The Explorers

Executive: "We must confess that your proposal seems less like science and more like science fiction."

Ellie Arroway: "Science fiction. Well you're right, it's crazy. In fact, it's even worse than that, it's nuts."

[angrily slams down her briefcase and marches up to the desk]

"You wanna hear something really nutty? I heard of a couple guys who wanna build something called an "airplane", you know you get people to go in, and fly around like birds, it's ridiculous, right? And what about breaking the sound barrier, or rockets to the moon, or atomic energy, or a mission to Mars? Science fiction, right? Look, all I'm asking, is for you to just have the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to just sit back for one minute and look at the big picture. To take a chance on something that just might end up being the most profoundly impactful moment for humanity, for the history... of history."

- From the movie Contact, 1997


I am still in awe that we humans can sometimes, when the conditions are right, build up the courage to do something crazy and difficult, just to grasp at the remotest chance to learn something new and profound about the universe. These brave people are explorers. They live on the cutting edge of cutting edge. They are very smart, probably the smartest people there are. Innovative, tireless. And passionately curious in a way only children usually are. And they live for one purpose: to ask the "next" question.

"Why is the sky blue?" Is not at all a dumb question. For most of human history, we did not know the answer to that question. It is only because of the tenacious curiosity of a small part of humanity that we do know it now.*

The great physicist Richard Feynman used to say that we all ask questions like that when we are young, but because adults won't or can't answer them, most of us eventually stop. The very few who stubbornly persist in asking these questions, he said, grow up to be either physicists or artists.

Imagine sending a very expensive tiny metal can packed full of instruments on a 1.2 billion kilometer one-way journey to Saturn for the sole purpose of getting one single photograph or reading of something new. The odds were always small. The task, almost impossible. Not gonna happen.

But that is exactly what the Cassini-Huygens Spacecraft has done.

Launched in 1997, Cassini, full of some of the most elegant instruments mankind has yet devised, started its long and lonely journey towards the jewel of the solar system, Saturn. On July 1st, 2004, Cassini inserted itself perfectly into orbit around Saturn and began doing what it was made to do: teach us more about this magnificent "gas giant" and the many moons that surround it.

On Christmas Day, 2004, as planned, the Huygens probe component of Cassini separated itself and established orbit around mighty Titan, the largest moon in our solar system. Cassini-Huygens was designed to find evidence of liquid on Titan. Scientists have long suspected that Titan is graced with thousands of liquid methane lakes, cold and vast. But a thick and pervasive haze covering the moon obscured the view almost all of the time.

Circumstantial evidence was mounting. Spectrographic data from the Southern Hemisphere showed telltale signs of liquid methane. But there was as yet no "smoking gun", no definitive evidence. Then, after five vigilant years in the Saturn system, the infrared mapping camera on Cassini struck gold and got a brief glimpse through Titan's haze. It captured this photograph. The digital data was sent back to Earth via radio waves, bounced around between satellites and microwave relay stations, and then came home to us.

What you're looking at here is the first picture ever taken of a lake outside of Earth. The shine is light reflecting off the lake's surface.

This is a huge discovery. It is an answer to a question we have asked. And it will lead to other questions, and other answers. And we will know our universe better.

Once again, as the explorers have shown us many times in the past, intelligence, patience, and sheer force of will, along with a little luck, can move the human race forward.



* Short answer:

"­The­re is a physical phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering that causes light to scatter when it p­asses through particles that have a diameter one-tenth that of the wavelength (color) of the light. Sunlight is made up of all different colors of light, but because of the elements in the atmosphere (mostly Nitrogen) the color blue is scattered much more efficiently than the other colors.

When you look at the sky on a clear day, you can see the sun as a bright disk. The blueness you see everywhere else is all of the atoms in the atmosphere scattering blue light toward you. Because red light, yellow light, green light and the other colors aren't scattered nearly as well, you see the sk­y­ as blue."