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[ ♪ ]

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A World Unveiled
Cassini at Titan

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From Voyager, Titan
was so unusual.

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All we could see from Voyager
is this hazy world.

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We couldn't see through
to the surface.

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And that's why we
had to go back

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with Cassini carrying
the Huygens probe

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to try to see what does the
surface of Titan look like.

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So the Huygens probe
parachuted through in 2005.

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And we landed on the surface.
And we saw an amazing world.

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It was incredible how
Earthlike Titan appeared.

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It had river channels.

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It had lakes.

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It had sand dunes.

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The only difference is,
it's very cold on Titan.

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And the liquid that flows
through Titan's rivers

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is methane instead of water.

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The Cassini-Huygens mission
has been one of the greatest

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voyages of discovery in
the history of science.

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We have learned and
discovered more things

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about a previously unknown
dynamic system--

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a system that's a billion miles
from us: the Saturn system--

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than we ever could
have imagined.

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One of the pinnacles of that has
been the discoveries on Titan.

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Titan has turned out to be
a very complex world.

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It has geology. It has
methane rain.

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It has lakes and seas. It has
dunes of organic molecules.

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And it has a lot more secrets
that it's still hiding from us.

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I think that really what makes
people so excited about Titan

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is this combination of
familiarity and alienness.

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We had 126 close flybys

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with a spacecraft with
a dozen instruments

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that in each of those flybys
are all taking data

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about different
aspects of Titan.

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Not only was Titan fascinating
in its own right:

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a moon the size of
the planet Mercury,

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it was also Cassini's gas tank.

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It allowed us to change
the shape and orientation

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of the orbit to explore
the poles of Saturn,

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the rings, and all
of the icy moons

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by carrying a lot less fuel

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than we would have
to have carried otherwise.

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It gave us the energy to go
all the way across the rings

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and fly between the gap between
the rings and the planet.

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Because of these flybys of Titan

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using Titan as a
gravitational slingshot.

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And so many of the other
remarkable discoveries

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that have been
made by Cassini--

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for example, mapping
the composition of

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the plume of Enceladus,
would not have been possible

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without Titan there.

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We could not have
gotten to these places

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without using Titan.

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And so I think Titan
has really been

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a particularly special
place to explore

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just because of all the
complexity in the system

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and the puzzles that
it has given us.

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[ ♪ ]

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NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory