doesn't seem like something

made by a committee.

It's too quirky.

["Cranes in Their Nest"

to the Voyager record,

it would be remarkable if you

that were quite unlike anything

The Japanese shakuhachi piece

or the sixteen-year-old

pygmy girl singing

an initiation song,

a kind of puberty song,

in the Ituri forest of Africa

is just unbelievably beautiful.

[Pygmy girl initiation song

There was a certain amount

of hunting up rare records

here and there.

of an Indian appliance store

in New York

some Indian records,

and there was one copy

that we ended up putting

on the record.

to have had a Bob Dylan piece.

But really there's only room

contemporary rock piece.

But you know you're up against

Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode,

which Bob Dylan himself

just four simple words,

but it is the first

that other intelligent beings

inhabit the universe.

What are the four words,

Send more Chuck Berry.

The world is full

of fantastic music,

and it goes without saying

there's a lot more great music

on the Voyager record

than there is on it.

Which is a good thing, too,

I mean, if you imagine

living on a planet

that was so pathetic

that it only had 90 minutes

of decent music.

In the summer of 1977,

final preparations for two

launches began in Florida.

When it was launched,

it was of course all folded up,

it was like origami.

unexpected encapsulation.

I mean, we knew that we were

going to be encapsulated,

but the emotional effect

on that was kind of

surprising,

in just looking around me.

I realized that this

was the last time

any of us were going to see

the spacecraft with eyes.

And, um, that's a f...

that's a fairly moving

experience.

converged on Cape Canaveral

a once in a lifetime mission.

When the reporters

came to the launch,

they all wanted to know more

Most of the press release

show the other side

of the spacecraft

so you can't see the record.

There was always a lot of

ambiguity in NASA about this.

the Voyager record is useless

from a scientific standpoint,

and the officials reluctantly

arranged a press conference.

The press conference

was a joke really.

It was held in a hotel room

separated by one of those

accordion folding barriers

from what was literally,

as memory serves me,

a Polish wedding reception.

We did the whole

press conference

a wedding reception next door.

But I think the public

seemed to get it.

Environmental control, ready.

Roger.

We actually launched

Voyager 2 first,

and this gave the media,

uh, drove them nuts.

We launched Voyager 1 later,

but it was launched

on a faster trajectory,

so it overtook Voyager 2

in December of 1977.

From that point on, Voyager 1

always got to the planet

and the press was happy,

We have just had a report

the Voyager project manager,

to count down at 10:25.

After five years

of planning,

spacecraft's 65.000 parts

mathematical calculations,

it all came down to this.

Five, four, three, two, one.

and we have lift-off.

those solids ignite,

and you are really not prepared

for what's about to occur.

The sound waves then catch up

and then this forceful shaking,

the body is actually moved

in resonance with this energy,

shaking it, right.

We were sitting in bleachers,

and they keep you pretty far

because they can explode, and

So there's a little bit

wanting to make sure you see it

get that first little motion

off the pad starting

We were all thinking

There it goes, it's going to be

out there to represent us

five billion years.

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.

in control of itself,

it's just riding

this big rocket,

and that was shaking it

that it thought it was failing,

switching off various boxes,

changing to the back-up this,

to the back-up that.

all this stuff was happening.

As the launch vehicle

leaves the launchpad,

it has to roll through

to get to the right direction

and the rate that it rolls at

than the spacecraft would ever

normally experience flying,

and so the gyro hits the stops.

Us poor people on Earth,

"what is it doing?"

it was a real nail-biter.

have you lost the spacecraft

we don't know for sure

because we didn't know

read "Mutiny in Space."

The Voyager spacecraft

to follow the instructions

that its human controllers

and it was going to do

what it wanted to do.

So early in the mission

it's like, oh, man,

is this mission going to be

Is there some fundamental flaw

That was a cliff hanger.

That was the end

of the mission.

the end of the mission.

Fortunately, the person

who had written that code

was able to say this is okay,

it's doing this, it tried that

and calm everyone else down.

The limits were set

simply too tight.

It needed to be able

to wiggle more and

Finally stabilized,

bound for Jupiter.

The launch of Voyager 1

was coming up fast,

so the team scrambled

the spacecraft's software

to head off another mutiny.

With the launch window

Voyager 1 finally took off.

is famously complicated.

