StarTalk Radio - The Story of Space Imaging with Carolyn “Madam Saturn” Porco

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

How much has space imaging furthered our understanding of the Universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice learn the story of cameras on space probes like Voyager and Cassini and the exciting science of Saturn with planetary scientist Carolyn Porco. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/the-story-of-space-imaging-with-carolyn-madam-saturn-porco/Thanks to our Patrons Collin Money, Jeffery K Ogren, José Luis Pizano Escalante, Micheal Yablon, Artemis ma, and Paul Scott for supporting us this week.Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Up next on StarTalk, I've got my friend and colleague Carolyn Porco, otherwise known as Madam Saturn. And she's going to tell us about the history of getting cameras on board space probes. We will also find out what gives Saturn its colors and what else is in store for us. Not only the pale blue dot taken by Voyager, but its reprise taken by Cassini, and will reflect on the meaning and significance of Moonrise, that iconic picture taken by Apollo 8. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Got with me Chuck Knight. Chuck, how you doing, man? Oh, great, man. How's it going? All right. You're my co-host extraordinaire. Oh, fantastic. I don't tell you that as often as I want to.

I'll take it any time I can get it. We've got a special guest today. Yes. A longtime friend and colleague, Madam Saturn. Yes. Does she have a name beyond that? I don't know, and I don't think so. But until we verify, let's call her Carolyn Porco.

Carolyn, welcome back to StarTalk. Thank you. It's great to be here. Hello to both of you. You both look great. It's good to see Porco. Carolyn, welcome back to StarTalk. Thank you. It's great to be here. Hello to both of you. You both look great. It's good to see you. Excellent. Good to see you. Excellent. We got you on because we're going to talk about

world-changing, civilization-moving space images. And you've been a part of this parade of cosmic perspectives that have come to us from photography in space. And I'm delighted to sort of get your take on this and what roles you played in the past, present, and maybe even the future. So Carolyn, I've got a three-line bio for you. This is, I think, encapsulates why we've got you on the show today. You are a member of the Voyager imaging team. Voyager was launched back in 1977, so you've been at this for a while. You're also a leader and head of the imaging team of Cassini.

That was NASA's mission to Saturn. And currently, you're a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. And my favorite planet after Earth is Saturn. And so every day I was looking at my inbox to see if a new beautiful image was coming from your Saturn portfolio. So, Carolyn, welcome back to StarTalk. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And let me add to that three-line resume, Carolyn, that on July 19th, 2013, that on July 19th, 2013, you oversaw an image taken by the Cassini spacecraft while it orbited Saturn called the Day the Earth Smiled.

And many have called that the greatest selfie ever taken. Now, before we go there, before we go there, because there's some earlier tracking I want to get through. So, Carolyn, as I've come to understand, the early planetary probes, as conceived by NASA, did not contain cameras. They contained all manner of sophisticated scientific equipment to measure like magnetic fields and plasma densities and all this, but not photos. And so, what do you know about the history of this? Yeah, it has a very interesting history and not surprising. Carl Sagan is involved in this because he was one of the original planetary scientists.

In fact, the Voyager imaging team leader, Brad Smith, referred to Carl as the first planetary scientist. But anyway, it was the first mariner mission to Venus. This was going to be the first mission to a planet because we'd been with, you know, rangers, surveyors, so on to the moon. It was the first mission to Venus and the... And Venus is, of course, the closest planet to Earth. So why wouldn't it be Venus?

You go to the closest place. Good idea. So anyway, the scientists involved in that mission did not want to carry a camera. And they said, and this was told to me by Carl, they said that they thought essentially that cameras were for kids. You know, there was no really, you know, important science that could be done with a camera. And it was Carl, Carl tried to convince them that that wouldn't be a, you know, a sensible thing to leave off the camera. They didn't believe him, and he lost the battle, but he won the war because all future missions thankfully carry cameras.

And it just shows you how silly people can be, because what is an imaging device, especially a space imaging device, that takes a scene and turns it into an array of numbers, which get relayed back to Mother Earth. What is that except a bunch of detectors? In fact, in the case of Cassini, a million, a thousand on the side, a million individual detectors arrayed in two dimensions. They're okay.

These scientists were okay with carrying one detector that could just look in one spot, take whatever information it needed. For some reason, they did not like the idea of a two-dimensional array of a million of these things. But anyway, it's true. There was really strong pushback against carrying a camera. And we know of...

