The journey back to Saturn
At last year's TED conference, one of the presenters was Carolyn Porco, the leader of the Imaging Team on the Cassini mission to Saturn. Her presentation focused mainly on a tour of the discoveries regarding two of Saturn's most intriguing moons: Titan and Enceladus.
For centuries, Titan had been a mystery, its surface completely shrouded in a thick haze of hydrocarbons. Nothing was known of the nature of its surface until the day the Cassini orbiter dropped the Huygens probe into the atmosphere; the probe pierced the dense, visually impenetrable atmosphere of Titan, taking readings and photographs as it parachuted to the surface. Her presentation includes some of those photos, including the first photograph ever taken from the surface of any body in the outer solar system.
She also discussed Enceladus, with its surface completely covered in ice and snow made from hydrocarbons. That moon has a surface which is geologically very active, and this had been known for some time. However, it wasn't until the Cassini mission that scientists caught the first glimpse of the enormous geysers on Enceladus; gigantic plumes of organic compounds spew thousands of miles above the surface, raining down across the planet, and it's believed that they are propelled from below by pockets of hot water. These represent conditions which might be ideal for the genesis of carbon-based life.
In her compelling presentation, Porco says this:
The journey back to Saturn is ... a metaphor for a much larger human voyage to understand the interconnectedness of everything around us.
See the journey here:
Her presentation ends with a staggering image of a total eclipse of the sun seen from the far side of Saturn. The planet occludes the sun, and Saturn's rings are illuminated in a breathtaking backlit glow. This is reminiscent of the image sent back from the moon of the Earth rising above the horizon, and that's a point she's eager to make. The image is humbling, and its beauty is soaring and poetic.