All language subtitles for How.the.Universe.Works.S11E01.The.Moons.of.Saturn.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP2.0.H.264-BurCyg_track3_[eng].1

Orbiting the magnificent
ringed planet, Saturn,

are a series of
extraordinary moons.

The closer that we look,

the more that we see its moons
are like worlds of their own.

So dynamic, so Earth-like.

Almost a billion miles from the Sun,

these icy worlds
could be home for life 2.0.

The moons of Saturn offer possibly
the best chance

of finding extraterrestrial life
in our Solar System.

With each new mission,
we get closer

to unraveling the mysteries
of Saturn's moons.

October 2019.

Astronomers discover 20 new moons
orbiting the gas giant, Saturn.

These tiny three-mile wide objects

bring the ringed planet's moon count
to over 80,

the most of any planet
in our Solar System.

You hate to play favorites,
but I'm gonna say it.

Saturn is my favorite
planetary system.

It is unbelievably beautiful,

with this incredible system
of rings and moons,

and there's a lot of mystery
kind of all bound up in there.

The Voyager spacecraft gave us
our first close look

at Saturn and its rings.

Two decades later,

Cassini got us even closer
to many of Saturn's moons.

There's Prometheus, Pandora
and Atlas.

Its largest moon, Titan, is a moon
that's shrouded in mystery.

There's Mimas, that's fairly small,

and then Tethys and Dione
are a bit larger.

There are a pair of moons,
Janus and Epimetheus,

that were perhaps one moon
in the past.

Iapetus, half of it's bright white,
the other half is...

it sort of as dark as coal,
sort of yin and yang.

Each of the moons of Saturn
have remarkable stories to tell.

In 2005, Cassini discovered

that one moon's story
was particularly exciting.

Yeah, Enceladus! Enceladus is
one of Saturn's wee little moons.

It's about 300 miles across.

For scale, it's roughly
the size of Colorado.

The spacecraft's cameras
spot plumes of water vapor

shooting out from Enceladus
at 800 miles an hour.

Three times as powerful than all
the hot springs in Yellowstone.

The discovery of geysers
gushing out of tiny little Enceladus

that should have been cold and dead

completely changed our view
of what that moon exactly was.

It's alive, that moon's alive!

I'd like to be standing there
on the surface of Enceladus

to see what this water vapor
and ice crystals

booming out of the surface

at supersonic speeds.

Cassini's sensors probe deep beneath
the frozen surface of Enceladus,

detecting hints of a rocky core and
something else even more remarkable.

Underneath that thick layer of ice,
there is liquid water ocean.

The measurements suggest
this is a huge part

of Enceladus' interior volume,
about six miles deep,

because it was making Enceladus
wobble in its orbit.

Imagine putting liquid
inside a ball and rolling it.

You see the natural wobble of the
ball as the liquid sloshes around.

Giant liquid oceans
on an alien world,

opening up
exciting new possibilities.

Where you find water,
you could possibly find life.

If you would ask me 20 years ago

where there might be life in the
Solar System besides Earth,

I think Saturn's moons would've been
the last place I would have picked.

But, against all odds,
it's looking like

this tiny icy moon orbiting Saturn
nearly a billion miles from the Sun

may be one of the best places
to look for life.

July 2021.

A new study re-examines
Cassini's plume data

and finds
huge quantities of methane.

This large amount can't be explained
by just geochemical processes.

The methane might be
from primordial organic matter

breaking down
in Enceladus' oceans...

...or even processes
we've never seen before.

But it could be
that living microorganisms

helped generate the methane,
just like they do on Earth.

Enceladus might actually
look a lot like early Earth

in its deepest oceans
when life was first arising,

because we know that there
are some chemical pathways

that are likely occurring on
Enceladus that happened on Earth.

These chemical pathways

start with hot hydrothermal vents
on Earth's cold sea floor,

releasing important life-giving
chemicals into the oceans.

Having hydrothermal vents are
a real boon to the evolution of life.

These are cracks
in the Earth's crust

where hot material
can then spew out into the ocean.

And that's the energy that life needs
to be able to form, and then water.

So everything is present
and things are able

to just grab all these resources
and energy and just start to evolve.

On Earth, hydrothermal vents
produce methane,

but only in small amounts.

Microbial life living
around the vents makes the rest.

Maybe microorganisms do the same

at the bottom
of Enceladus' deep oceans.

Hydrothermal vents on Enceladus

could offer the perfect location

for chemistry becoming biochemistry
becoming life.