Titan Centaur 6

has lifted off at 8:56

at the Cape Canaveral

Air Force Station...

We're thinking

everything's okay,

and then we begin to hear

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,

And he says, "I don't know,

going to make it, you know."

in the propellant line,

and we were losing propellant

so while it was burning,

propellant was escaping

from the launch vehicle

and 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,

and when it separates

from the second stage

it knows it has to burn longer

to add more velocity.

The Centaur had to use

of extra propellant.

Now we're all thinking

is it going to have enough

left in the tanks

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,

just barely made it.

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 we'd come back

which would not have been good.

# I watch the distant lights

Go down the runway

Into the evening sky

# Oh, you know I'm with you

# Never could say goodbye...

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, as...

our role had been finished.

# Though I won't stop you,

I don't want you to

# Break away

# Fly across your ocean

# Break away

# Time has come for you

# Break away

# Fly across your ocean

# Break away

# Time has come

Thanks to the dedicated work

of hundreds of the world's best

scientists and engineers,

the twin Voyagers had at last

embarked on their odyssey

across the solar system.

400 million miles to Jupiter.

You can never really imagine,

you can try, but you can

never really imagine

will actually have in store

when you get there.

realizing that a

human life ago,

less than 100 years ago,

the universe consisted of one,

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.

In January 1979,

Voyager 1 was coming up on its

first planetary encounter,

was four months behind.

It seems like time

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,

all of that there's no science,

it's all getting ready.

And then March '79: the flood.

they creep up on you.

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

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 splendor.

That acceleration

as you're approaching

is really something

very, very exciting.

out of a fire hose, you know,

you're trying to take

and this torrent of data

is coming out.

Would someone

care to speculate

what you would say

to Galileo Galilei

into the room today?

How... how, how are you

able to live so long?

I think Galileo...

Jupiter is more than

ten times the diameter

it's huge, and it's mainly

there are no solid surface

These planets are liquid,

gas and liquid deep inside.

The gas is compressed

the farther down you go,

and it gets very hot indeed

and you would melt,

vaporize, in fact,

if you tried to fly

through Jupiter.

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

before the other groups

and we were always the first

to start shouting.

we don't fly color detectors.

You get a much

image in black and white,

and so when we want

to make color,

through different filters

and then on the ground

you put it together

and make a color image

You go to Jupiter

and you have a storm that's

been around for more than

that's the Great Red Spot.

You could fit two or three

When Voyager started getting

close-up images,

that it was very active,

and that deepened the mystery

of how these big storms

with all this turbulence

clouds and spitting out others.

We knew that it was a vortex,

but to see it in action...

Another feature of Jupiter's

dynamic environment

danger to Voyager.

Powerful radiation might

destroy the spacecraft's

electronics.

you're wondering

did we build the spacecraft

all the possible things

that could go wrong?

this monster magnetic field,

this monster radiation

environment on purpose,

because you need to get close

because you want to see

and the clouds and the storms

and you want to slingshot

but you just don't know

if you're going to survive.

Thing gets fried,

you lose the mission.

Still out there physically

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

were intense enough that they

would accelerate particles.

Whoa! We were hearing

initially 40.000 volts,

that would be the end

of our spacecraft.

Cabling on these appendages

were conductors

these destroying pulses

into our systems and kill us,

to ground everything.

We didn't have time

the normal design reviews,

protection done quickly enough,

an ad hoc team was formed

that were out of the ordinary,

very out of the ordinary.

I can remember asking

one of the technicians

to go out and buy

aluminum foil.

It was the only material

that was available to us.

Normally our procurement

hardware supplies,

materials, are a much more

sophisticated process.

We're actually cutting

and then cleaning them

with wipes and alcohol

and then finally wrapping these

on all of our exterior cabling,

but yeah, same material

Christmas turkey.

I don't think we created

any shortage per se.

It may have been

a local shortage

in the local grocery store

until they reordered right.

Your turkey wrapping

is protecting Voyager,

and now fast forward, you know,

did we know whether

we had done enough?

survived the onslaught

and went on to record signals

that led to a discovery.

the right kind of antennas

on your ears, you could go out

and hear what we record.

I'm going to call them

because we have to detect them

with antennas.

Amazingly we heard

all kinds of sounds.

Whistlers.

These things that go like that.

Yeah, whistlers mean lightning.

There are lightning flashes

that would go halfway

from the east coast

of the United States

to the west coast.