But isn't it... It's not because they were just ignorant. It's that if you're going to carry a camera, that means you can't carry something else, right? Every ounce matters on these space missions. I know, but what... Okay, but what they couldn't see was the utility in imaging data. That's really what it came down to.

But, you know, with cameras, they didn't do this on the early missions, but with cameras, of course, you can take movies, you could see phenomena as they're developing, and you could put filters in front of cameras, and you can, you know, make spectral measurements and so on. But anyway, just as an interesting footnote to the history of planetary exploration, it was actually pushback against cameras when cameras, I mean, just look at the handles of, you know, the discoveries that have been made and the planetary program and how much of it is there because of

imaging devices. So you're saying these original planetary scientists were boneheaded, that's what you're saying? No, you said it. You said it. I said it. I'll say it. Okay. I'll say it. But you know what? We still have boneheaded scientists. I'm just not going to mention any names. So tell me about the Pale Blue Dot and Voyager. Okay, so I love talking about it. Because we're speaking, you lived it. So this is oral history as well as scientific history right here on our program. I'm going to tell it to you from my point of view.

I was made an imaging team member officially after I graduated Caltech in May and then I finally moved to Arizona to be a postdoc under Brad Smith the Voyager imaging team leader and that's when I was became an official member of the Voyager imaging team and soon after that I began hulking around this idea to take a picture of the Earth from the outer solar system. And I had in mind, you know, the perspective that it would give us of our place. I also had in mind that it would show what aliens coming to the Earth would see. You know, it was to take a picture of the Earth and all the other planets. But aliens coming to the solar system of the Earth and all the other planets.

But aliens coming to the solar system would then see Earth in the distance. Yes. Right. Yes, that's right. So I just thought this would be a cool thing to do. And I began hawking it around. I spoke to Brad Smith about this. I spoke to Ed Stone about this, who was the project scientist Voyager.

Okay. Gotcha. And he would later become, would he later become head of the Jet Propulsion? Yes, he did for a time. He was the head of, yeah, after Voyager. But anyway, so I was told by Ed Stone, you know, no, we're not going to take an image like this unless you can find some science to it.

Ed was a professor at Caltech and one of the, just a gem of a guy. And he was trying to encourage me. He said, go find some science you can do with this and maybe we'll do it. And I couldn't think of any and I ended up going off

and doing something else. But meanwhile, a few years go by and it's 1988 and I find out that Carl Sagan had proposed the same thing. He had done it a year or two before I did, but he was also having trouble getting anyone to, you know,

want to get interested in this. Certainly not the project leadership, not at Stone, but the managers at JPL, because they would have been a dangerous thing to do in those days. Take a picture like that because the high gain antenna on Voyager was always 100% of the time pointed towards the earth and they feared if you had to take the high gain antenna off the earth in order to move the camera into place to take the picture, we might lose the spacecraft.

So it turned out not until 1989 was it clear that we were going to be able to do this. Oh, and I should say that I told Carl after I found out that he was trying to do it, I met him at a DPS meeting, Division of Planetary Sciences meeting, and said, you know, I was trying to do this too, and I didn't get anywhere. He said, why don't you join me and help us? trying to do this too and I didn't get anywhere. He said, why don't you join me and help us? So I was tasked with computing the exposure times for the pictures we were going to take. We ended up taking six of the eight planets and the picture finally happened and it really happened. This is why Carl really gets the credit here.

He had to go to NASA headquarters, speak to NASA headquarters people to get permission and get the funding to take this picture. And I think the funding amounted to, in present day dollars, would have amounted to something like asking for $4 million. It was asking a lot, I guess, to do this. So anyway, it finally got done. And lots of people poo-pooed this idea. And people thought, it's only going to be less than a pixel. How could this possibly be an interesting picture? But as we all know, it's what Carl had to say about it. And the way he romanced it, and he turned it into an allegory on the human condition that has turned it, the picture and the phrase pale blue dot,

into a meme, if you will. You know, it really, and a, well, like I said, it's an allegory of where we stand. So that established almost a protocol in planetary exploration because it seems like every mission since then has taken a picture of the Earth. So there's pictures of the Earth taken from the surface of Mars,

pictures of the Earth from the Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter, and so on. And of course… So Carolyn, I'm stuck on something. Why would pointing a camera cost $4 million? It was a Kodak. It was a Kodak. What's the film made of?