Hydrothermal vents normally
require heat from a hot core.

So, what's going on
inside Enceladus?

This is an icy moon out there
in the cold outer Solar System.

Where's all this heat coming from?

Cassini spotted Enceladus' plumes

shooting out from parallel cracks in
the surface, called "tiger stripes."

The cracks are a clue to the origin
of the geysers

and the energy that powers them.

We looked at the orbit
of Enceladus itself.

It's not in a perfectly circular
orbit around the planet,

it's on a slightly elliptical orbit.

And that means that the tidal forces
acting on the moon change over time.

It's a little bit like the forces
on a rubber ball.

When the moon is closer to the planet
it's stretched out

and when the moon is farther
from the planet

it's relaxed back a little bit.

And you're gonna squeeze
and deform and squish

the body of that moon over time,
which is gonna heat its interior.

The warm rocky core
heats up the ocean,

which both powers the geysers
as they burst through the surface...

...and creates conditions
that could support life.

We see the energy source

kicking the water out
of the Enceladus subsurface.

You combine that energy source
and liquid water,

that harkens to putting us
on the same path

that early life may have taken
here on the Earth.

And if that's the case,
there could be little beasties

swimming underneath the surface
of one of Saturn's moons.

There are a huge variety of moons
orbiting Saturn,

from Titan, a moon larger
than the planet Mercury,

to objects about the size
of a sport stadium.

There must be something dramatic
that happened to create a system

that's so complicated
and changing before our very eyes.

To understand such
a marked difference in size,

scientists look for clues
in the moon's orbits

around Saturn itself.

Most of the moons of that system
orbit in the same direction.

Well, that's obviously
not a coincidence.

That's motion left over from the
formation of our Solar System.

This suggests the moons formed
around the same time as Saturn did.

4.6 billion years ago,
the ringless gas giant grows

from gas, rock and ice
in the protoplanetary disc,

along with a family of moons.

This origin story works
for most of Saturn's moons...

...but not for the recently
discovered objects

orbiting in the opposite direction
of the planet's rotation.

If there's a moon orbiting
in the other direction,

it couldn't have formed
with the planet.

It must've come from somewhere else.

Saturn captured these moons...

...but from where?

We think there's a huge upheaval
in the Solar System,

over four billion years ago,

where the giant planets went from
a close and compact configuration,

started having interactions
with each other,

moved each other around, end up
into the orbits that they find today.

During that process,
a lot of smaller bodies,

like asteroids from the distant part
of the Solar System,

got scattered every which direction.

During this ancient upheaval, Saturn
grabs some of the scattered objects.

Many bodies now crowd the region
around the planet

and that means collisions.

Some are destructive,
others form new moons.

In the cosmic pinball,

some moons are thrown
out of the system...

...and others into Saturn.

Only one large moon
survives the carnage.

And all of a sudden, most of the mass
of all the satellites

is in that single moon, Titan.

Titan may have formed from the
material in the protoplanetary disc

at the same time as Saturn,

but then gorged on the debris

created in the later
lunar collisions.

It amassed 96% of the material
orbiting Saturn

and grew so large that it developed
a dense atmosphere.

When Voyager photographed Titan,

it clearly showed that Titan
had a thick atmosphere,

which was so incredibly exciting.

But it was so dense and impenetrable,
that was all we could see.

Two decades after Voyager,

the Huygens probe
launched from Cassini,

and plunged through the murky depths
of Titan's atmosphere.

Our first images of what the Titanic
landscape was like were,

were utterly and truly mind-blowing.

It showed there were mountains

and there was sort of erosion
on those mountains

that looked like liquid
had fallen down the mountains

and brought material with it.

That liquid must have
come from somewhere

and where else than rain,
than weather on Titan?

We've only found two places
in the solar system

with rivers and rain...

...Earth and Titan.

Out of this thick gloom,

this is the most similar place
to Earth we've ever seen.

Similar, but not identical.

Titan's atmosphere has nitrogen,
like ours.

But, instead of oxygen,
it has methane.

Plus, the atmosphere
is 50% thicker than Earth's.

Imagine the smoggiest, nastiest day
you've ever imagined,

and multiply it by ten,

and then envelop the moon in that.

That's kind of what its atmosphere
was like.

And the physics of this smog

can lead to some
truly bizarre possibilities.

One consequence of Titan's
very thick atmosphere

is that rain falls much more slowly.

So, if you were singing a song,
likeSinging in the Rain,

you'd probably want to do it
a little bit slower

because the rain is coming down
more gently.

