NARRATOR: NASA's mission is to explore the unknown.
There's more that we don't know than we do know.
That's just the nature of the universe.
NARRATOR: Searching for answers,
it launches scientists into space
and craft beyond the edge of the solar system.
Taking risks is part of making discovery.
Space exploration is like lighting a match,
and we don't know what lurks in the shadows.
There could be anything out there.
NARRATOR: Strange flying objects on the moon and Mars.
Something up there is sabotaging
or is trying to sabotage the, uh, MIR space station.
NARRATOR: Intelligent lightning and abandoned space stations...
[ beep ]
unexpected intruders lurking in our solar system...
Or alien craft powered by nuclear explosions.
It's really quite astonishing.
This object is not on its own in the sky.
There's something with it.
NARRATOR: NASA's missions uncover disturbing evidence...
Man: Okay, we're seeing three or four objects.
Man: Yeah, there are... there are three objects.
NARRATOR: ...that continues to perplex
our finest scientific minds.
This is a journey into uncharted territory...
...into "NASA's Unexplained Files."
-=[" NASA's Unexplained Files - 1x06 "]=- [" Ghosts on the Moon "] Sync, corrected for web by : UF Original Air Date on July 20, 2014
NARRATOR: July, 19, 1969.
As "Apollo 11" makes its final approach
to the moon, mysterious lights appear, dazzling the astronauts.
Even the harshest critic
discovered the fact this was real.
They actually did see something.
NARRATOR: NASA thinks it's moon debris.
It had to be something else.
It's... it really is a mystery.
Is there something there
they don't want the public to know?
[ static ]
NARRATOR: Just hours before NASA astronauts
take man's first steps on the moon,
astronomers in Germany report a strange light
coming from the Aristarchus crater.
[ beeping, static ]
NARRATOR: Mission control immediately
asked the astronauts to investigate.
[ static ]
NARRATOR: What "Apollo 11" sees defies explanation.
The Apollo astronauts see this glow
in... in... in this crater.
They're having this conversation back and forth with capcom,
and they mention that suddenly there's interference,
there's static, and then there's silence.
[ alarm sounding ]
[ frequencies whizzing ]
NARRATOR: The live mission broadcast
disappears for 89 tense seconds.
Is NASA deliberately cutting out a public feed
'cause they didn't want us to know
that something is on the moon that shouldn't be?
NARRATOR: NASA astronaut Charles Duke doesn't think so.
He was part of the shift at mission control in the hours
immediately following the incident.
I was the only guy talking to them for eight hours
'til we landed on the moon.
I don't remember any big discussion about transient...
Is there something there
they don't want the public to know?
NARRATOR: It's an issue
that's fascinated lunar scientist Peter Schultz
for decades.
I saw something on the moon many years... 40, 50 years ago,
and realized it's very dangerous
to publish anything about this.
It was terribly controversial. It could ruin a career.
NARRATOR: NASA calls these sightings
Transient Lunar Phenomena,
T.L.P. for short.
T.L.P. could be something other than natural.
There are a lot of transient events on the moon,
but I can't comment specifically.
Sometimes it's on. Sometimes it's off,
and if it's artificial,
that would belie all of the stories
about the moon being a dead celestial body.
NARRATOR: NASA's official position
is that Aristarchus glistens
because it contains reflective dust.
But Peter Schultz claims the sun wasn't in the right place
to reflect off the crater when "Apollo 11" saw it.
Aristarchus was in the night time
when the astronauts from "Apollo 11" went over it.
So it can't be a glint off the sun.
It had to be something else.
It's... it really is a mystery.
NARRATOR: Solar glint remains NASA's official explanation,
although not everyone agrees.
People were fired because of
people trying to look for those transient phenomena.
Amazing.
So all these reports, all these astronomers
who said they saw something and nobody believed them...
they were probably right.
[ static, pinging ]
NARRATOR: Aristarchus was the first of many sightings
that make moon watchers think there's more
to our nearest neighbor than meets the eye.
Even today, there are people
who think that there might be artifacts on the moon...
things left by societies.
I mean, think of the movie "2001,"
there's a big monolith on the moon.
NARRATOR: Earth's moon may still hide secrets,
but Mars' largest moon might itself
be the biggest mystery in the solar system.