Gold? I mean, what? Is it the procedures? It was just the effort? The overhead? It's keeping... It was keeping the marching army at JPL that managed and ran the whole project and took care of the spacecraft, keeping them all on board for some extra time. That was basically part of it, or most of it. Okay, so it's during the time you are taking that picture, they're not doing anything else that they should have been doing.

And so then you can cost that up and you get to $4 million. That's what you're saying. No, we didn't do that picture until the mission, the Voyager planetary portion of the mission was over. So no soft... You have to of the mission was over. So no, no soft. You had to keep the marching army marching. That's what it is. Yes, yes.

That makes sense. It was basically overtime. Is that it? It's like, we can't do this. We have to pay overtime. Everybody gets time and a half. Time and a half we can't do. You're laughing, you're laughing,

but it really was sort of like that. So. Okay. Anyway, so it was only a. So just, I have to interlude, I have to quick interlude.

I have an excerpt here from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot. Go ahead. The book, which is probably among the most quoted sentences of the entire book. if you allow me.

I will allow you. Okay. Okay. Thank you. By the way, you're supposed to be listening to this while you're looking at this Pale Blue Dot. Okay. Here it is. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged

by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. And it goes on and on and on. And that's just representatively beautiful of a very long passage. And it's a take on that pale blue dot. Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Bringing the universe down to Earth, this is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Not many people know who have seen these beautiful passages from Carl about the pale blue dot, that a big part of this recitation is Carl explaining what a pixel is.

This was early before that became common knowledge, right? What a pixel, how to think about it, how much resolution is there. So he goes through a whole disclaimer or a primer on how to look at a digital image and what a pixel is and that Earth barely fills a pixel. But one thing that he did not make clear is that Earth barely fills a pixel because of the resolution of the camera.

A higher resolution camera would have had many more pixels to represent Earth, but he never really went there. And you're left thinking, oh, my gosh, from space, Earth is only one pixel. So we now fast forward. How many years? We go to the—Caroline is ready to just knock one out of the park. So, Carolyn, pick us up at Saturday.

Now we're up to two pixels. Well, okay, but let me just say, I'm going to nerd out on you. Is that okay? Yes, go for it. I'm just going to say that it's not only the size of the pixel, it is the diffraction limit of the camera that counts too. So you could have a CCD with a billion pixels on a side in, you know, at the focal plane of your telescope. But if your telescope has a certain

diffraction limit, you can't see anything better than that. So it's a little bit more tricky. But anyway, fast forward where I get to be the imaging team leader on Cassini less than a year from the time the Voyager pale blue dot was taken, and I had at the top of my bucket list certain items that I wanted to do. One was I was going to make sure that we did what the Voyager people really never got a good chance to do, and that was as much as we could put out true color images because I wanted people to see what the solar system with Saturn and everything in it really looked like.

And then another was where we could use the cameras as movie cameras and just take repeated imagery so that we could see phenomena as they were happening. And we did that in spades. And then finally, it was to redo the pale blue dot. And it didn't happen. It didn't really happen. I didn't have the time.

We didn't have the, the things just weren't, you know, all set up the way they should need it. Wait, just again, to put this in time context, the Voyager was launched 1977. It was passing Neptune in 1980. So it's done with the planet. No, 1980. No, no, no, no. 1989.

Oh, no, 1990. 89. No, no, sorry. Okay. No, but the pale blue black was 1990, correct? Valentine's Day, 1990. Gotcha. So it took 13 years to get far enough out beyond the orbit of Neptune for everyone to say,

we're done with the Voyager's scientific mission. Now let's do this frivolous stuff, like take a picture of Earth. And so with the $4 million, the craft stays online, takes the picture. So now that's 1990. You are now appointed to the imaging team head for cassini a year after that that's all correct did i get my timeline yes pale blue dot happened valentine's day 1990 november 13th 1990 i get a phone call from massa headquarters telling me i'm the imaging team leader i'm i'm sure those people who didn't want to pay overtime were like damn well there was yeah well anyway so uh and my first team meeting my first team meeting was i think