That rain filling lakes and rivers
on Titan isn't water.

It's liquid methane.

It's like if every oil well,
if every gas station on Earth

started leaking all over the place,

that is what we see on this world.

The methane is a liquid on Titan

because the surface temperature
is 290 degrees below zero,

which is a big problem for life
as we understand it.

We don't know of any organism
that can really survive

past negative 4 degrees Fahrenheit,

and that's just because
cells will tend to freeze there.

The cells that we have,
what they're made up from,

these proteins and fatty material,

stop working,
and everything would die.

That's what happens
to Earth's water-based cells.

But could methane-based life
survive in extreme cold?

The ALMA telescope spotted a clue

in Titan's nitrogen and methane rich
atmosphere.

With sunlight hitting
the atmosphere of Titan,

things like methane and nitrogen can
get broken apart and reassembled,

like playing with Lego blocks,

and then these molecules recombine
to make new ones,

like vinyl cyanide.

Artist's depiction.

Used on Earth to make plastics,

vinyl cyanide can build long chains
of molecules,

the type you need
to build cell membranes.

But unlike
Earth's water-based cells,

the extreme cold
wouldn't destroy them.

It could survive
at those low temperatures.

So, on Titan, it could be
that this vinyl cyanide

is able to form the membranes

that are required
for cells to develop,

which are required
for life to happen.

And good news,

there's a lot of this stuff
on Titan right now.

There's as much as 10 billion tons
of this vinyl cyanide

in just one of the lakes.

If you want to start making creatures
out of it,

say, I don't know, a giant squid,

do you like giant squids?

I hope so, because you could make
billions of giant squids

out of this vinyl cyanide.

Saturn's geyser moon, Enceladus,
could have life as we know it.

Titan might have something
truly alien.

It is an unrelentingly brutal,
cold place compared to Earth.

But for Titanic life,
it might just be ideal.

As we search for life beyond Earth,

it still comes with a bias
of life as we know it.

And so it's great,
as we continue to explore

and continue to evolve
our definition,

we can expand our view
of how to search for life.

Maybe the Saturn system
has two living worlds.

But for life to thrive
on Titan's surface,

it must survive a storm of deadly
particles racing out of the Sun

at over a million miles an hour.

The sun provides light and warmth...

...and something else,
something very dangerous...

the solar wind.

These lethal solar particles
can strip away

atmosphere from planets and moons.

Without an atmosphere, Earth
would be a barren desert, right?

There wouldn't be any water,
it would just all boil away.

There wouldn't be any life.

Luckily, Earth has
a built-in defense system.

In the center of our Earth,
we have a solid iron core.

And surrounding that is liquid iron

that is constantly moving
and swirling and convecting,

and these complex motions

power up a global-scale
magnetic field.

And this acts like a force field
against the solar wind,

pushes it away, pushes it around us
so it doesn't hit us.

We think that Saturn's moon, Titan,
has no molten iron core...

...and therefore
no protective magnetic field.

So it's at the mercy
of the solar wind.

It kind of begs the question,

why does Titan
have such a thick, dense atmosphere?

Using Cassini data to model
Titan's atmosphere,

scientists spot a clue
at the moon's poles.

So the Cassini spacecraft
saw these swirls, almost cyclones

of hydrogen cyanide
in the atmosphere of Titan.

This is a very strange pattern
to find in the poles of Titan.

The closest analog we have
to how these molecules

look and behave on Titan is
the aurora on Earth, of all things.

When solar particles
hit the magnetic shield

around the Earth,
the field lines funnel the particles

down to the poles,
both North and South,

triggered the light shows
we call the auroras.

Titan's atmospheric vortices
follow a similar pattern.

These vortices,
the pattern of the gas here

is a little bit of a paradox.

It's a bit of a mystery
because it's almost as though

the gas is clumped along

and formed along magnetic field lines
near the pole.

Titan doesn't have
an Earth-like magnetic field.

Titan retaining an atmosphere

without a protective shield
makes no sense.

Titan doesn't have a magnetic field,
but Saturn does.

So maybe there's some sort
of interaction

between the atmosphere of Titan
and Saturn's giant magnetic field.

The gas giant Saturn
generates a magnetic field

around 600 times
larger than Earth's...

large enough to shield Titan
from the solar wind.

So Titan by itself is vulnerable.

Saturn is like the mothership.

It has this giant forcefield
that it can use to protect Titan.

Despite Saturn's embrace,

Titan still loses
some of its atmosphere

because occasionally,

the moon wanders away
from its protective parent.

