It was really a wow moment.
There was liquid water elsewhere in the solar system.
We had been right.
You have all of the ingredients that you need, that we know of, to
develop life as we know it.
We have cleared the tower.
and the Cassini spacecraft is on its way to Saturn.
So these sort of hard cases,
these James Bond looking cases.
We used to transport the flight hardware.
This is one of the magnetometer sensors that I worked on, and it
will have been integrated onto the boom that came out
from the side of the spacecraft.
And here's part of the magnetometer instrument.
And here's the other half of the magnetometer instrument.
This is a quarter sized model.
So this is a quarter size me.
I'd like to be this weight, not this height.
She was one of the best things about the Cassini mission because I
spoke to her on the phone every couple of days, for years, and years
and years.
So a gas giant like Saturn
is incredibly mysterious.
Saturn just captivates people because it looks so supernatural.
It engenders the immediate feeling that it can't possibly be real
It has no solid surface and it has rings around it, and we don't
necessarily know where those rings came from or how old they are.
These, as you can see, are spiky shadows that are created by these
features here that are sticking up two and a half miles.
Having the perspective of Cassini to be able to see
that was one of the most extraordinary things, I think, about
the images that came back.
It was just extraordinary, it was out of science fiction.
Some of the most amazing discoveries that Cassini made were
about Saturn's moons.
The first flyby of Enceladus was not terribly close, but something
funny was happening in the magnetometer data.
Okay, so.
Put it into slide show.
My boss came to the team and said,
You can see there's a little pimple in the data, just over there.
This looks intriguing.
This is not what we expect.
We expect on a rocky moon for the magnetic field to drape over it, a
bit like a nice peaceful curtain draping over a window that's not
moving. And instead, it looks like there's some sort of breeze gently
fluttering that curtain.
And what we were able to do is calculate what ions were generating
those waves and it was water group ions.
So Michelle decided, after discussions with all of us, that she
would go to the Jet Propulsion Lab and she would propose moving the
next flyby of Enceladus, which wasn't for some time to come, to
much sooner.
And this was a huge risk for her.
We knew for us to be able to have a chance of really seeing what was
going on in Enceladus, we needed to get closer.
The principal investigator of the magnetometer, God bless her, she
went into action and convinced the project to take the spacecraft
close to the South Pole, so we could all get a better look.
And I must confess, I didn't sleep for two or three nights before that
close flyby because if we hadn't seen anything, no one would ever
have believed anything
I said again.
So, but what we found was spectacular.
This image made me nearly fall off my chair, because here we see dozens
of jets, big and small, coming off the south polar region.
It was fantastic.
It was really a wow sort of a moment.
There was liquid water elsewhere in the solar system
other than the earth.
Enceladus, tiny rocky moon of Saturn, is geologically active.
A stable liquid environment,
organic material and contact with rock
you have all of the ingredients that you need,
that we know of, to develop life
as we know it.
I love this picture and
it's about as much meaning as you can get out of the
the Cassini mission, because we know that moon has an ocean in it
that could harbor life.
One of the mysteries of Saturn, originally, was the source of the
rings, and it turns out that Enceladus's geysers feed the very
faint but very wide E ring.
It shouldn't be surprising that we found such interesting geological
activity on a planet with 82 moons.
Ironically, all of these wonderful discoveries that we made meant
you run out of fuel.
It was on one percent.
It had an empty tank, so we had to crash it into the planet and let it go.
This is the start of the end of the mission.
We're running out of fuel and we are going to make sure we go out
with as much great science as we can.
We want to see
how much of the atmosphere we can see before we lose the signal,
before it can't fight the atmosphere anymore
and it goes off point.
These last grand finale orbits where Cassini dove between the
rings and the planet, they were never foreseen in the original
mission planning.
Actually, getting to do that was really remarkable.
Take these kind of dangerous dives between the rings
and the planet to see what that space was like.
Actually, with the spacecraft physically being there
was really remarkable.
In some ways, I just want it to be over now, you know, you're sort of
waiting for it to end and it's really weird.
Quite a lot of us were gathered round, tensely waiting for the data
to come back. We were relying on the commands that we had written
and we had sent to the spacecraft to work properly and for the
spacecraft to continue to be able to talk to us right up to the very
last minute.
I can confirm
Science playback is in lock.
And, and then it'll go away.
It just will lose the signal and that'll be end of mission.
That would be the end of the spacecraft.
Project manager off the net.
It doesn't feel a long way away, actually, because every time I
watch it, I am immediately there again.
So that I think, I guess says something about the impact
that the end of mission had.
That was a great spacecraft.
It did exactly what we ask it to do
all the way to the end.
When you have checked on a spacecraft every day for more than
a decade and then suddenly it's not there.
It really is a wrench.
It's a blow.
And you feel sadness and a certain amount of grief.
Godspeed, take it and release it.