Dazzling...
Legendary.
The most beautiful planet in the night sky.
But secretive Saturn has been holding out on us.
We've learned a vast amount about it,
and most of this has been very surprising.
We thought we knew those bodies.
We had no idea.
Saturn boils
with extreme weather and weird lights.
The rings ripple and twist,
bullied by over 60 remarkable moons.
- They are individual worlds. - They each have a story to tell.
This is a planetary explorer's dream.
Saturn's moons are the hottest property
in the search for alien life.
If there's one place in the solar system
I would put a bet that life exists there right now,
I would choose Saturn.
Have you ever dreamed about traveling out of this world?
My name is Mike Massimino,
and I turned that fantasy into a reality
when I space-walked to repair the Hubble space telescope.
Great job, Mike.
Now as we expand our knowledge of our solar system
from Mercury to the cosmic unknowns,
I want to take you on a personal journey to...
Captions by vitac... www.Vitac.Com
captions paid for by discovery communications
welcome to "the planets."
I'm astronaut Mike Massimino.
Walking in space gives you
an unparalleled view of planet earth.
It's so amazing, you can't believe it's real.
Now imagine looking at Saturn up close,
with its distinctive rings,
and try to fathom how breathtaking that would be.
But what's amazing about Saturn
is that its best features may be hidden.
Saturn, the Jewel of the night sky,
dazzles with its beauty and scale.
It's huge...
So big, you could fit more than 700 earths inside it.
But don't let size fool you.
One of the more interesting things about Saturn
is that it is so big, compared to how much stuff is in it,
that it's actually lower density than water.
The old joke is that if you could find a bathtub big enough
and fill it with water, Saturn would float,
but it would leave a ring.
Other planets have rings,
but none so vast and glorious as Saturn's.
The journey from the outside of the main rings
to the inside edge is 66,000 miles,
yet this vast collection of dust and ice particles
is whisper thin, just tens of feet in places.
Racing within the rings and orbiting far outside them
are over 60 moons made from rock and water ice.
They range in size from tiny snowballs
to worlds with active geology, liquid water,
weather systems, and possibly even life
a billion miles from the warmth of the sun.
It's so cold out there, we just thought
there'd be nothing there, and we were so wrong.
We were so wrong.
Saturn's first shocker...
Its wild weather.
The storms on Saturn are extremely violent,
unlike anything we see on the planet earth.
In fact, Saturn has the second-fastest winds
in the entire solar system.
These winds race through Saturn's cloud tops
at over 1,000 miles per hour,
four times faster than earth's strongest cyclones.
And lightning bolts flash
up to 10,000 times more powerfully
than those on earth.
Everything on Saturn is just so very, very much bigger.
I mean, there are weather systems
that are as big or bigger than the earth.
Saturn's ferocious weather is surprising,
because, on earth,
weather is driven by the heat of the sun.
It causes the seas to evaporate, creating clouds and rain.
Saturn lies too far from the sun to feel the same warmth,
so the heat that drives its weather
must be coming from somewhere else.
To understand this mysterious heat source,
we need to go back 4 1/2 billion years
to the birth of the ringed planet.
The planets of our solar system emerged
from a vast swirling cloud of ice, dust, and gas.
The same ingredients can still be found on earth today
in places like Iceland,
where volcanic ash mixes with icy glaciers.
If you want to build a giant planet like Saturn,
this pile of raw material here is a great visual analog.
There's a lot of oxygen and hydrogen in the universe.
That makes water. That makes water ice.
And the stuff, initially, that made the solar system
is basically this stuff here.
It's dirty ice, water ice with a little bit of...
Little bit of rocky and metallic minerals left in there...
Out there in the cold of space.
4 1/2 billion years ago,
a vast cloud of dirty ice particles
shrouded in hydrogen and helium
collapses under its own gravity,
and at the center, a new star, our sun, sparks into life.
The heat of the new star
melts the ice closest to it and blows away the gas,
leaving only rocky debris behind.
But farther out, icy material and gas survive.
A boundary forms, a frost line
between the rocky inner cloud and the icy gas beyond.
Once you fired up that campfire, if you will,
what would be left behind in the inner solar system's
gonna be this stuff,
the silicate minerals you make a planet like the earth from.
But far away from the sun, where it's colder,
you cross the frost line,
and what's out there is still cold enough
to maintain the ice behind,
and there's a lot of it there.
At first, you make sort of a solid core of this material,
but when you reach a critical mass,
you've got enough gravitational influence
to start to directly draw in some of the hydrogen and helium
in the interplanetary cloud.