Titan orbits inside
of that magnetic field,

mostly, most of the time.

Its orbit isn't perfectly circular.
It's slightly elliptical.

So as Titan orbits the planet,

for a little bit of time,
about 5% of its orbit,

it's actually slightly outside
the magnetic field

before dipping back in again.

But these short forays
into the firing line

don't cause any lasting damage.

What's really weird is that
there's sort of a residual

magnetic effect on Titan.

When it leaves Saturn's
protective field,

it should just immediately
drop to nothing.

But there still
is this residual field,

protecting it from the solar wind.

It can maintain the memory
of that magnetic field

and still preserve some
of that protection.

It's almost like Saturn
is trying to teach Titan

how to have a magnetic field,

and Titan can remember
for a little bit,

but then it needs to come back home.

This magnetic memory could help
support any life on Titan's surface,

providing a safe haven that's
protected from the solar wind.

Saturn doesn't just help out
its moons,

it communicates with them,

and sometimes we're able
to listen in to that conversation.

Near the end of its mission,

Cassini gathered one last bit
of data, of signal,

And it was radio emission
from Saturn itself.

It tuned in to Radio Saturn.

You can convert sound
into electromagnetic energy.

This is how radios work.

You take somebody singing,

you convert it into fluctuations
of an electromagnetic field.

Then you can beam that
to somebody's radio

and then they can
hear it again as music.

Well, Enceladus interacts
with Saturn's magnetic field

and creates a changing, fluctuating
energy field around it,

and you can take that
and can convert it into audio.

This is beautiful.

This is a conversation
of electromagnetic radiation

that that we got to listen in to
this very private, intimate moment

between Saturn and its moon.

Yeah, that's creepy as hell.
I don't wanna hear that on the radio.

I wanna hear that on Halloween,
right?

That's really weird. Creepy.

But what that is showing us
is that Enceladus

is reacting to Saturn's
magnetic field.

And Cassini spots a way
Saturn's magnetism

might also allow
its moons to develop life.

One of the most amazing discoveries
around Saturn was

that its magnetic field is not just
transporting charged particles from,

say, the Sun,
but it's also transporting material

from one moon to another.

Saturn's magnetic field helps boost
the chance of life on Titan

by stealing material
from its sister moon, Enceladus.

Magnetism is a strong force,
of course,

but to act on a scale
and a range like this

and maybe transport matter
from moon to moon,

that's pretty cool.

Saturn's magnetic field

smashes apart water molecules
blasted out from Enceladus's geysers

and carries the leftover oxygen
to Titan.

The magnetic field of Saturn
acts like an inter-lunar highway

in the Saturn system,

transporting oxygen
from Enceladus all the way to Titan.

But there's a problem
when the oxygen

tries to take the Titan exit off
of this inter-lunar highway.

Normally, this oxygen wouldn't
survive in the atmosphere of Titan.

It would react with the methane there
and create carbon dioxide.

To get to the surface
in one piece,

oxygen hitches a ride
with something called a fullerene.

Fullerenes are these sort of

soccer ball shaped molecules
that are hollow.

If the oxygen atom gets in there,

it can be safely transported
through Titan's atmosphere.

Once on the surface, the oxygen
could help create amino acids,

the essential building blocks
of proteins,

another stepping stone
for life to emerge.

Think of all the complex coincidences
that have to happen

for these chemical reactions
to take place.

If Titan's orbit was any different,
it simply wouldn't exist.

At 170,000 miles in diameter,

but only 30 feet thick in places,

Saturn's beautiful rings
have always stolen the show.

But their origin is still a mystery.

Saturn has these beautiful rings
that really define it as a planet,

but its unique in the solar system
in the sense

that no other planet
has such a big ring system.

All of the other gas giants
have remnants of a ring,

kind of small, thin, dark rings,
but nothing like Saturn.

So something very different
happened around Saturn.

A clue comes from
the rings' composition.

They're around 99 percent water ice,

giving the rings
their sparkling appearance.

This leads astronomers
to a bold theory.

We do not know
how Saturn's icy rings formed.

We're not even sure how old they are,

but one idea is that
they formed from ice

that was existing previously
on a moon.

How amazing is that?

Several billion years ago,
Saturn may have been ringless,

with a large, icy moon.

The moon was big enough
that its gravity drew heavier stuff

like rock to its core

and lighter stuff like ice
floated to the top.

We think the moon
strayed too close to Saturn.

The gravity from Saturn
could tear it apart,

and it could separate the ices
from the rocky parts

and the ices could stay in orbit
and form our rings,

and the rocky parts would
get swallowed up by Saturn.

