(dramatic music)
(indistinct speaking) (audience applauding)
2017 was a busy year
for scientists of all sorts,
the professional and the enthusiast alike.
From a predictable astronomical rarity
to surprise discoveries deep underground.
It was a year that saw long-held beliefs
challenged by newly-found wonders,
breakthroughs that led to innovations,
and a glimpse 130 million years into the past.
(buzzing)
In August 2017, alarms sounded at the most sensitive
scientific devices ever constructed.
In Washington state, the Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-Wave Observatory, LIGO
detected faint disturbances from deep space.
The signal also hit LIGO's sister facility in Louisiana.
Gravitational waves had reached Earth.
Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time.
Space-time is incredibly dense,
so to cause ripples, you have to have some sort of
object that has enormous gravity
like a black hole or a neutron star.
And when these objects are rapidly accelerating,
they bend space-time and create these ripples
that then travel through the universe
to our detectors on Earth,
like the one last August.
On high alert,
the LIGO team quickly reached out to Virgo,
its European counterpart in Italy,
who confirmed that they, too,
had detected gravitational waves,
and then, as if by destiny, the stars would align once more
to pave the way to a groundbreaking discovery.
Just two seconds later,
with the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope,
we detected a short bright flash of high energy light
that we call a gamma ray burst.
This alerted the entire astronomical community
to the fact that something very exciting was happening.
Using data collected from LIGO,
Virgo, and Fermi, 70 ground and space-based telescopes
scoured the edge of galaxy NGC 4993,
some 130 million light years away from Earth,
searching for a small flash of light amidst a sea of stars.
It would take less than 12 hours
after the alarms rang at LIGO
for Earth to have visual confirmation
of a never-before-seen astronomical event.
What we saw was the result
of the merging of two neutron stars.
When they merged, they created an explosion in space-time.
Those ripples went out across the universe
as gravitational waves and were detected on Earth.
The matter involved gave off gamma rays
and other forms of light.
Neutron stars are the collapsed cores
of massive stars left behind after a supernova explosion.
No larger than a mid-sized city,
these dense stars have 10 to 60% more mass than our sun.
This pair of stars, 200 miles apart,
were locked in each other's orbit for over 11 billion years,
but as they started accelerating and moving inwards,
their orbit quickened from 30 times a second
to an astonishing and unsustainable 2,000 orbits a second.
Then, 130 million years ago,
they collided in a resounding explosion.
Peering into the past,
telescopes were able to see the remnants
of one of the universe's most impressive fireworks shows.
A bright flash of blue followed the initial explosion,
growing redder and duller as they days passed
until eventually fading to black.
The conditions around these merging neutron stars
have densities and temperatures
completely unlike anything we can do on Earth.
The violent explosion was observed
to have produced 200 Earth masses worth of gold
and 500 Earth masses of platinum,
revealing for the first time
the origins of heavy metals in our galaxy.
We think that all the gold in the universe
was formed in explosions of this kind.
After the explosion happens, the gold is spread out
into the gas and dust of the interstellar medium.
Later on, that gas and dust collapses into brand new stars
and brand new planetary systems.
And these weren't the first
gravitational waves detected by LIGO this year.
Two separate events have been measured before,
including a pair of monstrous black holes
that collided to form a single spinning hole
53 times more massive than the sun.
We received a perfect signal from this last merger.
It traveled three billion light years to get here.
In any given galaxy, one of these events
might only happen once every million years,
but we're now able to monitor
about 10 million galaxies at a time.
It's a new type of astronomy.
(exciting music)
But while we wait for gravitational waves
that can open a window on the origins of our universe,
volcanic activity off the coast of Japan is presenting
scientists with picture of Earth's early history
when the land first rose from the seas.
Violent eruptions spew a steady stream of lava and rocks,
expanding the newly emerged island of Nishinoshima
three square kilometers in just five short months this year.
These most recent blasts stopped in August
but could resume at any time.
Situated atop the junction of four tectonic plates,
the Japanese islands offer stunning insights
about the formation of a variety of landscapes.