The data that we retrieved from Phobos
makes it seem as though Phobos is hollow.
There have been thoughts that it might be the remnants
of a huge space station.
If that were true, holy cow, that changes everything.
[ static ]
NARRATOR: Small, fast, and impossibly low...
Phobos streaks just 5,800 miles above the surface of Mars,
and its orbit is shrinking.
Astronomists calculate that Phobos will collide
with the planet in the next 10 million years
a blink of an eye in astronomical time,
and that poses some difficult questions.
In... in astronomy, you have something that will only last
for 10 million years,
it's not from the formation of the solar system.
It's something more recent.
How do you get that more recent thing?
How did Phobos get captured into an orbit around Mars?
NARRATOR: In 1958,
Russian astrophysicist Yosef Slavski
asked the same thing.
When he measured the orbital velocity of Phobos,
he made an astonishing discovery.
To his surprise, the moon changes speed,
but there was more.
It was his investigation... his research into Phobos
that suggested the idea that Phobos was hollow,
and that is so tantalizing for experts at NASA that,
that's really one of the reasons we were driven to Mars...
just to explore the possibility that Mars had a hollow moon.
NARRATOR: Because if Phobos is hollow,
that opens up a whole new set of possibilities.
If indeed it's hollow,
that certainly means somebody put it up.
Why would you even want to build
a hollow moon in Mars' orbit anyway?
A refueling station? A jumping off point?
If I were involved in setting priorities for NASA,
I would be interested in Phobos too.
NASA's budget,... a lot of that budget is black budget.
It's a secret budget.
It's doing missions for the military
and doing missions for the intelligence agency.
But maybe, just maybe, one of those missions
has to be to explore celestial bodies...
moons that are actually hollow on the inside.
Whoever gets to Phobos first may stand to win points
with whatever intelligence put it up.
NARRATOR: Landing on Phobos is a massive technological hurdle
that no human agency has so far managed to jump.
Interesting that every time
we try to send something to Phobos,
it fails for some reason.
Maybe something's stopping us from getting there.
NARRATOR: Perhaps our first successful mission to Phobos
will signify a major milestone for humankind
and anyone else who's watching.
But astronomer J.J. Kavelaars
is not convinced that Phobos is artificial.
When we do spectroscopy of Phobos' surface.
[ computer beeping ] We see that it's made
from the same sort of thing as the asteroids are made from.
So this gives a pretty good indication
of where it's coming from.
If it was a more exotic material,
you would detect that.
NARRATOR: If Phobos is an asteroid,
how can it be hollow?
Phobos is basically made up
of a bunch of boulders and loosely aggregated dust.
And so there's lots of voids, space, between the rocks.
And so the density of the object itself
is really quite low compared to the rocks that it's made from.
NARRATOR: NASA believes that over billions of years,
the pull of gravity has drawn bits of orbital debris together.
Phobos is just a big pile of rocks.
Definitely not a space station.
Phobos is not a space station.
But that doesn't mean that Phobos
can't become a great space station.
It is perfectly located
to be the base from which we can explore Mars,
possibly occupy Mars.
If Phobos isn't a space station yet,
don't worry. It will be.
NARRATOR: We're a long way from putting a man on Mars,
but NASA's latest mission suggests that something
or someone has already been there.
We finally land rovers on Mars,
and what's the first thing we see?
Two objects flying away.
We go 5 million miles,
and we see U.F.O.s fly over Mars.
NARRATOR: As NASA's Curiosity rover begins
a new era in Mars exploration...
It's a real major life event for everybody around you.
NARRATOR: Astonishing footage leaves scientists stunned.
We get not just one, but a double u.F.O. Sighting.
Doesn't that strike you as odd?
NARRATOR: August 6, 2012...
deputy principal investigator Jim Bell waits
as NASA's innovative new sky crane landing system
lowers the Curiosity rover onto the surface of Mars.
There's this immense wave of relief
that kind of washes over everybody.
[ cheering ]
NARRATOR: After an 8-month wait,
scientists will finally see the first
high resolution pictures of the red planet.
But the images that grab the world's attention
suggest Curiosity has company.
We've wanted so long to be on Mars looking around.
We've got Curiosity there.
We flip on the cameras. What do we see?
Very first thing that happens two flying objects.