That was the first detection

on a planet other than Earth.

The two Voyagers were poised

to study Jupiter's

little known moons.

Having picked up

36.000 miles an hour

from Jupiter's gravity assist,

the spacecraft were now

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

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

Let's face it, it's dull.

figured they would be

just battered ice-balls,

kind of like the highlands

nothing but impact craters.

And when we saw Callisto,

totally hammered, right,

with impact craters.

interesting grooves and ridges,

but it's pretty blasted

with impact craters.

Every crater lasts for eons

because no forces were present

to resculpt the surface.

The first two moons

were dormant worlds.

And then as we went

into the inner two...

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.

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.

than on the entire Earth,

probably two or three times.

It's the largest ocean

in the solar system

in a moon going around Jupiter.

And then of course,

kind of the showstopper

for Voyager, we get to Io.

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

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, "Okay,

of the realm of Jupiter",

high-priority work.

an optical navigation image,

and Linda saw this strange

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

An object that size,

would have been seen from

sufficiently large.

it's the only thing I knew,

that I was seeing something

been seen before.

an umbrella-shaped plume

rising 250 kilometers

above the surface of Io

with volcanic activity.

I found the very first evidence

on a world beyond the Earth.

believe that a little moon

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 realized

this was a different journey

Io's volcanoes can shoot lava

over 200 miles into space.

These eruptions are powered

which endlessly compresses

and releases the moon.

I wanted to say

one other thing,

we've been saying that perhaps

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 had we missed we would have

made the first impact crater.

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

Oh, no pressure there, right?

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,

you don't want to miss anything

because every 48 seconds

a new image would come down.

sleep during one of

when the spacecraft

would go zooming past.

The photo labs were working

and people were sleeping

in their cars.

way too exciting to...

to sleep.

During its Jupiter encounter,

Voyager revealed a feature

of the giant planet

never seen before.

Jupiter had something in common

with its flashier neighbor,

in charge of the camera

and he was like, "Candy,

what have you done?

What is the matter

with our camera?"

And I looked at it and went,

ah, it's Jupiter's ring.

you've broken the camera

to, "This is the first picture

ever of Jupiter's ring."

Jupiter was

a game-changer.

all the registers.

Now we're really up

for something.

And to know that this was just

the very, very beginning

If we're blown away by Jupiter,

just wait until we get

Saturn would take over a year

and bring Voyager

and its message

one tiny step closer

where, just possibly,

intelligent aliens

might discover it.

The Golden Record contained

the call of a humpback whale

in 55 human languages.

Most were recorded

at Cornell University,

where Carl Sagan was

professor of astronomy.

My father was Carl Sagan,

is Linda Salzman Sagan,

and she's a writer

and an artist

the iconic Pioneer plaque,

she actually drew it,

who got all the greetings

for the Voyager Golden Record.

that she kind of put together

a kind of a choir of voices

of greetings to the stars.

The greetings to the universe

are almost like proto-tweets,

keep it short, keep it simple,

and there was a limit to what

they could put on the record.

It's like kind of

a tasting menu.

It's enough to get the aliens

that, um, we're diverse.

My parents wanted a child

of one of the voices,

and they just came

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?"

the children of planet Earth.

the children of planet Earth",

that's what I would say

They loved that, and so it's

like great, let's record you.

It's a bit of a blur.

Like the only thing that I

know that I remember

from that time

and the little recording level

that goes into the red

if you speak too much,

this 70s, kind of, um...

so I remember that,

and I remember watching

the needle move as I spoke

oh, that got close to the red

but actually didn't go

okay, that's probably good.

And that was that.

And then I, you know,

drank my apple juice

and went back to my books.

till considerably later

that the kind of enormity of

actually hit me.

various languages]

Well, that brings up

the whole question:

Is there anybody out there?

Listen, there are,

give or take,

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,

there's thousands of galaxies.

And each one of those galaxies

with billions of stars.

That's just the 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

other civilizations,

the numbers just compel it.

statistically impossible

for there not to be

other life forms

and other life forms

that have evolved

to a state of intelligence.

that an intelligent alien

also hinges on another factor,

the sheer vastness of space.

The bigger you think space is,

the less probable it is

you're going to find them

because they're needles

in infinite haystacks.