early december of 1990 and that's when i told my you know i didn't tell them we wanted we're going to do the pale blue dot but that's where I set my goals for the team. But anyway, so fast forward a number of years again to 20, I don't know what it was, 2010, 11. And I'm starting to think, where can I find the time or in the plans for all the imagery we were going to do, where can I slot in another pale blue dot? do, where can I slot in another pale blue dot? And in doing that, trying to think of where we were going to put it, it occurred to me how great it would be if we just do the pale blue dot with a twist. And that twist was going to be that I thought we'll invite people the world over to participate in this. We'll tell them ahead of time, not after the image is taken,

like everybody else had done up until that point. We'll tell them ahead of time. At this certain time and date, we're going to take a picture of you here on the earth. That the window,

the picture-taking window lasts 15 minutes. We want you all to go out, straighten up, comb your hair to go out, you know, straighten up, comb your hair, go out, you know, and look up, you know, at the sky, even if you're on the other side of the earth, look up. Wait, I saw Chuck in that photo. He had like, he had spinach in his teeth. And clearly I was not wearing pants, so. Well, anyway, it wasn't so clear chuck don't worry about it okay

good so okay so i remember i remember carolyn because there were news articles about this to get everybody to participate so do you know at the end of the day how many people looked up and smiled i don't really know i think we estimated tens of thousands. And I really, to be honest with you, I had plans to make it a big event. I even had applied to the TED people, you know, the TED conference? Right.

They give out a million dollar prize for a big project. And I thought this is just going to be up their alley. And I applied to them and they didn't choose it. But the idea was to just make it a big event, a teaching moment all around the globe. And that never happened. But anyway, people did participate. We said, just go out, look up at the sky, think of all of us here on this planet, all of Earth's creatures on one planet.

on this planet, all of Earth's creatures on one planet, think of our isolation and the blackness of space, and think of how precious life is and our own lives are on this planet, and just smile at being alive on a pale blue dot. And that was kind of the directive. And we set up a website, people wrote in, and it was really moving for a lot of people. So I was very, and the picture, People wrote in, and it was really moving for a lot of people. So I was very—and the picture, of course, turned out like just—it's a killer picture. Stunning. In the shadow of Saturn. It's one of the more brilliant photos, I think, ever taken in space. I know.

And it was the first time we ever had seen the Earth and Saturn and the whole thing together just like that. And I've been told, Neil, literally people I know who are in your audiences, this has been happening for years, they write me an email, they say, do you know Neil DeGrasse Tyson is showing your image right now and he's saying great things about you. So anyway,

thank you for that. Yeah, yeah, I call you out every time I say Carolyn Borgo and I also let people know that you're active on social media so they can find you. Okay, good. Thank you. So Carolyn, when I look at these Cassini images, I'm often struck by the colors. And so what makes the different colors? The different colors basically come down to two different phenomena.

One is just basically different materials, different phenomena. One is just basically different materials, different compositions, okay? In the atmosphere of Saturn, different compounds, organic materials of one kind or another, they have different colors, right? So that's what you're seeing in the atmosphere of Saturn. The same thing in the rings. There are impurities in the rings,

and they give the rings, even though they're mostly water, largely water, there are impurities, and they can, from afar, they can look like color to your eye. Okay?

Of course, it's frozen water, just to be clear. It's ice, yes. It's ice, yes. It's not a bathtub, right? Not a bathtub. But there are times when you are seeing a phenomenon known as refraction or diffraction to different phenomena that actually they work.

If you're looking at different angles, the object at different angles, you'll see different colors. So it's just light, electromagnetic radiation interacting with atoms of different types of atoms that can produce different colors. Okay, and as far as true color goes, it's a very hard thing to do to get true color. it's a very hard thing to do to get true color. What you would see, first of all, if you were hanging out, floating above Saturn, first, you have to appreciate what you would see would be a hundred times fainter than what you would see here

because Saturn is 10 times farther away from the sun. Oh. So automatically, when we take a picture and we expose the picture, we leave the shutter open for longer. Long exposure. For longer than your eye's residence time on your retina, we're already cheating. Right. So it's always going to look somewhat different than it would to you if you were there.

But we. It wouldn't be cheating, Chuck, if you had huge eyeballs. I was going to say, if my eyes had CCD chips in them, collecting all those photons, I'd be good. If you had Elsa-sized eyeballs from Frozen. So, Carolyn, when I think of the inventory of profound photos, of course, Earthrise from Apollo 8 comes to mind. Can you reflect on that?