NARRATOR: An eerie cloud-like shape hovers on the horizon
and that's not all.
Moving across the cloud,
a bright object travels at high speed.
A double U.F.O. sighting... that seems very strange to me.
Might be what you'd expect if there were beings
paying attention to what we're doing in outer space.
NARRATOR: A theory emerges
that the white dot could be a snapshot
of either Deimos or Phobos, the moons of Mars.
But Bell isn't convinced.
What's actually seen in those pictures
or the right speed or the right brightness
to be either Phobos or Deimos, Mars' other moon.
NARRATOR: For Jim Bell,
the very movement of the object is a problem.
[ camera shutter clicking ]
because the first picture Curiosity took after landing
was not a moving image.
We took a few pictures with the Curiosity cameras
right around that time.
But we didn't take a time-lapse series
of... of images.
We didn't take a movie with those cameras.
NARRATOR: Curiosity's hazard camera
took only eight photographs at the time of the landing,
and all of them were still images.
[ camera shutter clicks ]
[ whirring ]
so if a dot is moving across the picture,
it has to have been added later.
This image is just that... one image.
So how can you have a movie from just one image?
NARRATOR: Astronomer Marc d'Antonio
is also a professional image analyst.
He can prove just how easy it is to doctor a picture like this.
[ click ]
I've taken this similar image
taken of the billowing cloud on the horizon.
You see it just there, right there on the horizon.
And I've added a U.F.O. of my own.
And when I hit the "play" button,
you can actually see it moving across,
and then off it goes.
It disappears and it goes behind
that part of the structure of the rover.
But I added that in. It's all fake.
[ clicks ]
NARRATOR: It's that easy to alter NASA's footage.
We post our images on the internet
in almost real time.
Anyone in the world can download them,
and if you wanna go in
and change the brightness of some pixels
and duplicate the images and make a little time-lap,
it's possible.
People are really good
with image processing software right now.
NARRATOR: One final piece of proof
is the cloud seen billowing on the horizon.
The cloud wasn't moving at all,
and that was a problem for me 'cause that made me feel like,
well, this is clearly a hoax.
NARRATOR: Yet that doesn't explain the presence
of the cloud in the first place.
Something must have caused it.
For the answer to this, Jim Bell believes
we need to study the events leading up to the landing.
Many of my colleagues think that we sort of accidentally
captured th-the crash and the explosion of the sky crane.
This whole package flies away off to the horizon,
still has a whole bunch of fuel on it,
and as it hits the ground, that fuel explodes,
creates this big plume and...
and I think that's what we're seeing in those images.
NARRATOR: But not everyone
accepts the sky crane explanation.
It's too simplistic. Too easy.
I think we would certainly know
if the sky crane was going away and what would happen to it.
We'd know about that.
NARRATOR: To date, NASA has offered no official explanation
for the anomaly.
Perhaps we need to look farther afield
for signs of alien activity.
Far out in the magellanic clouds,
scientists have spotted something
that raises intriguing possibilities.
When we see
high-energy radiation coming from deep space,
you know, one possibility is,
well, maybe that's somebody else's nuclear rocket.
[ whooshes ]
it's the most awesome surfing experience
you can imagine.
[ click ]
NARRATOR: NASA's scientists detect strange x-ray signals
in a neighboring galaxy.
Maybe that's somebody else's nuclear rocket.
NARRATOR: Could they be traces of an alien star drive?
Dumping nuclear bombs out the rear hatch
and riding the wave.
It needs further investigation.
[ static ]
NARRATOR: 2010... NASA's Chandra observatory
detects an x-ray signature in a neighboring galaxy cluster
known as the Small Magellanic Cloud.
[ static ]
NARRATOR: Astronomers initially interpret the x-ray as a pulsar.
Pulsars are spinning neutron stars,
and they result from the collapse of massive stars.
NARRATOR: When the star collapses,
all of its mass concentrates into a tiny sphere...
the pulsar.
It's called pulsar because when these
very, very dense objects rotate,
they emit x-rays in pulses.
NARRATOR: But this pulsar is behaving very weirdly.
The object takes 18 minutes to rotate,
way longer than any pulsar should.
To have a pulsar that rotates at only 18 minutes,
with a period of 18 minutes is pretty much impossible.
The data that we were looking at didn't make sense.