If you want to realize

how empty our galaxy is,

the nearest galaxy to our own

it's about two million

It's on a collision course

with us right now,

and in five billion years

that galaxy's going to collide

And you might say,

"Oh, no, oh, no",

but it turns out space is,

it's mostly empty space.

When our two galaxies collide,

will hit any other star.

room out there, a lot of room.

Once you start

getting into the

astronomical scales,

our solar system

is pretty tiny,

and so this adventure

which seems so remote

for this little spacecraft

to go out to the giant planets

is really just exploring

closest neighborhood

when you start thinking

about cosmic scales.

are almost unfathomable.

the fastest spacecraft

that had ever been built

and launched and flown,

and they're traveling

at ten miles per second.

You wouldn't even

see it, right?

And yet, even at those

by Earth standard speeds,

decades to get out there

into the outer solar system.

the answer, are we alone?

I'd like to know the answer

to that question.

with extraterrestrial life

is not space, it's time.

our sun is relatively young.

The galaxy's about

12 billion years old,

our sun's four and a half

billion years old,

there are many stars

that are a lot older:

therefore, you could have

imagined some civilization

around such a star that might

have watched our Earth form

four and a half billion years.

four and a half billion years,

the only evidence

of intelligent life

would have been in the last

fifty or sixty years

by watching Star Trek

or whatever signals

so even if you knew,

even if someone told you

and then look at the third rock

from that star,

you're going to find life.

Even if they knew which object

there's only a 50-year period

over five billion years almost

where you'd be able to find

intelligent life.

then we're truly unique,

and how did that happen

and how are we so special

and yet in such

a kind of far-flung

kind of 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

and what are they like

creatures of our dreams

or our nightmares?

In the fall of 1980,

Voyager got its first close

views of the planet Saturn.

We started off with images

that were probably no better

than what you can get

from the ground,

and then it keeps

and better and better

as you get closer and closer.

What are we going to see

when we get really close?

in a telescope with the rings

just looking like these little

tiny ears on either side,

the beauty of Saturn's rings,

you know, looking like,

almost like the grooves

on a phonograph record.

The rings of Saturn,

Billions of icy particles,

some the size of a house.

much wider than many Earths

strung together

but less than a

kilometer thick.

We get there and we find

features throughout the rings,

and it got very complex.

We become junkies who...

This is how you become

a planetary flyby junkie,

it's because you've

it's the greatest feeling

and you want to keep doing it

again and again.

perhaps a year or so from now,

it may be possible to put

all of this into perspective,

but right at the moment

being in such a state

for any previous

planetary encounter,

including our two remarkable

Voyager encounters at Jupiter.

The largest moon of Saturn,

Titan's the most

extraordinary place.

There's a dense

methane atmosphere

where a complex organic

chemistry has been going on

for perhaps billions of years,

of extraordinary discovery.

both spacecraft programmed

to do identical missions

and that was the prime mission

and it involved Titan.

of scientific interest in Titan

that early in our own history,

may have been like that

with very little oxygen,

lots of hydrocarbons,

very thick, different,

that was changed dramatically

so if you want to understand

the starting conditions,

go study Titan.

was successful at Titan,

Voyager 2, which is nine months

would be free to continue to

Uranus and to go on to Neptune.

But it depended upon Voyager 1

had to be in a certain place

in order to pass Titan,

to Uranus and Neptune.

There was just no way

to bend its 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

You gonna try for Titan again

and give up two other worlds,

Uranus and Neptune?

of pressure on Voyager 1.

Mostly what we looked at

was a giant ball of brown smog

with some sort of electric blue

Was it Voyager camera,

you couldn't see through

the clouds and haze.

But the radio signal

from the spacecraft

passed through the atmosphere

and that gave them a measure

of the pressure at the surface

and also the temperature

and so we learned a lot about

Titan from that radio signal.

Voyager 1 revealed a world

at nearly 300 degrees

below zero Fahrenheit

that might have lakes

of liquid methane

under its smoggy atmosphere.

Voyager 1 had succeeded.

And shortly after that,

NASA Headquarters agreed

that we should continue

on its Uranus trajectory.

its planetary mission over,

sped away from the plane

Voyager 2, in part to get

on its trajectory to Uranus,

would have to fly dangerously

close to Saturn's rings.

We're getting pictures

and other data back

from Voyager 2.

