There's going to be a bit of

an experiment here. We're going to see if you can process video and audio simultaneously and asynchronously.

What I'm going to show you here are some of the images were taken from the Conseeny Hoygun Commission of Saturn
which is going to be my topice tonight. One thing I'll point out about these images is none of them is a montache. They're all
mosaics but in some cases you're going to see 2 or 3 or 4 satellites in the same frame on the screen and that is a single
image.

Okay, Conseeny Hoyguns Saturn our missions is a joint NASA European space agency,
Italian Space Agency mission. The Conseeny spacecraft the main carrier craft is that NASAs
primary contribution to this but the Italian Space Agency made some major contributions in the components
they provided to the spacecraft and the Hoyguns probe the atmospheric probe that we've carried on the Conseeny craft
is primarily the contribution of the European Space Agency. We launched this spacecraft to Saturn
back in October, 1997, spacecraft weighed 5700 kilograms at launch. So as you can
imagine this was a bit of a challenge to get a spacecraft this massive on a projectory that would carry it all the way out
to saturn. So we started out with two loops around the sun before we headed into the outer solar system
In the course of getting there, we've used 4 planetary fly bys that we've used as gravity assistant energy boosters
that finally gave the spacecraft the trajectory the energy that we needed to get it as far out as Saturn. Finally ,
about seven years later, first of July, last summer we arrived at saturn fired the main engine just slow it
down enough to capture it into orbit above Saturn and began the first of what will eventually
be 75 orbits around Saturn by the time we have completed our primary four year mission. Repeated fly bys
of Titan, Titan is the single large moon as Saturn. Titian is particularly of interest to the scientific
community because its the only moon in our solar system to have an atmosphere. That is an
atmosphere of any consequence and in fact, it is a very dense, think atmosphere, mostly nitrogen about 95
% nitrogen, has a surface pressure of 1.6 times greater than our own surface pressure here on earth.
So scientists believe it that Titan today probably looks a lot like earth did 3 or 4 billion years ago, but
the difference is since Titan is 10 times farther out from the sun than our earth is it simply did not have
the energy input needed to evolve as earth has today. But the exciting thing about Titan is that it is a
laboratory. It's a chance to look at what earth probably may have looked like way back before any prebiotic activity
took place. So we may be able to learn just how earth evolved perhaps even how life evolved
on earth and of course of the study of Titan. We will have numerous fly bys of the smaller icy
satellites. You have seen some of them. There's one. That's Epametheist. right there. you're going to
see a number of those by the time we have completed the four years we should have a very detailed
mapping of all of the satellites all of the larger of the smaller icy satellites of saturn.The spacecraft, the
Conseeny spacecraft carries 12 scientific instruments. These include optical remote sensing, it includes
spectrometors, it includes fields dedicated to fields and particles and radio wave frequency instruments,
radar mapper and 3 different radio frequencies so we can transmit through the atmospheres of Saturn
and Titan, as well as through the rings to be able to measure just what the particle composition density structure
looks like. It's remarkable and rather non inituiative, to me at least. The amount of information the scientists are able to
extract from a radio signal that has passed through rings and then received here on earth.

On Christmas Day of last year we released the Hoyguns probe from the Conseeny craft sent it on a three week
path that was going to put it on an intercepting path to Titan enter Titan's atmosphere on
January 14th and spent two and a half hours descending on parachute through the atmosphere relaying
by radio data backup to the Conseeny spacecraft as it passed overhead. The mission was designed to be
an atomospheric mission. Titan's atmosphere being really the key. We had asked sometimes why Titan, why not Saturn like you did
with Galileo and Jupiter and the answer is, as I mentioned earlier, Titan is unique. It is fascinating
There's a lot of mysteries that Titan a probe in Saturn's atmosphere would be nice, scientists would like that but with a
choice between the two, it was just a no-brainer Titan was the place to go. Let's see, this is
going to be the last one. This is my cue that I've used up my five minutes and let me say a little bit more about just
what the impact, what the benefit of doing this is, what's our motivation? Well, partly, it's
exploration. That's just what the human species does. It's what Christopher Columbus did. It's what Lewis
and Clark did. It's what Neil Armstrong did. We're doing the same kind of thing. We don't get to
in person which I think is good, but our reach is a little greater and it is exploration. Another thing is
it's knowledge. This thing about Titan in particular is just really exciting but in terms of the dynamics
there were learning about the rings this is giving us information about how planetary systems form out
of an original solar nebula. And the third piece of this, the third benefit, the third impact, I think, we're at
the most important is this kind of, the results that we get back, some of the material that I'm showing
you right here, this really excites kids and I think that what we're doing right here did nothing more than
excite a bunch of young people to go into science, engineering, mathematics, medicine then
that all by itself, makes it worth the cost of investment but of course there are these other benefits as well. Well, I'm well beyond
my five limit point here, so I'll end it with that.