[ static ]
NARRATOR: If the signal isn't a pulsar,
what else could it be?
When we see high-energy radiation
coming from deep space,
you know, one possibility is
well, maybe that's somebody else's nuclear rocket.
[ static ]
NARRATOR: A nuclear rocket that explodes regularly
every 18 minutes might sound unlikely,
but the physics makes sense.
[ static ]
in order to move forward,
you have to have a reaction,
according to Newton's second law.
One way to do that is to burn chemical fuel
in our rockets we have right now.
Another is to drop little bombs behind yourself
and just explode them
and let the explosion push you forward.
Early in the space age,
it was thought that we could do that with atomic bombs.
Radiation would push on the plate behind the spacecraft
and then move it forward.
[ explosions ]
pushing them, bam, bam, bam, through space.
[ explosions ]
you're dumping nuclear bombs
out the rear hatch and riding the wave.
It's the most awesome surfing experience you can imagine.
NARRATOR: It sounds like science fiction, but it isn't.
[ static ]
footage from a top secret 1950s project shows
that NASA was seriously considering using atomic bombs
as a method of propulsion.
The scheme was called project Orion.
[ explosions ]
There was talk of using an atomic bomb
to move a pre-formed colony
the size of the empire state building
to Mars.
There was serious discussion of it,
and on paper it would work.
[ static ]
One design, uh, assumed that
we would use nuclear bombs, uh, even at the launch,
and therefore there would be several nuclear explosions
in the atmosphere.
[ explosion ]
NARRATOR: Project Orion was eventually abandoned in 1964
because of nuclear test treaties.
But human treaties wouldn't keep other civilizations
from using the technology.
If we were to see a signal from that far away,
it would require a considerable amount of energy...
much larger than any nuclear bomb
that we could ever produce.
It's unlikely that this signal was indeed produced
by an advanced civilization.
NARRATOR: If this is not an alien Orion drive,
scientists have to explain
the potential pulsars' strange behavior.
Currently, we don't understand why it's spinning this slowly.
But the theory is that
in some way its interaction with a companion star
is actually slowing it down rather than speeding it up.
It's still something that we need to understand.
If this is a pulsar,
it's not acting like any pulsar we've ever seen.
It's unique somehow in the universe
or at least to our perception,
but it goes exactly like what I would expect
a project Orion drive to behave.
Every time we see something
that's creepily, strangely regular,
it's good that we have a corner of our brain that says,
"what if somebody meant that to happen?"
NARRATOR: Up next...
[ thunderclap ]
What if lightning can communicate with itself?
You see one flash on one storm, and about a few seconds later,
you see another flash on the other storm.
NARRATOR: Secret signs in the sky suggest an alien code.
They look like they were actually talking to each other.
[ static ]
NARRATOR: Astronauts in orbit witness a baffling phenomenon
undetectable from the Earth's surface.
Sometimes we'll be confronted with things
that we can't understand, that are just weird.
It shouldn't be that way.
We don't know what's going on up there.
[ thunderclap ]
NARRATOR: Lightning storms hundreds of miles apart
appear to communicate with each other.
Thunderstorm cells are quite distant.
How could one storm know what the other storm is doing?
[ static ]
[ alarm sounding ]
NARRATOR: After the tragic breakup
of the "Columbia" shuttle during re-entry,
NASA scientists analyze the footage beamed back
from its final mission.
The astonishing images provide evidence for something
astronauts have reported since the early days of space flight.
When you're up in orbit 200 miles up,
and you're looking out a thousand miles
in any particular direction, it just seems amazing to me
that you're always gonna see lightning.
Lightning strikes all over the planet
millions of times a day.
It kills a lot of people, causes a lot of damage.
We, in some sense, know how the inside of stars
work better than how the inside of a thunderstorm works
just a few miles over our heads.
NARRATOR: Astronauts report bolts of lightning
hundreds of miles apart,
flashing in precisely orchestrated sequences.
All of a sudden, somewhere there would be
a-a lightning strike,
and it looked like it triggered
a whole series of lightning strikes.
A real chain reaction type of thing.
[ whoosh ] It's going...
[ imitates lightning whooshing ] and just sort of
running over the cloud and... and discharging the cloud.
So it has a pattern, you know?
It would seem to walk across the cloud like that.