(peaceful music)
Analysis of Nishinoshima's magma shows it to be andesitic,
similar to the composition of continental crust.
Monitoring the growth of Nishinoshima,
geologists hope to learn more about the forces
that led to the birth of the world's eight continents,
yes, not seven, eight.
In February 2017, the Geological Society of America
published a startling paper,
Zealandia: Earth's Hidden Continent.
Geologist Nick Mortimer was the lead author.
To discover Zealandia is to change
the map of the world, quite literally.
Beforehand, most people would say,
yes, we got seven continents.
They could count them off.
But now, the world map's changed
and we got an eighth one on there.
In the beginning,
there was no search for Zealandia.
Mortimer and his team discovered
the shallow submerged continent
while performing geological work
aboard a research vessel off of New Zealand's coast.
And so, what the various geological investigations
have led us to is that we do have
the components of a continent here.
When you pull a plug on the world's oceans,
you literally reveal the continent of Zealandia.
Mortimer and his team confirmed four geological markers,
the qualifying criteria for a continent,
height, a varied geology or diversity of rock types,
a thick crust, and ultimately size.
Is it big enough?
Corroborating data include rock samples,
ocean drill cores, and satellite microgravity measurements,
translated into bathymetric
or elevations maps of the sea floor.
Situated between the Pacific plate and the Australian plate,
tectonic forces squeezed Zealandia,
raising out of the water what we know today as New Zealand.
With 94% of Zealandia under water,
the islands of New Zealand and New Caledonia
are just the tip of this continental iceberg.
And measuring in at 4.9 million square kilometers,
Zealandia is six times bigger
than the so-called microcontinent of Madagascar
and more than twice as large as Greenland,
which also happens to be attached to North America.
To understand Zealandia's origins,
we must travel back in time
to the time of the supercontinent Gondwana,
comprised of what we know today as Africa,
South America, Antarctica, and Australia.
When Gondwana split apart 80 million years ago,
it was a bit like the stretching
of bread dough in a kitchen.
And then you start to pull that big lump of dough apart
and if you pull slowly,
some of those pieces will stretch and get thinner.
Just like Zealandia,
which broke off and slowly sank
because of its relatively thing continental crust.
It's not as thick as the main continents,
but it is thicker than the oceanic crust,
and geophysicists know that when you have thin crust,
it floats lower in the mantle
and so it sits lower elevation wise
and that explains in very simple terms
why Zealandia is so submerged.
Now that we've got Zealandia in the scientific arena,
we do hope to consolidate it
and to promote Zealand in New Zealand schools, first of all,
and we hope to get it in atlases, on globes.
We hope that Zealandia will become as common
and well-known as any of the other major continents.
Of course, the initial buzz about Zealandia
can only help its name recognition.
The notion that something so big and so important
could be hidden for so long,
I think captured people's imagination.
(dramatic music)
Out of sight, out of mind no more.
Of course, not everything that's undetected
is so obviously obscured.
And one remarkable discovery this year
offers clues about how some prehistoric creatures
could hide in plain sight.
In Northern Alberta, Canada,
the remnants of a 110-million-year-old dinosaur
from the late Mesozoic Era
is providing the world with an unprecedented look
at a new species, the nodosaur.
A fossil so pristine and complete
that it shows the texture, patterns, and color
of a prehistoric giant.
The nodosaur is the best specimen we have,
and it's the closest to, until we find a better one,
in terms of coming face to face with a dinosaur.
The nodosaur is next to surreal.
A petrified beast caught by Medusa's gaze.
We knew it was good, but we didn't know how good it was.
I think it's the best preserved
armored dinosaur in the world.
I'm calling this the Rosetta Stone for armored dinosaurs.
(dramatic music)
The anatomy of the new species
has already given scientists clues
to how these animals evolved,
how they radiated, and diversified through time,
and it doesn't stop there.
The skin is preserved.
It's not just the impression of the skin.
We actually have some of
the original biomolecules preserved.
One of the cool things that they tell us for this specimen
is that the animal had at least a component
of reddish brown pigment to its skin.
The coloration aspect is very exciting.
