 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community Matters here. It's one o'clock on a Monday afternoon, so you must be watching Think Tech Hawaii research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and I guess today is Marissa Cameron, who is a graduate student in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at UH Manoa, soon to be Dr. Marissa, I think, but this is really good. And our show today is focused on the Cassini space mission. We're broadcasting in late September, so just last week, NASA's Cassini spacecraft dove into the clouds of Saturn, so Marissa's kindly agreed to come in and talk to us about Cassini. I realize that you're primarily focusing your studies on the moons of Jupiter, but if nothing else, you have the Cassini t-shirt. Yes. You've taught a class on Cassini, so welcome, Marissa. Thank you. Thank you for having us with us today. And Cassini's space mission as a whole, really exciting. Amazing amount of... And so, can you give me some first reactions? What did you think of the space? Well, I thought it was amazing just the length of time that it was out there collecting data for us and taking all of these amazing pictures was amazing. And also, to see it in its final days and kind of what it was still capable of doing after all of those years, still willing to give everything it's got to the last moment. Right. And then, of course, for the viewers, the Cassini spacecraft evidently was in orbit around Saturn, which, of course, is way out in the solar system beyond the orbit of Mars and Jupiter, right? Yes. So, to give you an idea, it launched from Florida in 1997, and it didn't arrive to the Saturn system until 2004. So, it had quite a journey to get there. And once it was there, it actually collected data up until, like you said, last week. So, it was there about 13 years. Last week, your t-shirt says September 15th, 2017, huh? Really, really good. Yes. And the University of Hawaii has had a connection with the Cassini spacecraft even before you became a graduate student. Yes, yes. We hosted one of the Cassini project scientists, Dennis Mattson, back in the 80s. That's great. Very good. And Cassini went to Saturn. So, let's start off and look at the first image, because Saturn is such a wonderful place to explore. Here we see an image. What is it we're looking at here? So, this is a really great shot of Saturn. I think people are fascinated with Saturn primarily because of the rings. So, this is an excellent shot of the rings, too, around Saturn. So, like we said, Cassini arrived there at Saturn in 2004, and it orbited Saturn almost 300 times. So, this particular picture is taken in 2016. And in its time there, it actually got to see the illumination angle. That's the light on the planet change because Saturn was changing seasons. So, just like Earth, Saturn has seasons. And we see off on the left-hand side on the very bright rings, there's this chunk taken out. A shadow. That's the shadow. Yes. So, right now we're looking at the Northern Hemisphere is quite illuminated because it's in the summer. So, the summer solstice actually happened in May earlier this year. So, Cassini had a great view of an illuminated Northern Hemisphere. So, we got to see views we hadn't seen any time prior. It's a wonderful image. How big is Saturn compared to the Earth? It's, oh boy, the volume. I can't remember. It's several hundred Earths that could fit inside of it, if you talk about volumes. And from side to side on the rings is... It's massive. It's about half the distance between Earth and the Moon is what I remember. So, it's a really big... It's hard to imagine how... Just how big it is. Yes. Looks spectacular in a telescope, but Cassini spacecraft was up close and personal. Yes, it was. Yes. So, actually the rings that we see, when we look at Saturn in the sky, we're not able to see the rings with our naked eye. We have to look through them to see them through a telescope. So, it wasn't until the 1600s when Galileo turned a telescope to Saturn that he saw the rings. And so, if you looked at the picture that we had just shown... If you go back to the first picture. Yes. So, we see this kind of wide, lighter color ring towards the inch near the planet and then a darker narrow ring. And there's this division that separates the rings, and that's actually known as the Cassini division. So, Giovanni Cassini was a French-Italian astronomer, mathematician, engineer that lived in the 1600s, early 1700s, and he spent a lot of time looking at Saturn. Kind of contemporary to him was Christian Huygens, who's a Dutch astronomer, also spent some time looking at Saturn. In fact, he was the first one to find one of Saturn's moons. He discovered Titan in the mid-1600s. Giovanni Cassini discovered four more moons after that, and one of the times he was looking through the telescope in his Paris Observatory, he saw that black division between the rings, and hence it's called the Cassini division. So, both Cassini and Huygens are very crucial people to contribute. And I suspect that the Cassini division provided the name for the spacecraft. And indeed, you mentioned that Huygens had also said, and we'll see in the next slide, in fact, that the Cassini spacecraft also had the Huygens probe. So, they were very influential members in what we know about Saturn's history and things like that. In fact, it wasn't for another hundred years until another moon was discovered, and it took another hundred