NARRATOR: Weather specialist Skeet Vaughan
has a name for the uncanny phenomenon.
He calls it sympathetic lightning.
Our definition of sympathetic lightning
was arrived at because we saw two big electrical storms
about 1,500 miles apart.
You see one flash on one storm, and about a few seconds later,
you see another flash on the other storm.
And so they look like they were actually talking to each other.
This is hard to figure out. How could this happen?
Thunderstorm cells are quite distant.
Um, how could one storm know what the other storm is doing?
You wonder if these two things
are sending communications back and forth.
And it appears they maybe... maybe are.
NARRATOR: Physicist Stanton Friedman
wonders if there is some other explanation
for this strange phenomenon.
[ electricity surges ]
I think there are really interesting phenomena here,
and we're not being told anything about them.
[ lightning striking ]
I think if we look carefully at some of the reports we get
of flying saucers, we find electrical aspects.
For example, color in the region around the craft
changes as it changes direction.
The color changes when the speed changes.
NARRATOR: The process of harnessing electricity
to improve flight is called magneto-aerodynamics.
This would be interactions of craft in the atmosphere,
electrical interactions.
[ static, beep ]
[ keyboard keys click ]
when I did a survey on magneto-aerodynamics,
I found that there were 900 references to government reports
using that one key word.
Like it or not,
90% of those references were classified.
[ keys clack ]
I would sure love to see those classified files
about magneto-aerodynamics. Wow.
NARRATOR: The contents of the mysterious files
on magneto-aerodynamics remain classified.
And for the time being, at least,
the phenomenon known as sympathetic lightning
must remain... unexplained.
Something strange is going on.
NARRATOR: In space, something even stranger is happening.
Coming up...
Something up there is sabotaging the MIR space station.
NARRATOR: And strange objects
dog the last mission on the moon.
Was this a warning
from some kind of extraterrestrial culture,
"Stay off the moon. It's not yours. It's ours"?
NARRATOR: Mysterious lights buzz the MIR space station.
[ static, pinging ]
Chris Hadfield saw something out the window.
He almost wonders if something up there is sabotaging
or is trying to sabotage the MIR space station.
Could it be E.T. probes looking at the MIR space station?
Man: Flight crew OTT, close and lock your visors.
Have a good flight.
NARRATOR: In the wake of the cold war,
NASA's shuttle "Atlantis" is about to try
one of the most dangerous space maneuvers ever attempted.
Man: And liftoff of Space Shuttle "Atlantis"
with the Russian docking module,
a threshold to world cooperation in space.
[ pinging ]
NARRATOR: The shuttle must dock with Russia's MIR space station.
The lives of those aboard,
like mission specialist Jerry Ross, depend on it.
[ radio chatter ]
177 feet stopped.
All right.
It had never been designed for a large vehicle
such as a Space Shuttle to come up and dock to it.
And it really was a pretty precarious thing for us
to come in and dock directly
to the MIR space station with a Space Shuttle.
Man: "Atlantis," go with throttle up.
You have to remember that the MIR space station
probably weighed a half a million pounds,
and the Space Shuttle weighed a quarter of a million pounds.
And we're both flying at 5 miles per second,
200 and some miles above the surface of the Earth.
So all those things
are playing into what you're doing.
.1 or .06? - .06.
NARRATOR: The slightest misjudgment
could end in tragedy.
But just as they think
the hardest part of their mission is over,
something unexpected distracts the astronauts.
I recall Chris Hadfield mentioning
that he saw something out the window,
and several of us came up to the window.
We grabbed some cameras and some binoculars,
and we were trying to identify what it was.
Orwoll: During this docking process,
they start to notice that there are objects moving
and essentially flying, uh, from the look of it,
around the MIR space station.
[ static, pinging ]
Start wondering what all this is.
[ static ]
[ radio chatter ]
[ men speaking in foreign language ]
NARRATOR: NASA says the objects are ice particles shaken free
by thruster vibrations.
We have ice all over the place because water cannot exist
in a vacuum as water.
It has to flash immediately into ice.
So when we dump water overboard, for example,
it immediately turns into ice... instantly.
Man: There is a tremendous amount of ice
that we saw coming off the back end,
some very large chunks of it.
Any of these little chunks of ice will float out
away from you.