Well, that was the first time the globe of people first saw the Earth from afar. I mean, there had been pictures like it taken, but it didn't become as popular as the Apollo 8 moon Earthrise. And in some sense, you can attribute the environmental movement to that picture, because it was the first time we see ourselves as a globe. It's an uncorrupted, unpoliticized view of our planet. And, you know, we know, of course, that we all live on it. And it's just people have such a powerful, as you must know, when you show that picture, the day the earth smiled,

and I've been going around doing the same thing, showing it, people have a very strong response to recognizing where and what we are. Yeah. And just knowing what the earth would look like in the skies of another world. It's the you are here on the mall. That's right. And it's not only you are here,

but you are here on this just insanely small and fragile looking thing with nothing around it. I mean, just complete blackness all around. And that's- Bare assed in the universe. That's a title of a book. Is that your next book?

Is that your next book? No, no, I don't know. So Carolyn, can you foresee a photo yet to be taken that might be as impactful as those that have come before? That sounds like a no. I'd have to think about it. I'd have to. Okay. While you're thinking, let's go to questions.

Okay. Chuck, you got some questions from our Patreon members? Yes, we do. All right. Line them up. What do you have? Let's start off with Casey here. And actually... And each of these members have been told that we would be speaking to you today, Carolyn. So these are tuned. These are bespoke for your presence on this program. Okay. Okay. Absolutely. Casey says, Dr. Tyson, Lord, nice. Dr. Porco.

Casey here from Florida with a question for Carolyn. What was the most interesting thing you learned from the Cassini mission? And what upcoming mission has you most excited? I like that. All right. Oh, gee. I mean, we learned so many things. So many. Okay.

Pick your favorite child then. Okay. I'm going to give two. Can I give two? Go ahead. We'll give you two. One, it's what everybody expects me to say because really is the thing that has grabbed me ever since we found it, and that was learning what exists on Enceladus.

It's the ocean that has got just complex organic compounds on it, has hints of hydrothermal activity that presumably is taking place on the seafloor of Enceladus as an ocean underneath it. That's what I'm trying to say. And it's expressing itself into space in the form of geysers and a plume that we can fly through. Cassini flew through it to sample it. And we know a lot about it now. And it's just, it really is, despite what anybody else tells you, it is the low-hanging fruit in our solar system to go search for life.

And to be at the forefront of that, I mean, we took the pictures. We were the ones who found the 100 geysers, you know, lofting into space. And there's good reason to believe that, very good reason to believe that that ocean, that the geysers are coming out of four fractions of the south polar terrain. And there's good reason to believe that the liquid water from which those geysers are created comes all the way up to the surface. Literally, it could be like Old Faithful, except not with an intermittent kind of character.

But water that comes all the way up to the surface. And, I mean, it just doesn't get any more exciting than that. So that was… If there's fish down there, then some of the fish might have come up in the geyser. You could have freeze-dried fish on the surface of Enceladus. Why not? No, not my story. That's a good story, Carolyn.

Let me keep my story. Bad, bad, bad. It's bad. It's bad because there's very very it's not likely there's complex life down there you need more energy that is then is available there but microbes hey microbes are cool don't disrespect microbes okay so microbes float up in there on the surface i said i've always said it could be snowing microbes in those geysers. Okay. All right. You like my fish? All right, I'll give you the microbes.

Give me a microbe. I'll take a microbe any day. Okay. I still like fish, but all right. That's all right. And what upcoming space mission, planetary mission, do you most look forward to? Well, okay. So I won't be around for it, but when we go back to Enceladus,

land on the surface, and we can do the whole kit and caboodle. We can measure the geophysical activity underneath the surface seismically. We can stand there and just have the stuff fall on us. We could collect to our heart's content, and we could really do a bang-up job searching for life in Enceladus Ocean. So how do you know when you land? Apparently, you expect to be dead. Well, it's going to take so long before that happens. How do we

make sure before we go back that when we land, we don't contaminate if there are microbes there? Good question. Good question. This brings up, boy, this brings another topic. I don't know if we want to do it this time or another time. You know, NASA treats this as, for all the criticisms people have about NASA,

they treat planetary protection very seriously. So we would have to go back with an absolutely, like, pristine, clean spacecraft contaminated with no microbes from Earth, or else we could be measuring our own scum. Viruses, yeah. So we don't want to do that. But this puts before us the specter of having the people from the commercial space side of things now just crazily

flying into space with what will be hundreds of thousands of satellites of lower orbit. They're talking about missions to go to Enceladus. I've heard plans to go land on Enceladus or fly through its plume. I doubt any commercial enterprise will ever be able, would want to spend the money, you know, actually fork over the bumps to ensure the cleanliness of a spacecraft. Hmm. Yeah. Okay.