The death of a large moon
may have built the rings...

...but they owe their current
appearance to the moons

that are still alive.

When you go back to Saturn's rings,
time and time again,

they're all slightly different.

They are changing, they are braiding
in and out of each other.

We had no idea there would be
so much beauty

and so much mystery
in the rings.

The behavior of two
of Saturn's moons,

Prometheus and Atlas,

which are embedded in the rings,

is especially surprising.

Some of these smallest moons

are interspersed
within the ring system.

Some of them are doing something
really bizarre.

In some cases, it looks like
the moons were shepherding

the edges of the rings
and keeping them in their place.

The moon's gravity
cleans up the rings,

sometimes, sculpting shapes
in their wake.

Saturn's rings aren't static,

and there's some really
fascinating interactions

where moons are clearly
pushing on the rings

and causing weird and cool waves,

making the rings
just that much more beautiful.

The whole dance between Saturn,
its moons, its rings,

how they all are interconnected,
is just completely fascinating.

It's a dynamic, amazing,
living, geologically vibrant place.

Saturn's moons may keep
the rings orderly,

but they can't explain why
the rings are so clean,

almost pristine.

They're too shiny.

If they were billions of years old,

they should have collected a lot
of dust by now and be a lot darker.

The fact that they're shiny
kind of implies

that maybe they're a lot younger
than we first thought.

Perhaps the rings we see today
are a more recent upgrade.

The rings might only be
100 million years old,

about the time of the dinosaurs.

So if the dinosaurs
had invented telescopes,

they could have seen Saturn
without rings.

And it makes you wonder,

is this the first ring system
that Saturn had?

Or was there another ring system
that maybe slowly eroded away?

Perhaps a comet or a body
came in too close to Saturn,

and Saturn's gravity
literally tore it apart,

and then we got
a brand-new ring system.

The later dinosaurs could have
watched the rings form,

and then they would have been
wiped out by an asteroid.

Yeah, should have built
better telescopes, dinosaurs,

sucks to be you.

We still don't know why
the rings of Saturn are so clean.

It could be that the rings
really are old,

and they have some
sort of cleaning system,

which removes the dust from them,
making them look young,

or they may actually be young,

and this may be the seventh or
eighth or whatever generation rings.

It is so different
than any other planetary system.

And those mysteries still exist.

We have some idea what went on,

but there's a lot
that we don't know about Saturn.

Cassini is changing that.

It's discovered a whole new
moon-making process,

with the rings taking the lead.

Midway through its 13-year mission
to Saturn,

Cassini captures
an intriguing image,

a bright feature at the edge
of one of Saturn's outermost rings,

something we'd never seen before.

I was really excited when we saw
these images of Saturn's rings

and it looked like there was a lump,

maybe a moon forming there,
which they nicknamed Peggy.

Named after the mother-in-law
of the scientist who discovered it,

Peggy was still too small

to be considered
a fully-formed moon.

But nearby orbits a group of objects

that are just big enough
to be moons,

and they are really weird.

These moons are really unusual.

We don't think of them as like
anything else we've seen.

They're kind of little fuzzy potatoes

or maybe even like a ravioli
is another one or a croissant.

Why do we always come up with food?

But at the same time,
that's exactly what they look like.

The most bizarrely-shaped moon
of Saturn is Pan.

It's got these crisscrossing cracks,
just like bread,

and then around the outside
is a belly band, it's undulatory.

How would this get there?

Cassini discovered a clue.

Like Saturn's rings,
these moons were made

almost entirely of water ice.

They must have grown from
tiny lumps trapped within the rings.

They're going
to be extremely fragile,

kind of like a snowflake
orbiting Saturn.

They can start drawing in material
and then can grow.

You can actually imagine
rolling up a snowball

and accumulating more and more
particles on the outside.

And in the same way,

you could accumulate these clumps
in the rings.

And if they're near the edge
of the rings,

perhaps they actually break free
and go out to form tiny moons.

The size of these space snowballs,

tens of miles across or less,

helps explain their unusual shapes.

The size of the moon
actually affects its shape

in that once you get below
a certain size threshold,

you cannot be round anymore.

That's because the strength
of the rock or the ice, in this case,

is too great to be overcome
by gravity,

and so the kind of oblong shapes
can be maintained.

Add in a few collisions,

and you get Saturn's ravioli-
and croissant-shaped moons.

It's a bizarre process
but leads to a beautiful form.