Saturn's huge, solid core,
now 10 to 20 times the size of earth,
generates relentless gravity and draws in gas.
The bigger this gas ball gets, the more material it sucks in.
Saturn's massive gravity then gets to work
on its fledgling atmosphere, compressing it.
And like any gas under pressure, it gets seriously hot.
Even today, Saturn's high-pressure atmosphere
heats its core to 21,000 degrees,
twice the temperature of the surface of the sun.
And it's this heat rising up
which forms Saturn's distinctive bands
and drives its extreme weather.
Saturn's actually rotating very quickly.
It's a large planet.
It rotates once on its axis about every 10 hours.
So, as the weather comes up from the interior,
it gets smeared out into bands.
And at Saturn's north pole,
the bands do something
that, at first glance, seems impossible.
There is a gigantic vortex,
a spinning region of air
that's shaped like a perfect hexagon.
You have waves of pressure, density, and temperature
that start to interact with each other.
And these waves can actually interfere
and become one big wave
that goes all the way around the planet.
This giant wave settles into a long-lasting pattern,
because there's no rocky surface below
to disrupt the winds that form it.
They form a beautifully defined, regular hexagon.
It's one of the most spectacular things about Saturn.
It took robotic probes
to reveal the weird weather on Saturn.
But if these close-up shots of storms and lightning
took scientists by surprise,
they were nothing compared to the shock of what came next...
The rings are alive.
Without a doubt,
Saturn's rings are its most captivating feature.
Cassini, an unmanned spacecraft,
was the first probe to enter Saturn's orbit,
spending 10 years capturing images
of both the planet and its rings.
Before Cassini's photos,
we thought the rings were just static,
but now we know they're more like a chaotic motor speedway.
Imagine Saturn without its rings,
just a pale globe floating in the darkness of space.
With the rings, it's magical.
When I was 4 or 5 years old,
my parents bought a small department-store telescope.
And I remember looking down into that eyepiece
and seeing this perfect Jewel of a planet.
From the eyepiece of a small telescope,
the rings seem quiet and serene.
But up close, it's a very different picture.
We know this thanks to a space probe called "Cassini"
and liftoff.
Launched in 2007,
Cassini became the first spacecraft
to study Saturn and its moons up close.
It was also the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn
and send back photos from inside its wild rings.
Ice particles jostle for position like stock cars,
traveling inside the rings
at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour.
These particles range in size
from chunks of ice as big as houses
to the finest powder snow.
It wasn't until we went to Saturn
and stayed there with Cassini
that we learned just how fiercely complex it is.
You have the gravity of the planet itself
and all of these moons
interacting with the rings and the moons and the planet.
All of these things are sculpting that entire system
it makes this magnificent crown Jewel of the solar system.
Scientists believe that, from time to time,
Saturn's icy moons break up,
adding new material to the rings.
This means that the structure of the rings
is constantly evolving.
With Cassini,
scientists can deconstruct the physics of this evolution,
and it's teaching us the rules
that make the whole universe tick.
All the planets in our solar system
evolved out of the same flat disk of dust and gas
4.5 billion years ago.
Astronomers see similar disks around young, distant stars,
but even with our most powerful telescopes,
we can't see planets forming.
They're too far away.
But Saturn's rings are right on our doorstep,
a veritable snapshot of a mini solar system
caught in the process of formation.
Cassini shows structures forming spontaneously inside the rings.
It's like you took the beginning stages
of the formation of the planets but stopped it.
They don't even need to be tickled.
They don't need to be disturbed into forming structures.
They form them on their own.
Cassini sees curious, propeller-like structures
inside Saturn's broad "a" ring.
They're caused by ring particles washing over tiny, hidden moons.
The particles collide with the moons,
sending them into random, ever-changing orbits,
sometimes closer to Saturn and sometimes farther away.
Perhaps similar forces influenced the earth's formation
around the sun,
pushing it into closer or wider orbits.
Saturn's rings also help us understand
why planets stop growing.
A walnut-shaped moon called "pan"
sits near the middle of Saturn's "a" ring.
Pan should be huge with so much ice around to gobble up,
but it's tiny, only 20 miles in diameter.
Rather than pulling ring material in,
pan appears to push it away.
As the moon passes the slower-moving material
outside it,
pan's gravity slings the particles into wider orbits.
The faster material inside pan's orbit
is slowed as it passes the little moon,
causing it to fall away towards Saturn.