So it's got to be NASA to lead this. Otherwise, we worry about forward contamination of what it is we're trying to observe. That's what I was trying to say. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. All right. That makes sense.

NASA cares. And, you know, everybody else just wants the money. And Carolyn. You'll be right. Yeah. Carolyn, is one of the plumes from Enceladus make one of the rings of Saturn? Isn't there some ring made by a plume? It's not just, well, hold it.

There's geysers. There's hundreds. There's a hundred that we counted.'s not just, well, hold it. There's geysers. There's 100. There's 100 that we counted. My research group, actually, this is my own research. We counted about 100 individual geysers. But if you had higher resolution, there's probably more. All those geysers make a plume. So don't get confused.

There's hundreds of geysers. They all make a plume. But another thing that my research group did, we showed that those geysers, they all make a plume. But another thing that my research group did, we showed that those geysers, the biggest among them, the most pronounced, actually, most of that stuff falls down, the solid stuff falls down on the ground, back on Enceladus. But some 4% of the material ends up going into the E-ring. It forms the E-ring. Wow.

That's very cool. Yes, it was very cool. And we showed that we did modeling simulations of these tendrils that you see coming off Enceladus at long distances, tens of thousands of kilometers away. And we could show that they were created by the geysers. So it was like a slam dunk. It was really cool. And so what is it I hear recently, Carolyn, about tasking the James Webb Space Telescope to look at this very phenomenon?

Yes, the James Webb Space Telescope, which by the way, I'm sure it's blown your mind, it's blown my mind, It's blown my mind. It's blown everybody's minds. It's just fantastic the way that whole thing has been working perfectly. And it also took a look at Enceladus. Okay. We'd never seen the plume from, you know, anywhere other than Saturn. Actually, Voyager also saw the plume, but saintly.

and Saturn. Actually, Voyager also saw the plume, but faintly. And here we have James Webb now has the ability to look at this plume and monitor it. And there's a collection of scientists. They were the team that did this. And they're going to keep looking at it. It means that we can monitor it from, is it okay to say the vicinity of the Earth? Okay. Yes. That's fine. I guess what I'm saying is it means that we can continue to monitor it before that mission goes back long after I'm dead. That's what I mean. Okay. There you go.

Unless you live forever, which might still happen. All right, so Chuck, time for a couple more questions. Okay, here we go. This is Samuel Tomka, and Samuel says, Hello, Dr. Porco. Greetings from Slovakia. My name is Samuel, and I was wondering, will the day come when we can live stream video as our probes allow us to watch in real time flybys of celestial bodies? Why don't we already have such a system in place?

Yeah. So videos. Okay. So what are we? The question is, you know, you're not going to have somebody out there taking a video of a spacecraft flying by a planet. So he doesn't need those kind of videos. And we actually have sort of done things like that. I mean, you know, remember, video is lots and lots of data volume, and you have to get that stuff down to the ground.

And we have lots of instruments that want to take data to get that stuff down to the ground. And we have lots of instruments that want to take data and get their data down to the ground. So we can't take an indefinite amount of data volume, even though it would be cool to do. So videos take a lot of space, a lot of downlink, we call it. But we did take imagery. We did this.

You can look at the Cyclops.org website, and we have a little page called Theater and Video Clips or whatever. Well, we made video clips, for example, when we flew by Iapetus, and we put together some imagery. It's kind of clunky, but we were able to show what it looked like as we went by. Cyclops is the name of what? It stands for Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations. So it's C-I-C-L-O-P-S. And it was the center, it was the center where we, we, the imaging team, actually my staff members and I, set up the uplink and downlink operations for the imaging team.

Okay. And now, since that's disbanded and there's no more of that, Cyclops.org is the website. That's my website. Where all the Saturn imagery is and lots of other stuff is put. We can find it there. Excellent. Yes. Excellent.