We know the moons affect the rings,

but it looks like in this case,
the rings affect the moons, too.

They're connected in both directions.

The rings form a moon factory...

...capable of building countless
generations of new worlds.

This is a dance of physics.

If moonlets can form by these
icy ring particles, they'll grow,

and then their natural gravitational
interaction with the rings

will make them move out.
They keep growing as they move out.

But then another moon forms
where the first one was.

So you keep getting
these growing moons, right,

and this process repeats
like on a conveyor belt.

And what you wind up with

is bigger moons orbiting
farther out from Saturn

and smaller ones
orbiting closer in.

But Saturn's conveyor belt
will eventually break down.

When ultraviolet light from the Sun

interacts with ring particles,

it throws their steady orbit
around Saturn out of whack.

The Sun energizes the rings,
and it gives them a charge.

This charge means they can get picked
up by the magnetic field of Saturn.

So these little tiny charged
particles then

are lifted out of the rings,

follow along
the magnetic field lines,

rain down into Saturn's atmosphere.

The charged particles
are tiny ice crystals.

They rain down onto Saturn,

enough to fill an Olympic-sized
swimming pool every second.

In less than 100 million years,
Saturn's rings will be gone.

There will be no material
to build new moons.

Saturn's moons and rings,
they almost make me feel bittersweet,

because they show you the beauty
of what physics can create,

but also the fleeting-ness.

They'll be gone soon,
and that makes me sad.

Saturn is one of
the most dynamic places

in the solar system.

We want to go back there,
to explore its moons up close

and hunt directly for Life 2.0.

For so long, we've been emphasizing
that to have a habitable planet,

you have to be warm,
you have to be close to your star.

In fact, the most likely chance
we have to find life

may be way in the outer
solar system in Saturn's moons.

But we won't know for sure
until we send another mission there,

specifically to look for life.

The Huygens probe

gave us a tantalizing glimpse
of Titan's surface...

...but it wasn't equipped
to search for life.

Now, scientists
are developing Dragonfly,

a space helicopter
that can search for life.

Dragonfly is an amazing mission.

We're sending this to Titan
to better understand

how life might arise in
a very different context than Earth.

One thing we know
absolutely for certain

is that Titan has interesting,
complex chemistry.

The question now is does that
chemistry actually turn into biology?

The million-dollar question,
is this a living world?

April 2021.

We test the concept
of a space helicopter.

Ingenuity, making the first remote
flight on another world

launches into
the thin Martian atmosphere.

Mars is a really difficult
place to fly,

because the atmosphere
is 100 times thinner than Earth's.

And remember, it's the atmosphere

that provides the support
and the lift for a helicopter to fly.

So in order for Ingenuity to fly,

it had to spin very fast in order
to even get itself off the ground.

Fortunately,
Titan's thick atmosphere

is much more helicopter friendly.

The contrast between Ingenuity
and the Dragonfly mission

is really funny, because Mars
has almost no atmosphere,

less than 1 percent
the atmospheric pressure of Earth.

On Titan, you have
exactly the opposite.

The air pressure near the surface of
Titan can be four times as much

as the air pressure on Earth.

So for a helicopter or something
like a drone,

something like an octocopter,

the lower the gravity is
and the denser the atmosphere,

the better you can fly.

So Titan just begs to be explored,
because you get a lot of lift,

and you can actually carry
heavy instruments with you.

It allows you to fly through
the atmosphere, collect samples,

and determine what the
prebiotic chemistry is on that moon.

If ever there was a world built
for flying drones, it's Titan.

Dragonfly is scheduled
to launch in 2027...

...arriving at Titan
around seven years later,

completing the journey
of moon discovery

that began with Voyager and Cassini.

We completely transformed
our picture of the Saturn system,

the rings and the moons.

It's a far more complex environment
than we ever dreamed possible.

The moons have come alive, right?
They're not boring, dead ice balls,

and it just begs generation after
generation of spacecraft follow up.

We're only just beginning to unravel
the secrets of Saturn's moons.

And with more than 80 to explore,

the Saturn system is a gift
that'll keep on giving.

Saturn was the very first thing

I ever saw through a telescope
when I was a kid.

And here I am, clearly,
I was inspired by Saturn,

by its beauty.

Saturn has always been
my favorite planet.

Everything you want is there.

Violence, colliding moons,

how new rings form,
new moons form over time.

And there might be life there.

There might be life
in more than one place there.

One destination, one planetary
zip code, gives you all of that.

I say go back to Saturn.

Subtitling by Iyuno