This may explain why multiple planets form around stars
instead of single giant planets that eat the whole buffet.
Of all Cassini's discoveries,
the most important is also the most surprising...
A tiny ice moon that may be home to life.
My childhood hero growing up was Neil Armstrong,
the first man to walk on the moon.
It must have been thrilling
to step out on this untouched surface,
but, ultimately, he and his partner, buzz Aldrin,
found the moon to be basically a dead zone.
If Armstrong had first touched down on Saturn's moons, though,
he would have found a vastly different world.
For most of history,
the only moon we've been able to study up close
is our own.
But what about the moons around other planets, like Saturn?
Are they dead, too?
Our first assumption about Saturn
was that the moons would be like that...
Cold, dead, lifeless relics from the early solar system.
It wasn't until we invented spacecraft
that could go to these moons
that we discovered how incredibly diverse
our solar system truly is.
And it wasn't until Cassini explored Saturn's orbit
that we learned that
the ringed planet could have up to 62 moons,
far more than the 18 that we had originally thought.
Take Enceladus,
an icy moon barely 300 miles across.
Nobody paid it any attention a decade ago.
Today, it's a geological rock star,
and this is why...
Enceladus orbits inside Saturn's outermost ring,
the "E" ring.
The "E" ring puzzled scientists
because they couldn't figure out
how a ring so broad and so diffuse
could hold itself together.
The Cassini team decided to take a close flyby of Enceladus
to solve the mystery.
Did it have something to do
with keeping the particles together?
What was the connection between the "E" ring and Enceladus?
Well, now we know that Enceladus
is actually responsible for the "E" ring being therE
in the first place.
2005.
Cassini captures an astonishing sight...
100 geysers shooting ice particles miles into space
from cracks in the south pole.
Enceladus is hurling its guts into space at a colossal rate.
As Enceladus orbits Saturn,
these icy plumes feed a vast, shimmering halo
around the planet,
the mysterious "E" ring.
This icy plume also interacts with Saturn's magnetic field,
creating a plasma cloud of charged particles.
The particles race along Saturn's magnetic field lines
and slam into its polar atmosphere,
raising huge, ultraviolet auroras,
like these recent images of Saturn's Southern lights,
captured by Cassini in July 2017.
While geysers can explain the "E" ring,
how can they exist on a frozen moon
a billion miles from the sun?
On earth, geysers form in highly volcanic places
where water comes into contact with hot rocks.
Enceladus, so small and so far from the sun,
should be cold and dead.
What heats it is Saturn's gravity.
The source of the heating on Enceladus
is the eccentric orbit of that moon.
Sometimes, it's a little closer to Saturn.
Sometimes, it's a little further away.
And that heating on Enceladus from that kneading,
gravitationally making the moon stretch and pull,
is what warms the interior,
causing the activity on Enceladus that we see today.
The gravitational pull of Saturn
reaches deep into Enceladus,
beyond its water ice exterior, gripping its rocky core.
As Saturn's grasp strengthens and weakens,
it massages this cold, rocky heart,
bringing it to geological life with frictional heat.
The heat melts the ice around it,
creating a vast subsurface lake.
This water jets out through huge cracks in the surface ice.
On earth, where there's liquid water, there's life.
Could Enceladus have what it takes
for simple organisms to exist?
Once Cassini saw these geysers, the scientists knew
they had found something extremely wonderful.
They actually changed the mission of Cassini itself,
changed its trajectory.
We sent the Cassini spacecraft to fly very, very close
over these cracks where the water was rushing out.
Scientists clung to the faint hope
that the water would contain salts
and organic molecules like ammonia,
the building blocks of life here on earth.
Stunningly, Cassini's sensors tasted all of them in abundance.
In that plume, there's organic material.
It's not water. It's a soup.
That's incredible.
All the main requirements for habitability...
Energy source, liquid water,
a source of biological nitrogen and ammonia,
organic material...
And the samples are coming up into space.
There's a big sign... "free samples. Take one."
There could be life that could have evolved there.
Now, we don't know. We haven't seen it.
But the conditions there are as good there now
as they were on earth 3 billion years ago,
when life arose here.
The sensational realization
that Enceladus may harbor life
has sparked intense debate about future missions to find it,
but it has a rival for those precious research dollars
because Saturn's largest moon, titan,
could also be home to life.
There's no question
that Saturn's many moons are mind-blowing.
The moon Enceladus has fantastic geysers
and even the possibility of life.