It's cool to know what color it was,
but it's actually more exciting
when that has implications for how the animal lived.
Researchers believe the nodosaur
was darker on the back
and lighter on its sides and underside,
a method of camouflage called countershading.
Now keep in mind, this was a five,
five and a half meter long, 10 and a half animal
covered in armor, but it still has camouflage,
and to us, that just illustrates
how intense the predation was back in the Cretaceous.
You had these very large meat-eating dinosaurs
and they would have also been very visual predators,
so it actually kind of just shows you have extreme
that ecosystem likely was back in the Cretaceous.
(dramatic music)
The plant-eating, slow-moving beast
only stood a chance
because of its impenetrable coat of armor.
We see three rows of osteoderms,
those are what are called cervical rings, and it's armory
that would've protected the neck of the animal,
and as we move to the side,
we see this giant periscapular spine.
It's basically a big armored spine
coming off the shoulder and it's about half a meter long.
And the spectacular specimen
still has many secrets to unveil.
The next focus of study
are the contents of the nodosaur's stomach.
In addition to having skin preserved
all over most of the surface of the animal,
we also have abundant gut contents,
so the last meal of the animal preserved inside,
and this is what that stuff looks like.
So, we're currently doing all sorts of work on this,
geochemical work, histological work, and CT scanning
trying to figure out what these spheroid structures are
and there's been many ideas
that part of the diversification of dinosaurs
is tied to the diversification of flowering plants,
and it'd be great to see
exactly which types of plants this guy was eating
and if that hypothesis makes sense.
We know what dinosaurs ate,
how they fought, and now, what they looked like,
but there are still many questions to be answered,
and Alberta might just be the place to find them.
It's estimated that there are thousands of fossils
hidden underneath the Earth.
But when a six-mile-wide asteroid
struck the Yucatan Peninsula 65 millions years ago,
dinosaurs had no where to hide.
(dramatic music)
(roaring)
And the resulting global cataclysm of earthquakes,
firestorms, and tsunamis ultimately led to their extinction.
Some animals, however, managed to survive, but how?
Since its discovery in 1978,
investigations of the asteroid's impact crater
include data from seismic images
and recently collected core samples
from deep within the site at Chicxulub.
(tense music)
The data paints a devastating picture of destruction
and led scientists to create a broad new survival theory
focusing on habitat and diet adaptability.
When dinosaurs perished and a vast new ecospace emerged,
the surviving species expanded rapidly to fill it.
This is called adaptive radiation.
A recent study shows that one out of 10 frog species
descend from the original three frog species
that survived the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event.
Frogs were able to escape extinction
for a number of reasons.
They live in an aquatic habitat that offered protection.
Their small size and unique metabolism
allow for better endurance of environmental stress.
Eventually, when vegetation returned,
they were able to diversify worldwide
and adapt to new lives in trees.
Birds, too, exhibited the same adaptive radiation
around the same time.
A newly-found 62-million-year-old
mousebird fossil in New Mexico helped paleontologists
map the diversification of land birds,
which can be traced back to nine original ancestors
which survived the event.
Warm-blooded, birds' feathers insulated them
from temperature extremes.
Their small size and ability to fly
allowed for easier escape from hostile and barren terrain.
And their diet of seeds, worms, and insects
gave them the edge after much
of the Earth's surface plant life had died.
(dramatic music)
In the end, the ability to adapt to changing conditions
proved a key characteristic for the survival
of many ancient animals,
including our smallest mammal ancestors.
Just as it may be for humans today
as we confront the challenges of climate change.
(tense music)
(birds chirping)
The city of Miami Beach already knows what it means
to wade through sea level rise.
In recent years, residents have experienced
elevated high tides at certain times of the year.
Known as king tides, these events are clear evidence
of incremental increases.
Right now, we are definitely witnessing
how sea level rise impacts these high tide flooding events
that are growing in severity,
more often, deeper, more widespread.
That's sort of a pattern that we expect will continue.
That means huge financial costs
by the year 2100.
Another predicts two and a half million Miamians
could become sea level refugees and leave the area.
It's not only Miami.