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,

that everybody knows

we're going to be

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 pops

out of the other side,

and there's all these

crazy error signals

coming from the spacecraft.

Something bad has happened.

Something happened

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?

Okay.

we can start the briefing.

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.

understand where we're headed

for 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.

A frozen scan platform

could be a fatal,

crippling event.

the darkest, the darkest day

of the whole mission.

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.

The problem is not

with the camera,

the articulated platform

of the instruments.

Our cameras, as far as we

know, are working just fine,

it's just that we're taking

of black space.

of the Saturn mission

and Uranus and Neptune

And seeing everything

that we were planning

just suddenly gone.

that we had hoped to do,

and Uranus and Neptune...

there were no other spacecraft

that were going to be

It was up to Voyager to do it,

and all of a sudden it looked

was not going to do it.

It was devastating, it was...

So, we've analyzed

the slew data.

It took a couple of days

while the engineering team went

to work diagnosing the problem.

command an azimuth slew

and an elevation slew

to the Saturn position...

the scan platform

has small motors to rotate it,

and we could run it

tick, tick, tick, tick...

fast... medium speed

We were of course wanting

to look at lots of places,

so we had the thing looking

and the lubrication wasn't

adequate and it just jammed.

sort of like a car

stuck in the snow.

You try to go forward

or backward little bit...

and keep working on it

and try to get it out,

and that's what we did

with the scan platform.

a little bit in one direction

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

and back came the spacecraft

the imaging system,

and there was Saturn on exit.

Yeah.

at the shadow of Saturn

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

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

of our own existence.

It's a longing to communicate,

we're here, you know, know us.

You know, where are you?

# Forward! He cried

And the front rank died

# And the general sat,

of the Golden Record

was another gift

from us to them.

has a set of pictures on it.

It depicts our civilization,

but we only had the ability

to do about a hundred 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 a hundred pictures.

You can't describe the Earth

in a thousand pictures,

but what art is about

is taking something

but can represent the whole.

it was very important

of humans nude on the record

to show just what our anatomy

and physiology was really like.

seriously criticized

about the Pioneer plaque.

There were actually letters

to the editors of newspapers

was sending smut to space.

NASA decided to play it safe.

Still, they gave the aliens

some hints about our bodies.

of cruising out to Uranus.

the most remote object yet

visited by a spacecraft,

that it was not even known

until 200 years ago,

and it's a great distance

and if we'd launched

directly from Earth

thirty years to get there,

so we were very fortunate

that we could swing by Jupiter

and Saturn on our way.

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,

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?

to take pictures of planets

this far from the sun?

Voyager was the first

of a class of NASA spacecraft

that could be reprogrammed.

what was on the computer

and just wipe it away

and give it a whole new set

They trained the spacecraft

to pirouette like a

basically you want to take

a picture of that thing

and it's going past you

so you spin the whole

spacecraft and follow

it was darker at Uranus

and really dark at Neptune,

you could leave

the shutter open

without smearing,

and that was just beautiful.

of the rich set of goodies

from Jupiter and from Saturn,

but Uranus was unknown.

In January 1986,

Voyager 2 closed in on Uranus.

It would be by far

the most remote planetary

encounter ever attempted.

taking something

that was almost fictional,

almost mythological,

and then seeing it

as a real object.

that system like a bull's eye

because Uranus is tilted

with this beautiful aquamarine

blue methane atmosphere,

and all these pictures,

every single one of them

And you could hear people

just, "whoa!"

would be doing something

and somebody would go, "whoa!"

would turn and look up.

"Oh, my gosh, look at that!"

There was no Internet,

there was no news stream

going out to live CNN.

The only way to experience

of being one of only

a small group of people

who saw a point of light

the only way to experience it

was to be in that room.

Well, just about

two minutes ago,

its closest approach to Uranus.

The new ring

is right here.

Now, I don't...

you're telling me

you can't see it.

I can.

Dr. Soderblom,

through your explanation,

I couldn't put it all together,

could you try that again?

Slower?

Slower and a few more details.

that was pretty slow.

Every time we arrived

there were always surprises,

even though we had gotten

For instance, before Voyager,

all the magnetic fields

have the magnetic pole near

axis of the planet,

and that was true for Jupiter,

and then we flew by Uranus and

the pole was near the equator.

a lot of speculation

about the magnetosphere

Would there be one,

what would it be like?