But Saturn has another moon that trumps even Enceladus,
and that's the beast, titan.
More than 60 moons orbit the planet Saturn,
but one dwarfs them all.
Titan is a colossus, bigger than the planet Mercury.
A thick, orange haze hides its surface from our telescopes.
And when the Cassini mission first appeared
beneath titan's orange cloak,
it revealed a world weirder than we could have ever imagined.
Titan has mountains and deserts, rivers and lakes.
Only the earth can match it for geological diversity.
But here, water ice takes the place of bedrock,
frozen at 300 degrees below zero.
And instead of water,
the rivers on titan flow with methane.
This is a place where it actually rains
liquid methane, liquid natural gas.
This liquid is filling up rivers and lakes.
And like earth,
titan has a thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere.
But instead of the oxygen we breathe,
titan's air is spiked with carbon-rich molecules
that stain it a dull orange.
It's a soup of methane
and ethane and propane and acetylene.
The list of organic molecules
is literally hundreds, hundreds long that we've detected there.
Titan's complex cocktail of atmospheric chemicals
intrigues scientists,
but it also puzzles them, especially methane gas,
which rapidly decays in sunlight.
So even a billion miles from the sun,
titan's thick haze should have lifted long ago.
A vast source of methane must be replenishing the orange smog.
Before Cassini, scientists assumed
the whole of titan was covered in massive impact craters.
Perhaps crater lakes filled with liquid methane
were evaporating into the atmosphere,
supplying the missing gas.
Cassini carried a hitchhiker all the way to Saturn
to help prove this theory.
The Huygens lander parachuted through the clouds,
snapping photographs as it fell.
When we first saw those pictures, it was life-changing.
There were no craters.
It looked like flowing liquid had once shaped the landscape,
but at the landing site and as far as Huygens could see,
that liquid was long gone.
Huygens landed in a spot almost identical
to what we're standing on right now.
If we look all around,
we can see this bleak, barren landscape.
We see pebbles and cobbles that have been rounded and smoothed
because they've come through river channels.
We see plenty of those at the Huygens' landing site.
In addition to that, we see lots of sand.
The desert Huygens landed in is huge.
It stretches all the way around titan's equator...
...with 300-foot-tall dunes sculpted by the wind,
just like they are on earth.
If the vast crater lakes weren't at the equator,
they had to be at titan's poles.
Cassini scheduled a number of additional flybys
to look for any signs of liquid.
One of the instruments on board Cassini
is basically a radar gun.
It shoots radar waves at titan, and they get reflected back.
After two years of hunting,
scientists finally got the signal they were waiting for.
One of the things it found
is that near the north pole of titan
were regions that were not reflecting radar,
and that sounds a lot like liquid.
Liquid absorbs that energy and doesn't reflect it back.
Later observations clenched it.
When Cassini finally imaged
the north polar regions of titan,
it finally saw these lakes and seas of methane
that we'd been looking for,
only they weren't contained in impact craters like we thought.
Instead, they're contained in big lake basins
that look just like they do on earth.
Basin lakes,
like this one in mono county, California,
form in the depressions left over from tectonic activity.
These geological features on titan
could only mean one shocking thing...
The moon was alive with geological activity.
If we were sitting on the margins of Kraken mare,
which is the largest sea that we see on titan,
then we would probably see something very similar
to this landscape.
We would look out across a fairly calm surface.
I think the winds are not very strong on titan,
and so, we'd have this calm lake of methane and ethane.
And in the distance, we would see hills and mountains
that have formed on titan,
probably through tectonic processes
in much the same way that mountains are built on earth.
Except on titan, it's so cold
that volcanoes spew water, not lava...
And the mountains and lake basins are solid ice.
At first, scientists thought
that methane evaporating from these lakes
generated titan's smog,
but when Cassini flew by to measure the lakes again,
the levels appeared to be the same.
The lakes didn't look like they were evaporating at all.
Scientists were stumped.
Either the lakes weren't the source
of the atmospheric methane,
or they were somehow being refilled.
Planetary geologist Jani Radebaugh believes
a crucial clue to the missing methane
lies in the formation of rocky deposits called "tufa."
They're found here at mono lake,
where clean springwater rises up from the ground
into the mineral-rich lake,
and the two water types react.
So, it's rock that has been formed
from the chemicals contained in two fluids.
There is water that's emerging at the margin of the lake
that's interacting with the lake water,
which has a very different chemistry.
And all the chemicals that are dissolved
combine with each other and create this rock.