All around the world, sea levels are expected to rise.
The question is, by how much?
(tense music)
In adopting a multi-pronged approach,
Miami Beach has committed $400 to 500 million
to combat sea level rise,
building water pumps and raising their defenses.
With the continued issue
of climate change and sea level rise,
we're seeing a increase of water level every year.
We had to make changes to adapt to this future condition.
What you're seein' here,
we put a boardwalk initially to give some height,
but we found that that wasn't protecting the city.
What we have done here
is we've increased the levels of our new sea wall.
The new wall you see in the background here
is our new standard.
This is good for approximately another 50 years.
We're gonna see water levels
challenging even that new sea wall.
Raising its elevation,
Miami Beach seeks to stay dry
and take control of its future.
The city's philosophy, our culture is rising above.
We believe we can meet the challenge
and the challenge is not only in rising above,
meaning elevation, it's rising to and withstanding
the challenges that come
with sea level rise due to climate change.
As the city engineer,
I have complete faith that we can handle it,
we can mitigate, we can survive.
(somber music)
Of course, the Earth's oceans have risen
and fallen many times during the planet's history,
and new archeological evidence suggests
these shifting shorelines may conceal clues
about the earliest Americans.
Until just recently, archeologists generally agreed
that the earliest people to populate North America
were the Clovis people,
dating back to some 12 to 13,000 years ago,
but a group of scientists in San Diego, California
have a different theory.
We have the bones, the fossils,
the distribution, the rocks, the date, we have evidence
for humans in North America 130,000 years ago.
We realize that that is a startling claim.
But the scientific community
is struggling with the idea
that humans arrived in North America 130,00 years ago.
The study of early humans in the New World
has been very political and very controversial
for over 125 years.
It's an old mystery yet to be solved,
deciding who got to North America first and when.
Welcome, and thank you for joining us this morning
at the San Diego National History Museum
as we share some exciting news
about a discovery made right here in San Diego.
Well, back in 1992, Caltrans was doing improvements
to State Route 54,
which involved adding a couple new travel lanes
and Richard Cerutti, who was a field paleontologist
here at the museum, was monitoring the excavations
on the very north side of the freeway alignment
and saw this little puff of,
let's say, tusk material being scraped up by an excavator
and said, stop, let me go look at this.
The bones that Richard Cerutti found
belonged to an ancient mastodon.
That's one tooth.
And it's characteristic of American mastodon.
(dramatic music)
Were these giants sharing North America
with early man 130,000 years ago?
The answer may life in the position of the bones
and tools found at the site.
There are anomalous fragments of rock,
anomalous fragments of tooth enamel
scattered throughout the site that just don't make sense.
Could these stones
amongst ancient bone remnants
have been an early form of primitive tools?
And we felt that it was important
to produce a map where we carefully plotted
or precisely plotted the position
of all the bones and the stones
or whatever else is in there,
so that we can understand what the general pattern is.
It's thought that the tools,
found with the mastodon bones,
were used for butchering the animal.
So, this is one of the cobbles
that we hypothesized was used as a hammer stone.
130,000 years ago where there was a carcass of a mastodon,
these people were trying to recover raw materials from it.
They had a problem, how do we break these bones?
They look over into the active river channel,
find some cobbles of the appropriate size and weight,
bring 'em back to the site,
and if you look closely,
there's some striations coming off of that
that are indications of where this flake has come off.
The cuts in this rock
led the San Diego team to conclude
that these were actually tools used by humans,
an idea that Demere says might not be so far fetched.
Dr. Steven Holen is co-director of the Center
for American Paleolithic Research in South Dakota.
He was part of the team that evaluated the findings
from the San Diego excavation site.
So, what have we got in here, Steve?
Looks like vertebra.
Yeah, it does.
I said, I can't get my mind around this.
This site has to be really, really old,
but yet, here's evidence of humans.
I said, it goes against everything I thought I knew
and everything I have ever been taught.
Holen evaluated the mastodon bones
and the stone tools recovered from the excavation site.
We would take the drawers out of the cabinets in here
and bring them in on this table and look through them,
paleontologists and archeologists together.