Yes. All right. Chuck, give me more. Okay, this is Captain James Riley, and he says, Hello, Dr. Porco. I've heard that the Hubble Deep Field image was used, was a use of director's time aimed at an empty point in space. Since that worked out so well, are we doing more at aiming at empty spots, space. Since that worked out so well, are we doing more at aiming at empty spots or are there telescopes scheduled to pretty much lock up on things that we just want a better look at, like

nothing? I think there are telescopes on the ground, and Neil probably knows this better than I do, telescopes that are on spacecraft or plan to be on spacecraft that will do surveys of the entire sky. So they're not just looking at one tiny little bit. They're doing entire surveys. And this reminds me to bring up the fact that they're… Well, just to be clear, it's not a survey of known objects. It's just a survey of areas of the sky, no matter what's there.

No matter. It's a survey of the sky, the entire sky. Okay, so that's better than just looking at one little spot. And this brings up something I would love to talk about if we can, and that is that there are plans for enormous telescopes, ground-based telescopes, the giant Magellan telescope, the extra large telescope. These are just enormous telescopes to be built on the ground to be able to look at the heavens from the surface of the earth. And I am deeply concerned about all the traffic that will be in

low earth orbit that is going to all these satellites, these internet constellations that are going to impair ground-based observations, not only in the visible, because they'll be streaking across fields of view, and there's going to be many, many more of them in the future, but also in the radio region of the spectrum, it's going to harm radio observations, even search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

And you know what else it'll do? It creates signatures of moving objects in the sky when you might be trying to find an asteroid that has our name on it headed towards us. And if the noise level of imagery goes up, you could possibly lose one of these killer asteroids. There's lots of bad things that could happen. And right now, the whole thing is just, it's poorly, if at all, regulated. There's insufficient monitoring, tracking.

There aren't protocols for what happens in the event of an imminent crash. But really, I think these- I'll say it again. NASA cares. Everybody else just wants the money. Well, NASA is supporting this. I was very, very disturbed to find out that they want to encourage this.

And I think it's a bad thing. 400, let me just put this number out there. As of about nine months ago and it could very well have changed there were proposed and approved satellites a totaling totaling 430,000 and there's now and there's now no actually as of about six months ago, there was 6,000 up there. And in order to appreciate what this means, before mid-2019, which was the first launch of the Starlink, SpaceX Starlink satellite, decades of exploration by nation states had left an accumulation of 3,700 satellites in orbit around the earth. About half of them were alive, about half of them were dead. And as of about, what did I say, six months ago, I think it was, maybe nine months ago, there were 6,000 and there are proposed and maybe already approved and proposed 430,000. That's 70 times what's up there now. It's the end of the night sky.

That's another thing I want to say is the night sky, the night sky belongs to all of us. It's the only thing you can lay your eyes on that's 13.8 billion years old. I go to the night sky to check in on the meaning of my life. I mean that. Where else can you find that kind of perspective? You know, and it will be ruined. It will be ruined not only for professional astronomers,

it will be ruined for people who just love to look up and remember where they really are. Wow. Yeah. You know, my ending comment on every show is keep looking up. Yeah. And now it's like keep looking up and look at all the satellites. That's all you're going to see.

Chuck, we might have time for one more question. All right. Got one more to slip in there. Wow. That was disturbing what we just talked about. It doesn't fit in with your humor thing, so I don't know if you'll use it. Well, no.

Believe it or not, we've had Morbidja, who is a, he deals in- An orbital dynamicist specializing in cleaning up the space environment. Oh, good. He's in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at University of Texas at Austin. Absolutely. Morabat Jha.

Morabat Jha. His name, J-A-H. Check out his work. Okay, here we go. This is Mohamed Saif, and he says, Hello, Dr. Tyson. Hello, Dr. Porco. And hopefully Chuck.

Well, thank you, Mohamed. He says, my name is Saif from the land down under. And my question for Carolyn is, as a part of your association with Cassini, Voyager, and New Horizon, what is the least known but most fascinating thing you have seen or noticed? Oh, my goodness. Yeah. What's the thing we would never see or know that you know? She can't talk about that.

But, okay, the second most fascinating. Well, okay, so here's something that I think is fascinating and most people don't know about it. We found, again, this is my research group, we found in the rings of Saturn a type of wave near the outer edge of the B ring, which I had done my thesis on many, many years ago. So I was anxious to look more closely at this. And we found evidence of these free normal modes of the rings where these waves are sloshing back and forth from the place where they get self-excited. These are not waves that are excited by an orbiting satellite. They're self-excited. They slosh up again.