Radar images of titan's largest lake
reveal rocky structures around the margins
that look just like mono lake's tufa.
Titan's tufa, if that's what they are,
could be evidence of a layer of liquid methane
that sits above titan's frozen core
and rises in Springs to feed its lakes,
just like springwater rises to feed mono lake.
Titan is no dead world.
It's alive with active geology and complex chemistry.
And it might be alive with something else,
something big.
Until the Cassini space probe
sailed through the orange haze on titan in 2005,
we had no idea there was another place in our solar system
with geology as rich as the earth's.
Could the earth and titan both be home
to the only life in our solar system?
We used to think that
Saturn was too far from the sun and too cold
to play host to anything dramatic.
We couldn't have been more wrong.
The moons aren't the frozen snowballs we expected.
They're shaped by active geology,
with warm water geysers and lakes of liquid methane.
And now, on Saturn's largest moon, titan,
scientists may have uncovered the first tangible evidence...
Of extraterrestrial life.
Our search for life
has been focused on liquid water...
Follow the water.
I think it's a good strategy,
but I think we are limiting ourselves
if we think that that's the only place to look.
I think liquids may be interesting,
even if they're not water.
Astrobiologist Chris McKay
believes that life on titan
may have evolved to live in liquid methane,
not liquid water.
But titan's so cold,
simple life would play by a different set of rules,
where bigger is better.
When we go to other worlds,
we're gonna be looking for bacteria,
and we assume that they're gonna be very small.
But you could ask the question, why are bacteria so small?
Well, I think the answer is because they live in water.
On earth,
bacteria don't need to grow big to thrive.
Water dissolves almost everything,
so it provides a nutrient-rich environment,
where small and simple bring success.
You go to titan,
where the liquid is liquid methane, liquid ethane...
Very different from water.
There is no reason an organism should be small.
In fact, quite the opposite. It should be huge.
McKay envisions
enormous, single-celled organisms
looking like sheets of paper.
Their huge surface area would maximize the uptake of food
from the nutrient-poor liquid methane.
I predict that there's life on titan living in liquid methane.
You won't need a microscope to see it.
You'll need a yardstick.
When Cassini released the Huygens probe
high above the cloud tops of titan,
McKay realized he had an opportunity
to bolster his theories of life on the surface.
His methane-loving life-forms must be eating to survive.
Perhaps Huygens' delicate sensors
would pick up evidence of ground-level feasting.
As Huygens was on its way to titan,
I'm sitting in a hotel room writing up a paper, saying,
"hey, what if there's life on titan?"
What would it eat, and how would we detect it?
How would this probe flying through the atmosphere
"detect it?"
Literally, the day Huygens landed,
I submitted this paper to the journal,
predicting that if there was life on titan,
it would eat hydrogen
and the probe would be able to measure
this depletion of hydrogen.
So, let's look for hydrogen.
Huygens parachutes through titan's atmosphere,
sampling the gases as it goes.
The upper atmosphere has plenty of hydrogen.
So do the middle layers.
But at the ground level, there's a surprise result...
An apparent drop-off
in the concentration of hydrogen in the air.
Something, or perhaps someone, was using it up.
When I heard the report
that there was a depletion of hydrogen,
I... my heart raced, 'cause I thought,
"if this is hard data for depletion of hydrogen,"
I can't imagine any other way besides biology
"to explain that."
It's exciting
in that it's consistent with what we predicted,
but we have to wait for this to be confirmed
by other calculations, by direct measurements,
and so on.
If future missions can confirm
methane-based life on titan,
it will surely be the greatest discovery
in the history of science,
because this low-temperature biology
must have arisen independently of life on earth.
If we discover life, let's say on Mars,
there will always be the possibility
that rocks and ice and bits of material
could've been exchanged,
but the chances of that happening from earth
all the way to Saturn are next to nothing.
Robotic missions offer tantalizing hints
of simple life on Enceladus and titan.
But is Saturn's realm only fit for giant bacteria,
or is it a place we humans could one day call home?
I was lucky enough to get the chance to marvel at earth
from my missions to the Hubble space telescope.
And as space tourism continues to gain momentum,
others may journey to space, as well.
When the time comes,
we should all be putting Saturn's moon titan
on our short list,
especially since it might be the perfect place
for humans to extend our vacations.
Saturn orbits a billion miles from the sun,
so far out that it takes an hour
for its reflected light to reach our eyes.
Yet, the future of our civilization
may rest on humans one day colonizing the moons
surrounding this gas giant planet.
