NOVA: "The Planets: Saturn" (BBC Studios, Tencent Penguin Pictures, The Open University, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, July 26) at 10 I put on the fourth of five episodes of the long-running PBS-TV series NOVA dealing with “The Planets,” this one about Saturn – which is perhaps the strangest object in our solar system, especially since it doesn’t have a core of solid rock like most planets do. Instead its center is of molten metal, around which has formed a core of frozen gas under tremendous pressure – enough, the show explained, to crush carbon into diamonds and then split up the diamonds again. The show was full of fascinating tidbits about Saturn I hadn’t known before, including that its fabled rings are made of ice – that’s right, frozen H2O – and that one of its moons (no, not Titan! Sorry, Kurt Vonnegut fans), Enceladus, contains the underground volcanic hot springs that most scientists who study these things were where life began. As usual, this show contained stunning visuals – most of them digital re-creations, though Saturn was sufficiently photographed from the Voyager and Cassini probes that at least a few of the images are authentic. Most of these NOVA shows on “The Planets” have centered around an interesting woman scientist who worked on the initial NASA probes and did some of the key analysis of the information they sent back – and this time the woman was Michele Daugherty, billed as the “principal investigator, Cassini Magnetometer.” She was down to earth and obviously thrilled with the info the probe was sending back, and she recalled her sadness when it came time after the last bit of data had been transmitted to direct the spacecraft to descend into Saturn and destroy itself.

At the same time she and others on the project mentioned the 90-minute time lag it takes for a radio signal from Earth to reach Saturn – which meant that any instructions to the craft had to be timed to take into account the three-hour time lag for the craft to receive the signal from Earth and respond to it. Indeed, one of the reasons Daugherty gave for their determination to let Cassini burn up in the Saturnian gravitational field was to make sure Earth life didn’t contaminate whatever ecosphere exists on Enceladus, so if we someday land on Enceladus and find life it won’t be something we brought with us and unintentionally planted there. I still have my quibbles with these NOVA programs on outside worlds, including my ongoing qualm about just how they can be so authoritative about what the various planets are made of when they can only observe and measure them from above in space – I guess that’s what Daugherty’s magnetometer is for – but at the same time I’ve found them impressive and awe-inspiring, and in some ways they confirm Werner Heisenberg’s (the inventor of quantum theory and the physicist Adolf Hitler put in charge of Nazi Germany’s program to develop the atomic bomb) famous quote, “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”