years after that for just two more moons to be discovered. So, these guys really did a lot of their initial legwork on Saturn. Right. And as we'll see later on this afternoon, we'll recognize that some of the moons of Saturn are quite small. So, because it's so far away from the Earth and the very small moons, they're obviously very hard. We're talking about the Cassini spacecraft. I think you've got a cartoon from the Jet Propulsion Line. Here we've got a spacecraft, which is roughly healthy, I guess. So, the Cassini spacecraft is about 22 feet tall. So, that's actually quite large for spacecraft that's going to be traveling planetary. So, things like the direct TV satellite, I actually got to see this being built, those are over 100 feet tall, but those are not going very far. So, Cassini being 22 feet is actually quite an amazing feat. And yeah, here we see it kind of deploying this Huygens probe that we mentioned off the left. And the Huygens probe is the little object on the left hand side, yes. And it's about nine feet wide and it weighed about 700 pounds. It had its own set of instruments on it. So, yeah, when we're looking at the Cassini spacecraft here, we see this antenna. That's the high gain antenna. We see some equipment modules in the middle and at the end we have a propulsion module and there's instruments attached all over the outside of Cassini. There's 12 instruments on board and I think probably one of the most obvious ones is this long boom that's extending out the side. So, that is where the magnetometers are attached to. And the magnetometer does what? So, a magnetometer is in a device that records the strength and direction of magnetic fields. So, you can kind of think of it like a compass that we use here on Earth that will point to North. And just like here on Earth, if you get too close to something magnetic, it's going to pull the needle away. It's the same thing for the spacecraft. That's why it needs to be on this boom to get it as far away from the spacecraft as possible. So, that boom was actually over 30 feet long. So, it was folded up initially during launch and then unfurled later. So, it was just one of the instruments. And on the national news, they last week were mentioning the magnetometer. How many they don't know the duration of the day on Saturn? We still don't. It's still, even in all the time we're there, we still haven't quite pinned it down. So, it's quite remarkable. Yes, but the magnetometer did collect a lot of data as well as some of the other instruments. And today we'll probably just see images from cameras. Yes, so the instruments kind of fall under main packages. There's an optical remote sensing, so optical you can think of like sight, only in this case Cassini had far better sight than we do. So, it can see in the visible range and take pictures with cameras like we're familiar with, but it can also see in infrared and it could see in the UV. So, it got to collect a lot of data. UV is ultraviolet. Ultraviolet. Right. So, the magnetometer falls under another group called the fields, waves and particles. So, magnetic fields is measuring those particles like cosmic dust, something some people are very interested in. Things like microwaves, things like of that nature all were put on there to study specific things about the Saturn system. Right. So, there must be a lot of conflict between some of the scientists. Yes. Who want to look in one direction with one instrument? Yes. Yes, definitely. Oh, and there's also the radar on there. The radar proved to be very important. So, radar is actually an acronym, radio detecting and ranging, and it proved crucial for looking at Titan that we'll see a little bit later because of the atmosphere on Titan. We can't really see it just by taking a picture with a camera, but the radar helped us get a better idea. Great. And you mentioned that there was many different orbits. So, let's move on to the next slide and I think what we'll see here is that the number of opportunities because Cassini spacecraft was in orbit around Saturn. Yes. As are the moons of Saturn. Yes. So, what we see is a noodle diagram here. It's affectionately called the ball of yarn. And I like this image because it shows that traveling to planets and their moons is not as simple as just getting in the car and driving directly there. It just doesn't work that way for these things. So, you have to take advantage of something called orbital mechanics and this is what ends up happening. So, you can see there's a couple different colors. The green is for the prime mission. So, that was the first part of the mission. It ran from 2004 to 2008. Kind of hard to see, but in the middle there's some yellow trajectories. That was something known as the Equinox mission that ran for two years until 2010. And finally that very elaborate purple, that's the solstice portion. Let me just ask. Yeah. The scale of this. Obviously Saturn's right in the middle. Saturn's in the middle and so, yeah, it's going out far beyond. Far beyond, way beyond Earth's moon orbit, way from the Earth. Yes. And what was interesting about the Saturn system is Titan, the one of the moons is large enough that they could use Titan to help boost Cassini's using something called a gravity assist to help it kind of change the trajectories. Why they're not all in a single plane. And those purple ones, they get very elaborate patterns there because that was when it was doing this grand finale. So, it's starting