And the magnetosphere of Uranus

is far more weird

and wonderful...

We found the planet's

tipped on its side,

but the magnetic field

relative to the spin axis,

so you have this huge

contortion in the

magnetic field

as the planet spins around,

just bizarre.

At that point in its orbit,

the planet didn't

look exciting,

and part of that

is Uranus itself,

holding its secrets back.

I guess, one of the...

well, disappointments

was not more photogenic

It was actually pretty blah.

Ah... poor Uranus.

Poor Uranus.

of the Uranus encounter

were actually the moons.

If you're going

to go to Neptune,

you still have to use Uranus

The gravity assist aiming point

just happened to be pretty

close to the orbit of Miranda.

If Uranus has been

the last stop,

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.

it had been ripped to pieces

and then just sort of shoved

back together again.

Come look at this.

screen and pointing and saying,

"did you... look at that,

look at that."

was ready for Miranda.

enormous cliffs and gashes,

one of them, you can see

the edge of a cliff,

ten kilometers tall.

The gravity on Miranda

if you jumped off that cliff,

you could read the newspaper

but when you hit the bottom

you'd still be going

a hundred miles an hour,

so it probably wouldn't...

the last newspaper you read.

At Uranus, Voyager

detected intense

radiation belts

and discovered two new rings

and ten tiny moons.

to present all our results,

we were all about to have

the big final finale

press conference and...

came back from breakfast,

the shuttle being launched...

We have main engines start...

Four, three, two, one

Lift off of the 25th

space shuttle mission,

and it has cleared the tower.

...and we thought,

we'll watch the shuttle launch

to the press conference."

that was Challenger.

Engines throttling up.

Three engine now at 104%.

go with throttle up.

Roger, go with throttle up.

People were just

like astonished.

This gasp of like, "oh, my,

did it really blow up?"

Because we had stopped

so everyone could watch it,

silence, people were crying.

Well, what can you say?

You knew right away that

a bunch of people were dead.

Flight Throttle. Go ahead.

RSO reports vehicle exploded.

Copy.

they showed replays and replays

and replays over and over

and over again.

We have no down link.

Okay, everybody, just stay

off the telephones.

Make sure you maintain

start pulling it together.

The Challenger

accident happened

as we were receding

I have this vivid memory

of picture after picture

of the crescent Uranus

coming back

of the Challenger explosion,

and it was just devastating.

for mourning and remembering.

are pained to the core

of the shuttle Challenger.

We know we share this pain

with all of the people

This is truly a national loss.

I know it's hard to understand,

but sometimes painful things

It's all part of the process

of exploration and discovery.

It's all part of taking

a chance and expanding

The future doesn't belong

to the faint hearted,

it belongs to the brave.

During these closest

approach time periods,

we would have hundreds

of reporters come to JPL,

exploded, everybody just left.

Those cosmic questions

by sending our machines out,

that you and I and every child

has asked themselves.

Where do we come from,

what's the universe made of,

All of these basic questions

are the questions

that drive science.

Finally at Neptune,

Voyager has begun

the last of a decade's worth

with the outer planets.

three and a half years

to get out to Neptune.

They had to reprogram

the spacecraft again,

teach it some new tricks,

to work in this even

darker environment,

even colder environment.

If we take the Earth

being one astronomical unit

from the sun, or AU for short.

Neptune is 30 times

that distance.

launched Voyager,

there was no capability to get

any images back from 30 AU.

That capability happened

all after launch.

It involved taking

two 34-meter antennas

to a 70-meter antenna.

ready to run that observation.

the entire Very Large Array

27 antennas to collect

the very weak signal

that we could get back

The flybys past Jupiter,

had sped up the spacecraft too,

so it's going even faster,

of pressure, and one shot.

In the summer of 1989,

Voyager 2 finally came up

on the ice giant Neptune.

at Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus,

the trip was almost 20 years

shorter than a direct approach,

one without gravity assist.

There it was just sitting

of our solar system,

waiting for somebody to

come out and appreciate

Just waiting for the day

that humans would get

out there, and go wow!

I had been taking

pictures of Neptune

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,

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,

what's this little dark spot,

bright clouds, I'm like wow!

Wow! Exclamation point!

And I'd draw pictures

The most surprising thing

was a giant dark spot.

Nobody had any idea

that would be there.