They travel up against the B-ring, the outer edge of the B-ring, which is held by a resonance with Mimas. It's held sharp. They reflect off the outer edge of the B-ring. They travel inwards. They reflect off their inner origin point. They go back and forth and back and forth,

and they can be amplified. And there's spiral waves. They go back and forth and back and forth, and they can be amplified. And there's spiral waves. They can be amplified, and you can see them actually in the motion of the outer edge of the B-ring. And the reason why this is so exciting is because these kind of waves are predicted to exist in protoplanetary disks around around protostellar disks, around stars, and even in spiral galaxies. In fact, they can be responsible for the spiral arms in galaxies. And you can't measure their motion in a galaxy

because the orbital, the periods, the rotation periods in a galaxy are like 200 million years. But we found the smaller version of them, the Saturn ring equivalent in Saturn's rings. So it really was so thrilling to find something that really exists on a galactic scale and we found evidence of it in Saturn's rings.

Wow. Love it. Love it. In fact, that's a scientist's great dream to discover something in their own field that affects other fields as well. Yeah. In this case, it's all astrophysics,

but it's not often that the planetary folks talk to the galactic folks. I know. That hardly ever happens. We made it. We put it out there, so it's there for people to know. Yeah.

Well, congratulations on that. Thank you. Very cool. And one last thing. I want to ask. I got this. I'm going to end with this question. What's up with that hexagon on Saturn's South Pole?

Everybody loves a hexagon. Whenever we... I don't... Hexagons don't belong in the gas. Okay. So what's... It's like a perfect hexagon made out of gas. If I'm made out of gas, I ain't giving you a hexagon.

I just got to tell you. I am made out of gas, and I'm letting you know right now, no hexagons here. So take us out with what the hell that was. Okay, so I just want to say, though, whenever we posted anything about the hexagon on our website, the hits went through the roof because people couldn't get their head around this. And people really, there were people who genuinely thought

it was crystal energy. There must be something inside Saturn creating this. It is a jet stream, just like the polar jet stream we have here on the earth. It is just a river of gas that if you took it and stretched it out, so it's circling the pole, right? We'll just take it, stretch it out. It would be a six, six waves, six conjoined waves, crests and troughs, just like that. But when you take it and you wrap it around a globe, it gives the impression that it has sides.

But that's just because you're stretching out the, what are you stretching? You're stretching out the, what are you stretching? You're stretching out the crests. The crests suddenly become stretched out. And so that's what it is. And the reason why we found it on Voyager, it's still screaming around at something like 220 miles an hour, going around Saturn, you know, 30, 40 years, whatever it is, since Voyager went and saw it at Saturn. It's because any atmospheric systems on Saturn or any of the giant planets that get started up,

they don't run down because you don't have a solid surface underneath the atmosphere of any of the giant planets. So there's no friction to run them down. Once they get started, they continue. It's the same thing with the Great Red Spot of the giant planets. So there's no friction to run them down. Once they get started, they continue. It's the same thing with the Great Red Spot. Jupiter, right. The Great Red Spot has been doing that for hundreds of years. Right.

At least hundreds of years. At least, yeah. Yeah, so. I'm just going to say that's awfully convenient there, Carolyn. That's all I can say. What's convenient? What's convenient? What's convenient? You just have a perfect little explanation for straight lines in nature.

Okay. I can tell you. Here's how to say that, Chuck. Go ahead. Chuck, here's how to say that. Say, Carolyn, if it's so obvious, why wasn't it predicted to be there before anyone found it? There are a lot of things that are obvious in hindsight that no one took the time to predict. Okay, that's the answer.

So, Carolyn, thank you for being on StarTalk once again. You're a good friend of our show. In fact, you even hosted StarTalk All-Stars back when that was a running part of our portfolio. So I want to thank you for your service. Thank you for having me. I love being here. It's fun being with you guys.

And I need affirmation. It's okay if with you guys. And I need affirmations. Okay, if we call you Madam Saturn, that's okay. Continue calling me Madam Saturn. Like you, Saturn is probably my favorite planet after the Earth. Yes, okay. Neptune is a close third. No, not for me. A close second.

I'm sorry. Neptune would be a close second. But anyway. All right. All right. Chuck, always good to have you close second. A close second. I'm sorry. Neptune would be a close second. But anyway. All right. All right. Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. This has been StarTalk, and I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson bidding you to keep looking up.