to do these more elaborate and daring maneuvers towards the end there. Let's take a look. I think you've got some stunning images coming up next. We'll start off, I guess this is Saturn, right? Yes, the Saturn North Pole, top of the world here. So, this is a turbulent cloud pattern that's been seen on Saturn's North Pole. They thought for a while there it was only on the South Pole, but discovered there's one on the North Pole as well. This is quite large. And there's no solid surface. Yes, this is all, yeah. This is all just gas. So, this is a significant image, not only in how it looks, but this was taken on April 26th of this year and it marked the beginning of the grand finale phase. So, this is something that Cassini took as it was approaching Saturn and was going to begin its dive in between the planet and the rings for the first time. And I think the next one we'll sort of back up just a little bit more the rings. The rings, yes. They look magnificent in that first image we saw, but this for you here, all of these near vertical stripes. Yep. So, this is the highest resolution color image that we have to date of the ring system. So, this is actually a portion of the rings that's in something known as the B ring. So, on that first image that was the wide light band. So, this is somewhere in the central portion of that. And so, we're looking at particles ranging in size from small, like sand size, to very large, as big as houses of icy material, some rocky material, all kind of mixed together. Now, this tan color that we're seeing, we wouldn't necessarily see this if we looked through a telescope, but Cassini's optical remote sensing allows us to see it in this kind. And I'm sure some of the viewers are wondering why are there so many small rings we saw in that original image? They look as if they were like five or six. Yes, now we see there's many more. What causes the gaps? Well, some of the gaps are caused by little moons in there, but actually the formation of the rings in general is something that's kind of still debated to this day, the age of it, how they really formed and things like that. Do we know how thick they are? They're about 15 meters. Yes, they're pretty thin. Less than 50 feet. So, if you were to look at them from directly side on, they would almost be only a stick about as a piece of paper compared to Saturn. They're very thin. Remarkable, yeah. And the colors here, although it's computer enhanced, tell us what. So, most people think it's different composition, but exactly what? It's still hard to know. We're just testing it. And they look within each ring to be of uniform color. Yes, they do seem to have something in common, the rings, each rings itself. So, does that mean that the rings have been sort of homogenized over geologic time? Perhaps, perhaps. Yes, this is one of the ones that people are still kind of talking about. Cassini hasn't given us all of the answers. No, it's given us enough curiosity to ask more questions from. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's fascinating to look at each one of these images because everyone, you want to ask even more questions and collect more data. Well, I know you've got a few more images to show us, but we're about ready to take a break now. So, let me just remind the viewers, you are watching Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manara. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Marc, and today's guest is Marissa Cameron, and we're talking about the Cassini mission to Saturn. And we'll be back in about a minute. See you then. Bye. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Aloha. I'm Marcia Joyner, inviting you to navigate the journey. Spend the time with us as we look through and discover all of the ins and outs of this journey through life. We're on Wednesdays at 11 a.m., and I would love to have you with us. Come navigate the journey. Aloha. Guys, don't forget to check me out right here at the Prince of Investing. I'm your host, Prince Dykes, each and every Tuesdays at 11 a.m. Hawaii time. I'm going to be right here. Stop by here from some of the best investment minds across the globe, and real estate, finances, stocks, hedge funds, managers, all that great stuff. Thank you. And welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii Research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark, and today's guest is Marissa Cameron, who is a graduate student in the Geology and Geophysics Department at Yorich Manoa. So, Marissa, a burning question. Why should anybody care about this? Well, I think a big part of exploring space is just kind of pushing the boundary of what we can do and what we think we know, and having something like going to Saturn is so complex of a thing. We learn so many things on the way. It's just a great way to push our boundaries, I think. And presumably pushing those boundaries means training graduate students and everybody else, STEM education. Are there careers in this kind of work? There is a lot of opportunities for careers in doing space science, whether you're into the science side or the engineering, or you're really like mathematics or computer modeling. All of those things are necessary for advancing space science. And where is this kind of work apart from studying at UH? Where do people actually do this kind of work? The most common place that people think of is probably NASA. There's several NASA centers across the United States, but it's more than