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

to forecast it twelve hours

and they were having

a lot of trouble

kept changing position.

plotting points on graph paper

and then said, "okay,

two weeks from now,

right here and it usually was."

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

that 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,

that's falling on them

is a thousand times fainter

than on Earth.

one one-thousandth the light

and you're trying

to image something

which is twice as dark as

jet-black background.

More than one ring

can 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.

Oh, dear!

to turn on me, right?

We knew at Neptune

we wanted a close

flyby of Triton,

which was a huge world

If you looked at

them on the way in,

they weren't lined up.

One's up here; one's down here.

And so, what are you

Well, there was a way...

fly over the north pole,

very close to Neptune

to bend the spacecraft

so it would go down.

But the meant getting

few thousand miles

of the cloud tops,

skimming the surface.

And they 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,

maybe you run right into Triton

and crash, and that's the end

You don't have enough time,

your last best guess,

hit the send button.

It would have been

just fascinating

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

After several billion

miles of journey

to within a few kilometers

of where we needed to be,

it's just absolutely

You know, threading

an incredible needle.

Southern hemisphere of Triton

is entirely covered

with nitrogen ice,

we were able to look down

at markings on the surface

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,

would not line up.

just scratching his head,

like I have no idea

what's going on here.

of the world's experts

on anything having to do

with planets and moons,

and he can't figure this out.

I said, "well,

let's put it in a

stereo viewer,

red and blue glasses."

into a three-dimensional model

and up popped these geysers.

holy moly, and so we knew

what we had.

These plumes.

Black geysers spewing out

The plumes extending

out of the surface

for like kilometers.

eruptions on a world

which should have been

just a frozen cinder.

This is too much.

we would have expected

to see further dynamics,

was at a moon this remote

in the solar system.

Just because

an idea's crazy,

it's not necessarily wrong.

Volcanoes on Io.

Hints of a giant ocean

under Europa's icy crust.

evidence of a source of energy.

And that's a prerequisite

for life as we know it.

was the last planet

Voyager would explore

for the rest of its journey,

the times together as a team,

at the pictures, talk,

became more precious.

by the secretary's desk

and she said, "Oh, Candy,

that wants to talk to you."

"The countdown clock

just went from minus,

counting down, to counting up."

Voyager's now leaving Neptune.

"How does that make you feel?"

And in that moment,

I dissolved into tears.

After the spacecraft

it turned around

and looked back,

and there's this beautiful

crescent Neptune and Triton,

and people realized

of the planetary part

That's the last protocol,

the last thing we'll see in

our solar system is

now behind us.

We could have enhanced

the color a bit

to make a somewhat

prettier picture,

to the Voyager spacecraft

we decided to show it to you

just as it is.

The way I looked at it was,

"Gee, we did something

really great."

Very, very successful mission.

A little weepy.

I mean it's... there was

and we have lift-off.

Years of intense effort.

of a sentimental journey.

We did it.

We pulled it off,

and that's important.

It is.

# Deep down in Louisiana

Close to New Orleans

# Way back up in the woods

Among the evergreens

# There stood a log cabin

Made of earth and wood

# Where lived a country boy

Named Johnny B. Goode...

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

Rock star moment

and sail on Voyager.

to go get some sleep

a little more dancing...

Thank you very much, Lou?

Meanwhile, Voyager 1

is still kind of

cruising out there,

getting farther

and farther out,

and a number of folks

including Carl Sagan,

had this idea that before we

have to shut the cameras down,

look back towards the sun

and let's take a picture

unlike any that had ever

been taken before.

And there was actually

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

because they're just

going to be little

points of light.

So, Carl being Carl

actually went all the way

to the NASA administrator

the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

to take this series

Absolutely zero science in it.

Absolutely none.

From a unique vantage point,

nearly four billion miles away,

Voyager 1's cameras

turned homeward

to take family snapshots.

It was Valentine's Day, 1990.

When we did our portrait

of each of the planets,

I was the first person

to look at the 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 realized

there was a lot of...

there were a lot of streaks

of light in that image,

and I realized, finally,

that the Earth was sitting

in one of those rays of light.

You know, I just sat there

just kind of realizing, "wow,

that's the Earth, you know,

that's Voyager looking back

And then once I had

sort of recovered,

I started calling people.

I called Brad.

"Brad, we got it."

"Carl, we got it."

Called my dad.

a different kind of milestone

than the scientific milestones

One that is really symbolic...