It won't be easy,
but Saturn has something worth the trouble...
A magical source of fuel called "helium-3"
that could satisfy our increasing hunger for energy
for millions of years.
Some futurists believe
that we have to have a commercial incentive
to going to Saturn,
not just to mine the minerals of the moons of Saturn,
but, also, to harvest fuel in the form of helium-3.
Helium-3 is a rare substance
that we could use in fusion engines
to provide, perhaps, unlimited energy.
Helium-3 is uniquely suited
to a form of energy production called "fusion"...
...the same process that burns in the heart of a star.
When two nuclei are crushed together
under enormous pressure,
they fuse,
creating a new, heavier atom and a burst of pure energy.
Best of all,
helium-3 doesn't release any of the harmful radiation
associated with other fusion fuels.
The only trouble with helium-3
is that there's precious little to be found on earth.
Now, you can find some helium-3 on the moon,
but the major supplies of helium-3 in our solar system
are located in the atmospheres of the giant planets.
I call the gas giants
the Persian Gulf of the solar system,
because they are the location
of its primary energy resources outside of the sun.
The gas giants provide
a near-inexhaustible supply of helium-3,
but how could we extract it?
Jupiter has the most,
but the planet's immense gravity and dangerous radiation belts
make it a no-go for mining.
Neptune and Uranus are way too far away to be practical.
That leaves Saturn,
with relatively low gravity for such a big planet
and far lower levels of deadly radiation than around Jupiter.
If we're gonna have a future human economy
based on using controlled fusion and helium-3,
Saturn is the destination of choice.
Futurists envision winged drones
flying through the upper atmosphere of Saturn,
scooping up gases.
But where to process this super fuel?
The ideal base of operations would clearly be titan.
With gravity as gentle as our moon's
and a thick, earth-like atmosphere,
titan is surprisingly suitable for a human outpost.
We could have huge dome settlements on titan.
They would not have to be strong enough to hold pressure...
They could just be thin, inflatable membranes.
You could have dome cities like you see in science fiction,
which are really not possible in places like the moon.
Walking out onto the surface of titan
would be much easier than on the moon or on Mars.
The pressure on titan is kind of nice.
It's one and half times earth pressure.
You would need a source of oxygen,
and you'd need a very warm coat,
but it wouldn't feel as cold as you might think,
because the atmosphere is calm, and there's not strong wind.
I think a coat like you might wear in Antarctica
might be adequate.
Titan's low gravity and dense atmosphere
could even send us soaring from place to place.
Let's say you had, you know,
just a little bit of a wing on your arm
and you started to flap your arms...
Remember, it's almost like you're on the moon,
but with a thick atmosphere...
And you'd really be able to lift yourself off the surface,
maybe fly just a little bit.
When the helium-3 trade route has opened
and the earth becomes a fusion economy,
a new generation of rockets
will open up interplanetary travel to everyone...
Taking humans to Mars and Jupiter
in months, not years.
And helium-3 might even power
adventure tourism to Saturn itself.
You can imagine, in 100 years,
when space travel is easy,
and there will hotels orbiting the moon and Mars
and everything,
what would be the one?
What would be the place, right, to go?
It would be Saturn.
I would hope one day
that there is such a thing as space tourism
and people can visit Enceladus.
It should be called
the Enceladus interplanetary geyser park,
because it would be a phenomenal place to just go visit.
Standing on Enceladus would be an amazing sight.
All of this frost condensing back out on the surface
makes it incredibly brilliant white.
It's got some of the best powder snow
for skiing anywhere in the solar system.
You could get close enough
to actually see the individual rings,
maybe even see the little moons and the gaps
sculpting and pulling and pushing and prodding,
shepherding those ring particles around.
You could go back over and over again,
and it would always be alien and exotic and exciting.
From a cold, dead Jewel in our telescopes
to a place alive with magic and mayhem,
Saturn and its worlds have come alive
and may harbor life itself.
We're bound to discover even more
about this magnificent ringed planet
as the Cassini spacecraft begins its final mission.
During this grand finale phase,
it will orbit the planet five times,
just 1,000 miles over Saturn's cloud tops,
closer to the planet than ever before.
Cassini will plunge into Saturn's dense atmosphere
for the first and last time.
After briefly reporting back from this new world,
Cassini will eventually lose contact with earth.
It will burn and become part of the planet itself,
ending its nearly 20-year journey,
but not before sending back vital data
that could forever change
the way we think about our universe.