that. There's ESA. It's the European Space Agency. A lot of countries have their own space agencies. And more than just NASA and ESA and things like that, there are universities and smaller facilities that all contribute to these things. And I believe you've recently visited some of the NASA facilities. Yes, I've been at JPL, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is in Southern California. And that's where the scene is. Yes, so JPL, one of its primary things that it works on, is building these robotic spacecraft, operation and building of robots. That must have been really exciting. What did you get to see over there? Well, it was pretty amazing. I got to go into the mission control room. And so you could see where they were blocking off part of the Cassini control desk to get ready for this grand finale. Okay. I got to see something called the Mars yard. So they have a replica of the Curiosity rover that they sometimes take out and test on obstacles and stuff before they actually command the rover to do it itself. So it's a really interesting place to be. And that was just a few weeks ago. Yes, this was just earlier this summer. What a great opportunity. And presumably, you know, this is where perhaps you'd be looking for a post-local position or something like that. Yes, that's my first choice for now. Very good, very good. Sounds really exciting. But yes, it's sort of a quest for knowledge and exploring the solar system or the galaxies beyond sort of thing. Yeah. I think cultures from as long as we can have documented history have always looked to the sky and kind of asked what's out there. And we have the ability to actually kind of go and see. And of course, all the money spent on missions like Cassini is spent here on Earth. Yes. So that's what improves our technology. Yes, definitely. The drive to push the technology to do these difficult things in space helps us here on Earth as well. And talking about difficult things in space, I think some of the next images will just show what a wonderful place the outer solar system really is. So if we can go on to the next slide, for example, this looks really odd. We've got bands in the middle and we've got little globes top and bottom, right? Yep. So I think when you mentioned the outer solar system, sometimes I kind of see it as the wild west of the space. And this kind of reminds me of it a little bit. So yeah, we've got Saturn's rings here and we've got three of the moons. So on the top right corner, the moon that's almost kind of out of frame, that's Tethys. The middle is Enceladus and the smaller little one off to the left is Mimus. And presumably the sun is shining from the right hand side. Yes. So you can see a shadow on the back ends of the moons. So they're not quite new moons. No. They are first quarter moons. And it's important to remember with this kind of image, all of these moons are at different distances from the camera. They're not actually like right next to each other. So Enceladus in the middle there is actually the one that's closest to the camera. They're not going to be knocking into each other. No. But when I say close, it's still far away. The camera is still about a million miles away when it took this picture. So yes, it's a very good camera. Let's take a look at the next slide. I think we're looking at how bizarre. I know. What is this? This is Pan. This is a moon that lives in the rings. Two images. Yes. So it's looking at kind of the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere. So to give you an idea, Pan is about 17 miles across. So that's actually about the width of the island Lanai. So it's pretty small. And it's very odd shaped because it started, it started forming in the ring system. So what they think happened is it started creating or getting material stuck onto the central mass, perhaps when the ring was a little bit larger. And then even after it cleared out its orbit, for whatever reason, material from the rings kept raining down on this equatorial region, so around the equator, to make this ridge. And because it's so small, the gravity is relatively small and it can build this ridge up. And you're a graduate student studying tectonics on sidewalks. This is bizarre to me. What would you do with it? Oh goodness. It would be hard to even start mapping this guy. Oh my god. We've got other pictures of moons, I think, coming up. Oh, yes. Speaking of moons, this is one we've had on the show before. Oh, Titan. I think this is Titan. And this is, what are we looking at here? We've got two images. Yes. So on the left here, we're looking at some images of what, I mean, if you think it looks like a river type of stream system, you're probably right. Like that is definitely believed to be channels carved by fluid. Liquids. But because of how cold Titan is, it's probably not water because it would have frozen. So the thing, the liquids make carving, this landscape is probably more methane. And the black lines are what you say. Those are the ones that look like rivers. Yeah, they really do. And then on the right hand side here, this is actually an image of the surface of Titan. So that Huygens probe was sent down to Titan in 2004, got there in 2005. It had some instruments on it, mostly to look at the atmosphere. Of Titan, but also to try to figure out what the surface it landed on, what were the physical properties. So it took some images and we can see it kind of looks like boulders, but they're actually more