They'll reflect sunlight.
So if you see them out there a ways away from you,
sometimes it looks like light shining.
NARRATOR: But the explanation raises more questions
than it answers.
Lot of ice particles in space.
But the problem is, if they're ice particles
that flaked off MIR,
wouldn't they be going in the same direction
or in similar directions? But these objects
are flying all over the place.
So whatever they are,
they certainly don't act like ice particles.
Ice particles should move away and stay away.
They shouldn't move around
as if they were propelled by something.
I have no doubt that on some occasions,
ice particles have been knocked off
because of motion within the craft or whatever.
But what... not nearly as many as NASA is claiming.
It's an easy out, and nobody is checking.
NARRATOR: In 15 years of active duty,
MIR suffers dangerous fires,
a near catastrophic collision,
and periods of out of control tumbling.
It has led some of her crew to suspect they were not alone.
I mean, there were issues with MIR,
and Chris Hadfield comments
that he almost wonders if something up there
is sabotaging or is "trying to sabotage"
the, uh, MIR space station.
NARRATOR: Bad luck, dancing ice, or space saboteurs?
The MIR mystery remains unexplained.
Still to come...
strange sightings on NASA's last mission to the moon.
There's no question that the easiest explanation
for why we didn't go on past "Apollo 17"
is that somebody out there said,
"Stay the heck off our moon."
NARRATOR: And when one astronomer
goes looking for asteroids, he finds something unexpected.
It was really quite astonishing.
This object is not on its own in the sky.
There's something with it.
It's the great unknown.
It's the far frontier of the solar system.
NARRATOR: Something appears to be shadowing
the astronauts of the "Apollo 17" mission.
You see this very, very thin,
uh, rectangular image that's kind of hovering,
seemingly almost flying.
[ static ]
Is it something watching the astronauts?
We've got to pull out.
What is this thing that's flying above the lunar landscape?
Was this a warning, "Stay off the moon.
It's not yours. It's ours"?
It's got to be one of the most proud moments of my life,
I guarantee ya.
NARRATOR: December 14, 1972.
[ pinging ]
"Apollo 17" astronauts, Eugene Cernan and Jack Schmitt,
are planting explosives on the moon.
The astronauts set up a network of seismometers
on the lunar surface, and these impacts
would give you clues to the interior of the moon.
NARRATOR: The explosives are part of a geological experiment
which will profile the upper crust of the moon.
[ static ]
Before the astronauts leave,
Cernan takes some last minute photographs.
Years later, one of the photographs
catches the attention of astronomer Jim Scotti.
So I'm looking at these images, and I see the mostly black sky,
but I see a little streak up in the top part of the image.
I start thinking about what sort of natural phenomena
or manmade phenomena we're actually seeing in the sky.
Orwoll: What is this strange, small, rectangular shape
that we're seeing flying above the lunar surface?
Is it some kind of craft, or what else could it be?
[ static ]
Is there something out there watching us
while we're walking on the lunar surface?
When I see something
that I can't quite recognize right away,
uh, you can sort of take the scientific approach,
or you can jump to conclusions,
and I prefer the scientific approach.
I look at the, uh, print, the high-resolution print,
and I can see the shape, and I...
it gives me an idea of...
Okay, Bob, I've got my tools of the trade right here.
NARRATOR: Scotti thinks the solution lies
with Jack Schmitt.
NASA picked him for the "Apollo 17" crew
because of his background as a geologist.
Let's see if I can't crack the corner and get that contact.
Jack Schmitt was the first scientist-to-astronaut
to walk on the moon... the only geologist even today
that has ever walked on the moon.
It's obviously very, uh, very cohesive.
We need to know a great deal more about the variation
of the concentration of different minerals.
They want to know in detail.
Where's the good stuff?
I can see it from here! It's orange!
Yeah, that is really orange.
NARRATOR: The astronauts spot telltale signs of titanium
and other exotic minerals.
They are eager to continue their survey.
There isn't enough time, Tony.
We need more time.
They got to leave at a certain time
regardless of what we got.
NARRATOR: Running low on oxygen, they must end the space walk.
[ static ]
just before they head back to the module,
Cernan asks the mission's geologist an odd question.
Gene Cernan says, "Can I throw the hammer?
Are we done with it?"