Richard Cerutti came in, so there were four of us,
my wife Kathleen, Tom, and I, and we would look through
and we would look for these very diagnostic pieces,
and one of the things that we got all excited about first
were these cone flakes that form in a circle
around the point of impact from the hammer stone
and based on the experiment that we'd done in Africa
breaking an elephant femur with a big hammer,
we saw the same kinds of fracture patterns
that we did experimentally.
Holen specializes in evaluating
broken bones at archeological sites,
looking for human causes.
As this video shows from a test he conducted in Africa
two years prior to working on the San Diego project.
Oh my god! -: Yeah, Steve!
(clapping)
As we puzzled over this,
we kept coming back to this one explanation
that explains all the data was that humans did this.
The detective work
by the San Diego Natural History Museum team
was kept by the age dating that Richard Cerutti had done
to prove the age of the mastodon bones he discovered.
This is one of the specimens that he used in his analysis.
He cored it and he also sliced it,
and after analyzing over 100 micro-samples
from this specimen
and two other specimens of bone from the site
yielded an age of 130,000 plus or minus 9,000.
So after the article came out,
there has been critic come out
to say that the dating is incorrect.
In fact, other specialists in uranium series dating
have come out and said the dates look perfectly good,
so we're very comfortable with the dates.
(dramatic music)
While humans' arrival in the Americas
may have occurred earlier than previously thought,
new dating of another paleontological find
found in a South African cave
could soon upend long-held theories
about the evolutionary tree of primates and early humans.
(dramatic music)
When we actually got into the chamber
and could start removing it,
we realized that not only was there
one individual line there on the surface,
but the floor was literally comprised of Homo naledi
There are thousands and thousands and thousands
of remains down in those chambers,
and all you have to do is sweep the surface off
and there they are.
So, the first time I sort of slid through that hallway
into the open area where the chamber is
and sort of started looking around, you know,
you're only wearing a headlamp, so you just see flashes.
Every flash of my headlamp showed bone,
so I think right at that point
I realized that we had a lot more
than the original photographs actually had portrayed,
so that was pretty exciting.
Homo naledi isn't really similar to any
known hominid species in its entirety of its package.
You've got little bits and pieces
of almost everything we've ever found.
Parts of the skull, if you just look at it quickly,
look a little bit like Homo erectus.
Got a very small brain, other parts of the skull
look very modern, like Homo sapiens.
It gets stranger and stranger as you move down the body.
You get the eight plied shoulders.
You get these more and more human-like arms,
which end with hand that's human proportioned.
I was actually at the London Natural History Museum
and Homo naledi was on the wall
and it was estimated age between 1.2 and 1.8 million years,
but then when we actually did
the scientific dating of those teeth,
this is when things got very interesting
because then we got an age of 200 to 300,000 years old.
When we got a date much younger than that,
a quarter of a million years, give or take,
we realized that we were dealing with a primitive creature,
almost like a time traveler,
that had come down from deep times
to a point where it is very possible
that Homo naledi was in direct contact
with the emergence of modern humans.
We never thought that was possible in Africa.
Until this moment, we thought that there was effectively,
during that entire time period of the Middle Pleistocene,
late Middle Pleistocene, one form,
a big-brained form of Homo sapiens.
Now, there are two,
and that adds incredible complexity to our record.
The world of Homo naledi
and other early humans was different than it is today,
a veritable Garden of Eden teeming with life,
pure and free from pollution.
(gentle music)
Few places like this still exist,
and most of them, quite remote.
But look just a few feet under water
and you can find one of the most productive
and overlooked ecosystems on Earth.
Scientists recently learned that seagrass meadows
help scrub the surrounding water clean of bacteria
from raw sewage and other pathogens.
A recent study of polluted waters in Indonesia
showed levels of harmful bacteria
to be 50% less in spots with robust seagrass beds,
leading to healthier fish and coral in the surrounding area.
You see, seagrasses oxygenate the water,
trap sediment that might otherwise float freely,
and host tiny microbes that kill many harmful bacteria.