pebble size. But they're not really made of rock, probably. They're made of some sort of ice and it's just cold enough. This is what I always find fascinating about looking at other worlds, whether it's Mars, which is fairly familiar to us or Venus. But the outer planet satellites, there's just these bizarre things and the temperatures are different than they are here on Earth. The atmospheres are different. So for your student studies, do you have to learn a lot about, say, what's gravity, what's temperature, that sort of thing? Yeah, it can actually get kind of complicated when you start studying several moons, because each of them will have their own properties, own sizes, their own gravities. And you kind of have to, I have a table where I just keep a list of all the different moon properties. Yeah, some of them are covered in ice, some have rocks. So you just have to kind of adjust depending on which body you're working on. And then I know you do a lot of work on the moons of Jupiter as well, which are also icy worlds. Yes. But there must be a temperature difference. Yes, there's definitely a temperature difference on the moons of Jupiter. There's four main moons that people usually talk about, they're known as the Galilean satellites. So the one I think most people have probably heard of is Europa. There's a movie about it. The one I study the most is Ganymede, so it's a little farther out, so it'll be a little bit colder. But there's this one moon isle that lives really close to Jupiter. It's quite hot and it's actually still volcanically active and things of that nature. So it's quite different even than its neighbors. How does somebody get into this line of work? So did you study this at high school? I did not. I actually started out as a pre-med biology major when I left high school. That's an obvious good training for you, yes? Yes. And it wasn't quite right for me. And I ended up taking a class at community college to fulfill a requirement that was a geology class that ended up just kind of changing my path completely. Growing up, my dad would have me look through the telescope and collect rocks, but I never realized that you could do a career from those things. But that geology class kind of brought it all back. So the spark of interest and the creativity came to you when you were at community college? Yes, I was working full-time. I would go to school in the evenings after my job. And I had to sit in this class and it was great. I had an excellent teacher that really inspired me to start asking more questions about the world about me. Because obviously at the University of Hawaii is part of a bigger system. Yes. It's not just Manoa. We've got many community colleges here in the state. So for those professors out there, here we've got great inspiration for community college students completely changing your career. Yeah, yeah. It's just unbelievable. Yeah, that's amazing. Good. We've got many more pictures than we can show time. These are so photogenic. I can't stop looking at some of these. What is it we've got here? This sun is tightened again in front of Saturn. And so you can see the rings and even some shadows from the rings. And in the right side there, the smaller moon, that's Dionii. And again, these moons are not next to each other. So Dionii is actually way, way off in the background there. But to give you a sense of scale here, Dionii, the one on the right, the smaller one, is about 630 miles across. And so twice the distance between Honolulu and Hilo. And Titan there is quite large. It's over 3,200 miles across. It's actually one of the largest moons in our solar system. And it looks fuzzy. It does. And that's from the atmosphere. It has such a large atmosphere. That is an atmosphere of Titan. And then the background is not the black of deep space. No, that is part of the ring system, I believe. Oh, the very bottom. Not sure. Yeah. Yeah, but very photogenic. Let's see one more. Because we've had a discussion of these before, but to remind the viewers, what do we see here? Yeah, so these are some of the lakes and seas of Titan. So again, these are not water. These are probably methane lakes. And it's interesting. These were actually named after mythological sea creatures. So crack in my there is probably the more familiar of the names. But these are not images like taken with a camera. This is where this radar came in handy too, because we could send radio waves down and get some of these radar images back to get an idea. Right. And when you say the lakes, the great lakes. Yes, so one of them is similar in size to Lake Superior. OK, so these are not small. Yeah, these are not puddles. They're lakes. Even if they're not liquid water. Yep. Well, I could spend the whole afternoon looking at some of these pictures with you, Marissa. But I'm afraid we're running out of time on the show. So let me just remind the audience, we have been watching Think Tech Hawaii research in Manoa. I'm your host, Pete McGinnis-Mark. And today's guest has been Marissa Cameron, who's a graduate student in the geology and geophysics department. Marissa, thank you very much for bringing some of these images and giving us some of the, not only the historical background on the Cassini mission, but also bringing some of these fabulous images. Thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Thank you. And we'll be back next week with another exciting show. So join us one o'clock next Monday afternoon. Bye for now.