Jack says,
"Can I throw the hammer? I'm the geologist."
NARRATOR: Scotti thinks this conversation
is the key to unlocking the mystery
of the anomaly in Cernan's photographs.
Most likely, these three images were taken by Gene Cernan,
who was carrying a camera with black and white film,
and it's very consistent with him
taking some images of the hammer in flight.
Mystery solved.
Man: This closes a golden chapter
in the age of space exploration.
[ clicking ]
NARRATOR: Mankind never returned to the moon.
[ electricity powers down ]
As one chapter closes,
another opens on the furthest reaches of the solar system.
The Kuiper belt is the new mysterious zone
of the solar system.
It's the great unknown.
NARRATOR: But something is missing.
It must have been there once upon a time.
NARRATOR: More than 90% of what should be there
has simply disappeared.
So why is the Kuiper belt depleted?
There's a lot we don't understand.
It's a total mystery.
[ static ]
NARRATOR: Hawaii, August 2001.
J.J. Kavelaars searches the Kuiper belt,
the vast area of space
at the far frontier of the solar system.
[ whirs ]
using a state-of-the art telescope,
he's hunting the debris leftover from planet formation.
We're basically doing archaeology.
We're digging through the sky
and looking at these objects,
trying to map out the evolution of our planetary system.
[ clank ]
NARRATOR: He's tracking a tiny object
labeled "2001 QW322."
I enter the coordinates for 2001 QW322
into the telescope control system.
The telescope slews over, points at that part of the sky,
and I acquire an image.
[ electricity whizzing ]
NARRATOR: But this is no routine observation.
It was really quite astonishing.
This object is not on its own in the sky.
There's something with it.
NARRATOR: The object is a binary pair...
two tiny asteroids bound together
by the pull of their own gravity.
That should be impossible.
There's almost 80,000 miles between the pair...
the diameter of 10 earths.
It's unbelievable to us that such tiny, tiny objects
can be bound together
and be separated by such a large distance.
NARRATOR: But they're still together,
and there are others just like them.
This isn't the only loosely bound binary
in the outer solar system.
So now we know there's a whole population
of these kinds of orbits out there.
NARRATOR: That leads scientists to a mind-blowing conclusion.
In order for this to happen,
a staggering 99% of the material
that should be in the Kuiper belt
must have disappeared.
[ whoosh ]
Could that happen naturally?
One of the leading theories for why the Kuiper belt
could be depleted is that
the gas giants... Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus
didn't just form where they're at now and stay there.
We think that maybe there was
almost some cosmic billiards that went on
uh, as the orbits of the planets
were settling themselves into place.
These things are pretty heavy duty players
in the solar system,
and so they were throwing their weight around.
The theory is, is that their gravitational influence
got rid of a lot of things
that were originally in the Kuiper belt.
NARRATOR: Astronomer Marc d'Antonio
has another theory.
He blames an unknown intruder
for grabbing the material on its way out of the solar system.
We have a simulation of the Kuiper belt right here,
where we use this magnet, and we run it underneath.
You can actually see
how attractive forces pull and tug
particles out of the way.
In our Kuiper belt, that's the equivalent
of pulling planets and asteroids.
One of the things we can speculate about is whether
we had more planets in our solar system or not.
If that's true, then if it was ejected
by some gravitational interaction with Jupiter
or one of the other planets,
it would have also left our solar system
and going right out like this
and taken a whole bunch of Kuiper belt objects with it.
The Kuiper belt is the new mysterious zone
of the solar system.
It's the great unknown.
It's the far frontier of the solar system,
and we have a NASA mission that's going
to go find out what's out there.
It's called New Horizons, and our destination is Pluto.
Morris: All of these questions that we have
will remain unanswered until the New Horizons mission
gets there and provides us with hopefully some of these answers.
NARRATOR: NASA's unceasing quest for answers
takes us to the outer edges of the solar system and beyond.
Rovers cross faraway planets,
and telescopes look to distant stars,
shedding new light on our own planet's mysteries,
offering glimpses of exciting new possibilities.
The answers to space's greatest challenges are out there.
NASAs.Unexplained.Files.S01E06.Ghosts.on.the.Moon.1080p.WEB.x264-CRiMSON English HI/SDH CC Converted SRT Subtitles - UF (v1.06)