I'm an imaging scientist,

"Oh, this didn't turn out

it was going to turn out",

and my first impulse

is to take my hand

and wipe away the dust, because

Well, one of the pieces of dust

that I wanted to wipe away

was the Earth.

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.

And in this color picture

you can see that it is in fact

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.

underscores our responsibility

to preserve and cherish

the only home we have.

still communicate with Earth

nearly every day.

to detect their faint signals,

now less than one trillionth

of a watt.

continue to be tracked

as they begin the final part

to travel beyond the edge

of our solar system,

into interstellar space.

It's in this never traveled

region between the stars

and its Golden Record

will have a chance

of being discovered.

we were designing Voyager,

interstellar space,

where the boundary was,

was totally unknown.

on the interstellar mission.

Are we going to boost

to get out of our solar system

It was a shot in the dark

because nobody knew how far.

Uncharted waters.

the sun can only extend so far,

it's a bubble around our star,

all the stars have bubbles,

around other stars out there,

that they have bubbles.

Where does our bubble end?

Somewhere beyond Neptune

is the edge of the bubble

around our sun.

At the heliopause

two forces balance...

the outward pressure

of the solar wind

of interstellar space.

But how far out it was,

no one was sure.

We kept going

and years went by

the interstellar medium.

Throughout the 1990s,

the edge of the bubble.

Throughout the 2000s,

the edge of the bubble,

and then finally in 2012

which is going the fastest,

which is the farthest,

these funny things happen

to the squiggly lines.

This crazy spike.

And everybody goes,

"Oh, is that it?"

And then it goes

back to normal.

And then it was just literally

one magical day in...

it was in August of 2012

that everything changed

and it was like pfff, just...

popped out of the bubble.

Voyager 1 has left

our solar system.

It's the first thing

that has left our solar system

in interstellar space.

NASA says that Voyager 1

the first man-made object

to reach interstellar space,

the cold dark region

between stars.

slipped the outermost grasp

of our solar system

with Voyager 1,

the first human-made object

to venture into

interstellar space.

achievement, actually.

When you think of it,

it's our first step

out of our bubble

which has been around

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.

It was like humanity

an interstellar species.

It was like knocking

on eternity's door.

When the Voyagers'

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

that when everything else

those records are still

floating somewhere in

interstellar space,

completing the last part

of the mission.

advanced intelligence beyond us

would detect, "Oh, hey,

there is a radiating body

coming into our area,

what this bottle in the ocean,

what message it might have.

Now is that a grand mystery?

Whoa!"

I love the optimism of it,

that these are things

that are meaningful to us,

maybe you'll find them

hypothetical alien, and yeah,

it just touches my heart.

One thing we know

about a metal record

with these grooves

engraved on it

is that information is good

for at least one billion years.

The inside of the record,

which was more protected

two billion years or more.

There's no wind, water,

there's no planets or comets

that they're going to run into,

and over thousands, millions,

they're predicted to remain

no proof that there's anything

ever going to encounter,

it's a story about us.

Voyager is rarely out of my thoughts.

Always some little part of me is wondering where is Voyager tonight.

Whenever I look up at the night stars,

I look in the direction that each of them is going.

There is never be another mission like it.

It was the first and last of the owe kind.

Maybe someday,

another being may might find Voyager

and at least know of our existence.

It's highly unlikely,

but it's not impossible.

And that small possibility shorly give us hope.

any different than it was then?

No.

But are we different?

Absolutely!

The thrill of the discoveries,

reaching the heliopause,

completing the Grand Tour,

I mean man, our child

has just made it.

We're the generation

that sent something

that's not only going

it's going to outlive our star.

Four billion years from now

into a red giant,

Voyager is still

going to be trucking

out there through the stars,

and the songs of our time

are going to be out there.

is still out there...

We'll still be out there.

IN THE 2020s NASA WIL LAUNCH A SPACECRAFT

TO MAKE REPEATED FLYBYS OF JUPITER'S MOON EUROPA.

TO LEARN ABOUT ITS LIQUID WATER OCEAN.

THE EUROPIAN SPACE AGENCY WILL LAUNCH A MISSION IN 2022

TO STUDY THREE OF JUPITER'S MOONS.

IN 40.000 YEARS BOTH VOYAGERS WILL DRIFT PAST OTHER STARS.