(tense music)
Eliminating toxins improves the health of any system
and the workings of a human body is no different.
In athletics though, they say no pain, no gain.
A nod to the physical effort required to increase endurance
and enjoy the health benefits of exercise.
But new pharmaceutical research also aims
to make those benefits more easily accessible.
The potential benefit of a drug that can tune you up
in the way in which you normally get tuned up by exercise
could have really dramatic effects.
Playfully known as the exercise pill,
the experimental drug shifts metabolism
by triggering genetic instructions for the body
to burn fat instead of sugar during exercise,
something that doesn't normally happen
until after extensive training and conditioning.
Recent tests increase the endurance
of otherwise sedentary mice, which also proved
to be resistant to weight gain while on the drug.
We have two groups of mice and one group on the drug,
the other group has a control
without the treatment of the drug.
So, we were quite surprised to see the astonishing results.
The mice treated with the drug,
they can run almost 100 minutes longer
than the one that are not treated.
The increase was around 70%.
Researchers ultimately hope
that their product can improve the health
of the disabled, elderly, and obese.
There are many reasons why people
can't either walk or run or exercise and the idea is
if you could bring a small molecule into the picture
that can confer the benefits of fitness without training,
you could really help a lot of people.
From energizing our bodies
to powering societies.
So, we are just waiting for the next experiment.
It's going to happen in 10 seconds.
There you go.
You see the flickering of the plasma?
We are creating fusion here.
This is our little sun.
It's extremely hot.
Each day, every 20 minutes,
researchers build the sun
at the Culham Fusion Center in Oxfordshire, Britain,
generating temperatures greater than 200 million degrees.
These nuclear fusion trials would be impossible without JET,
the Joint European Torus,
a donut-shaped plasma containment vessel.
At this point, we're the most important
experiment in the world.
Thanks to JET,
where energy is created by combining hydrogen atoms.
Right, there's heavy hydrogen, which we call deuterium
and there's super heavy hydrogen, which we call tritium,
and when they're running around
at these temperatures like 200 million degrees
they bang into each other with immense speed,
and when they do it and they get close enough,
what we call the strong force,
which binds the nucleus of atoms together,
grips them, pulls them together, and they fuse
and they make helium and they spit out a neutron.
Fusion really is the perfect way to make energy.
And yet, despite fusion's
transformative potential to provide safe
and sustainable energy to the world,
the program faces an uncertain future.
While the British government committed
to pay for its share of the experiments up to the year 2020,
Brexit, its planned departure from the European Union,
may also lead to the U.K.'s withdrawal
from scientific agencies like Euratom,
the European Atomic Energy Community.
Some say this could jeopardize JET logistics and operations
and perhaps, also the larger, next generation
fusion experiment currently being built in Southern France.
If fusion represents harnessing
the physical power of the sun,
a moment of darkness reflected its emotional power.
An awe-induced euphoria experienced by millions
as the first total solar eclipse over North America
in three decades made its way across the United States.
(suspenseful music)
(applauding and cheering)
It's the most unnatural
natural phenomenon I ever saw.
(dramatic music)
This is solar eclipse
and just what people witnessed on August 21st
along a 70-mile wide path.
First, along the Oregon coast
at 10:15 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time
and last in South Carolina 94 minutes later.
(cheering)
Oh yeah, look at that.
The uncommon coupling
was the most viewed and photographed eclipse ever recorded.
(crowd chattering)
And yet, even as the sun reemerged from the moon's shadow,
some Earthly domains remained, as always,
far removed from its rays.
(dramatic music)
Like the cave chambers 300 meters below Mexico's Naica Mine,
enormous, razor-sharp crystals dwarf human explorers.
While today, the cave is totally submerged,
previous expeditions collected bizarre lifeforms
from these crystal giants.
They call this place hell on Earth.
Temperatures climb to 135 degrees Fahrenheit
with over 80% humidity.
Even with life-saving bodysuits,
no visit can safely last longer than a half hour.
Yet deep within this extreme environment,
lifeforms, which exist no where else,
known as extremophiles.
NASA astrobiologist Penny Boston and her team
found 40 strains of mineral-eating organisms
trapped within the crystals here.
They collected sample microbes, some dormant but alive,
estimated to be between 10 and 50,000 years old,
including genetically unique
and previously undiscovered lifeforms.
Any extremophile system that we're studying
actually allows us to push the envelope of life further,
and we add it to this atlas of possibilities
that we can apply to different planetary settings.
(dramatic music)
By expanding the definitions
of life on Earth and where to find it,
Boston's findings could impact
the search for life beyond our planet.
On places like the protoplanet Ceres,
the largest object located
within the solar system's asteroid belt
and one of the scientific targets
of NASA's Dawn space probe.
And in February of 2017,
startling and unexpected news began coming in.
My colleague found a spectral signature in her data
that is consistent with
or the same signature of aliphatic hydrocarbons.
So, here we're finding maybe
the building blocks of biological material.
Seen here in red, the organic materials
were thought to have originated in the dwarf planet itself.
Dawn's study of Ceres also revealed evidence
of water and volcanic activity,
further raising the scientific profile of Ceres,
no longer considered a barren rock.
However, Dawn isn't the only NASA spacecraft
uncovering new surprises about our solar system.
(dramatic music)
Seven months after arriving in Jupiter's planetary system,
the Juno Explorer became
fully operational in February of 2017,
astonishing researchers with a steady stream
of images and scientific data it's sending back to Earth.
(dramatic music)
Jupiter is by far the largest planet in our solar system,
leaving Juno with a whole lot of ground to cover,
and although it is the second brightest planet
in our night sky, its formation and composition
have left us in the dark.
Previous NASA missions have given us some understanding
of its moons, small dust rings, and atmosphere,
but we've not been able to see past
the Van Gogh-like swirls of dense red, brown,
yellow, and white clouds that paint the planet,
at least, not until now.
Each individual image is awe inspiring,
especially those captured when Juno
came within 5,000 miles of Jupiter's Great Red Spot,
the planet's most famous storm.
Pouring over data from Juno's microwave radiometer,
scientists home to learn more about what powers the tempest
and how it differs from other Jovian storms.
This critical instrument measures
six distinct ranges of thermal radiation
as it peers more than 300 miles beneath Jupiter's clouds
to create a three dimensional model
of Jupiter's atmospheric environment.
For the first time, we're looking inside of Jupiter
into the interior and what we're seeing is
that it doesn't work at all like we had predicted.
Almost every model that has interior motion,
how the magnetic field, the gravity field,
how the deep atmosphere works, it's all different.
Current modeling estimates
that the cloud cover is roughly 30 miles thick.
Below it, there lies a 13,000-mile layer
of swirling hydrogen and helium that changes states
from gas to liquid as it nears the center,
leading to 24,000-mile deep sea of metallic hydrogen.
If we can probe it and work out
the abundance of elements in it, hydrogen, helium,
the higher elements as well,
and work out roughly what that mix is,
it'll tell us something about,
not only how Jupiter was formed,
but how the solar system got formed.
If there is a bunch of rocky material
in the center of Jupiter,
it means that in the early solar system,
before Jupiter formed, that rocky substances
were probably coming together
and Jupiter got built around those.
It could be that Jupiter was built without any of those
and that it just collapsed sorta like the sun
and there is no rocky material
or core of heavy elements in the center.
Strangely though, gravity data collected so far
points to a new possibility,
a somewhat larger that previously thought
and perhaps partially dissolved core,
leaving Jupiter experts with more questions than answers.
We're puttin' pieces of the puzzle together
and it's exciting but we don't have the whole picture yet.
Juno's primary mission is scheduled
to continue until February 2018.
But this past year, NASA saw another
of its extraordinary Explorers come to the end.
And we are in the atmosphere.
As the Cassini space probe plummeted
into Saturn's atmosphere in a fiery death spiral.
Roughly one minute till loss of signal.
The culmination of the craft's
revolutionary scientific quest.
We call loss of signal at 11:55:46.
(clapping)
The signal from the spacecraft is gone.
Congratulations to you all.
This has been an incredible spacecraft
and you're all an incredible team.
(clapping)
She has rewritten the textbooks about Saturn,
the rings, the moons, Titan.
So many things have changed because of Cassini.
From its launch 20 years ago
to its bold Grand Finale, Cassini-Huygens mission
has unveiled some amazing discoveries.
Saturn is ablaze with storms of unimaginable force.
The place crackled with giant lightning strikes.
(tense music)
The rings are even more dazzling than imagined,
stretching across hundreds of thousands of miles.
They're made of particles of pure water ice,
some microscopic, some the size of mountains.
They break apart and they reform
so there's this beautiful cosmic dance
going on inside the rings.
(dramatic music)
Cassini also carried
a little lander called Huygens,
which became the first probe
to land on a moon other than our own.
Its target, Titan because of its atmosphere.
And as those first pictures came back,
we just saw more and more haze and fog
and haze and haze until finally,
the probe broke through that haze
and we got to see the surface of Titan for the first time.
Huygens landed on the surface
of what looks like a mud flat.
The surface temperature was minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit
and these pebbles were made methane ice.
The nearby lake, a lake of methane.
Then Cassini went into orbit around Titan
and revealed with its radar system
that there indeed are lakes of liquid natural gas
and other molecules on the surface of Titan.
They evaporate just like here on Earth,
create clouds of methane, which rain back on the surface
creating rivers of liquid natural gas and lakes.
Could there, perhaps, be some very interesting life
in the lakes on Titan?
But there were dry formations here too,
including dunes that stretch for miles and miles
reaching 100 meters high and 3,000 meter mountains,
suggesting tectonic forces at work here,
similar to those on Earth.
(tense music)
Next, Cassini headed for a close look
at Saturn's tiny moon called Enceladus.
Here on the moon's south pole,
strange blue cracks dubbed tiger stripes
75 miles long and hundreds of feet deep
resemble fault lines here on Earth.
Cassini's thermal sensors picked up heat
coming out of the ice ball,
200 degrees warmer than the rest of the planet.
Cassini then captured giant jets of water
spewing hundreds of miles into space from the tiger stripes,
shooting out at 1,200 miles per hour,
vaporizing and then freezing.
Back on Earth, Cassini stunned controllers,
quickly reprogrammed the probe
to fly right through the jets collecting particles,
and what they found was even more stunning,
organic molecules, the basic building blocks of life.
Enceladus is really special.
It's giving us free samples.
Because the geysers are erupting
and they could guide the spacecraft very close
and look to see if there's water there, and there is water,
here on Earth, wherever there's liquid water,
whether it's deep in the ocean and very hot
or in rocky places or in ice, there's microbial life.
So, it certainly suggests microbial life
could have evolved on Enceladus
because it has all the properties
that the Earth had when life began here.
(dramatic music)
NASA controllers plotted the probe's
deadly descent into Saturn's atmosphere.
Productive until the end,
Cassini relayed detailed information
about the planet's environment
and then she burned like a meteor and vaporized.
Scientists will build on Cassini's contributions
as the search for extraterrestrial life
continues within our solar system and beyond,
perhaps around the star system 39 light years away
known as TRAPPIST-1, the first place found,
NASA announced, to have multiple planets.
Three here circling a single star inside the habitable zone
where liquid water can exist.
Well, with this discovery,
we've made a giant accelerated leap forward
in the search for habitable worlds
and life on other worlds, potentially speaking.
The TRAPPIST-one system has really captured our imagination
because with this amazing system,
we know that there must be many more
potentially life-bearing worlds out there
just waiting to be found.
Earth-like in size and temperature,
these three far away words suggest endless possibilities.
(dramatic music)
The discovery gives us a hint
that finding a second Earth
is not just a matter of if but when.
These questions about are we alone are being answered
as we speak in this decade and the next decades,
so I'm really excited about this.
It's been an astonishing year for sure,
and as our universe reveals more of its secrets,
far out in space and closer to home,
our foundation of knowledge will continue to grow
promising ever more to come.
(dramatic music)
(tense music)