Saturn's Secrets 🪐 | NASA's Unexplained Files | Science Channel

Mimas is an odd little world. Like most of Saturn's moons, Mimas is made mostly of rock and water ice. It's only about 250 miles across, which is, you know, like driving from Phoenix to Las Vegas. One feature immediately stands out. A gigantic crater that makes it look like the Death Star from Star Wars. Something weird is happening on top of Saturn. We have nothing like this on any other planet in the solar system. A formation of intentional design? Could there be some kind of intelligence behind it? What is Saturn's mega-hex? Something is organizing it. Something is keeping this thing together. And we don't understand what it is. On its journey out of the solar system, NASA spacecraft Voyager reaches its next target. Saturn. But its cameras can only see the ringed planet's side. The Voyager spacecraft was just taking lots and lots of photographs as it flew past Saturn. When a scientist stitches the images together, creating a picture of the planet's pole, the result is completely unexpected. He saw a six-sided shape on the top of Saturn. A perfect hexagon engulfs Saturn's north pole. It almost looks too regular to be natural. We have nothing like this on any other planet in the solar system. But NASA downplays the discovery. The explanation was simple. This is just a weather pattern. This was a curiosity at the time, but we were not able to follow this up with any other observation, so interest in it waned. Saturn's secret is forgotten. But not forever. June 2004. The Cassini space probe arrives at Saturn. It can look where Voyager could not, directly into the dark side of Saturn's north pole. Cassini can go up to the poles and look down from the poles, which no other spacecraft has been able to do up until now. And what its infrared camera sees astonishes NASA scientists. The gigantic hexagon still dominates Saturn. It's still there. It hasn't budged much at all in 30 years. I mean, this thing should be unstable. It just can't keep its form like that. The anomaly is massive, large enough to consume four planet Earths. But the hex is also doing weird things. The clouds follow the hexagon as if it's a racetrack. So we have these clouds that go on the straight lines, and then they turn the corners, and then they go into the next straight line. It's really bizarre. Something is organizing it. Something is keeping this thing together, and we don't understand what it is. Whenever you see these linear features, there's the temptation to think, could there be some kind of intelligence behind it? Now we start thinking this feels more like an artificial structure than a random weather pattern. For some observers, a colossal structure like this could be used to exploit the gas giant's natural resources, critical for space travel. When traveling at interstellar distances, what you need is propellant. And Saturn is a perfect place to pick up fuel. 75% of Saturn's atmosphere is hydrogen gas, the same fuel that got us to the moon. The atmosphere also contains helium-3, which could be the gas of the future. What if the gas giant is in fact a giant gas station? It's hard for us to fathom how it could be done, but it doesn't mean it can't be done by a civilization more advanced than ours. Scientists are not convinced that a huge gas refinery is behind Saturn's mega-hex. Numerous people have tried to say this is an alien feature of some type on Saturn, but it looks like there are natural explanations for it. And Professor Peter Reed could have that explanation. Using a model of Saturn's atmosphere, he investigates the anomaly. The tank here represents the northern hemisphere of Saturn, with the pole at the center. At the region where the hexagon occurs, there's a strong jet stream on Saturn. A disk spinning at the center creates a faster flow of fluid, a jet stream. Where the two flows meet, the hexagon should form. So we can illustrate this by adding some green dye to the tank. The dye moves around the tank, picking out the six sides of the hexagon. Reed's apparatus has summoned Saturn's mega-hex. But there is a problem with the result. In the experiment, whirlpool vortices hold the sides of the hexagon straight. On Saturn, we've looked and looked and looked, and we have not seen any of those vortices on any of those straight-line segments. Without these vortices, the hex ought to collapse. But it doesn't. It's a real mystery. We really don't know why. The cause of Saturn's mega-hex remains unexplained. A tiny portion of the brain should be saying, Ooh, what's that? Just in case it really is something weird. A NASA probe studying Saturn captures an intriguing image. There's a huge hole in one of Saturn's rings. It's like something punched right through it. The cause of the giant chasm baffles planetary scientists. Something big, really big, created this hole. But we can't find it. 2016. NASA's Cassini spacecraft is 12 years into its mission to study Saturn, the second-largest planet in our solar system. On April 8, Cassini is tasked with imaging the planet's outer ring, a band of icy debris known as the F ring. The F ring is a thin little ring that almost looks like braided wire that goes around the big, major, fat rings of Saturn. Material in the F ring is so fine that it's almost like frozen smoke. When the Cassini team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory study the images, they discover something unexpected. It's like something just punched clean through and left a hole behind. It looks really weird. It looks like maybe there's been an explosion in the F ring. A mysterious force or object appears to have blasted a 30,000-square-mile hole out of the icy ring. This hole is so large, you could fit Lake Erie into it. Astronomers dismiss the idea that one of NASA's craft could be responsible for this strange event. There's no known spacecraft that could have made a hole this big. A clue to the origin of the mystery could come from the two moons that flank the F ring, Prometheus and Pandora. These two potato-shaped balls of ice police the ring as they orbit on either side of it. These two moons, Prometheus and Pandora, act sort of like bodyguards. They kind of keep the wandering particles in track. If one of the moons were not there, the ring would just spread because each moon is pushing from each side and keeping it from spreading. Prometheus, the largest of the two moons, orbits closest to Saturn and has a history of causing disturbances in the F ring. It's the obvious suspect because it regularly comes close to the F ring and pulls out little bits that disturbs it as it comes close to it. Prometheus is kind of a cosmic vandal. But when the Cassini team analyzed Prometheus' position at the time of the incident, the theory falls down. In this case, Prometheus has an airtight alibi. It was clear on the other side of Saturn when the hole appeared. Closer analysis of the images suggests Prometheus' sister moon is a more likely suspect. In these images, part of the material that's being pulled out from the rings looks like it's pointing toward Pandora. So it might be Pandora being mischievous and causing this disturbance. The images seem to provide strong evidence that Pandora's gravitational pull has dragged material out of the F ring. But scientists calculate that the 70-mile-long moon could not be responsible for the massive disturbance. When we look at the math, we find out that Pandora is just too small. Its gravity is just not big enough to cause this kind of an eruption. So here, it seems to be just an innocent bystander. It's actually off the hook. The Cassini images provide no further clues to the origin of the giant chasm. It seems a mystery object traveled through this region of space and then disappeared. Whatever caused this simply isn't captured on camera. It's gone before Cassini can spot it. Something big, really big, created this hole. But we can't find it. A NASA probe encounters a mysterious object orbiting Saturn. It looks like the Death Star. It's uncanny. The strange sphere vibrates as it travels through space. You have to ask, is it really a moon? Is it really natural? February 13, 2010. NASA's Cassini probe is seven years into its mission to uncover the secrets of Saturn. During a high orbit, 31,000 miles above the ringed planet's outer atmosphere, it encounters a little-known object named Mimas. Mimas is an odd little world. Like most of Saturn's moons, Mimas is made mostly of rock and water ice. It's only about 250 miles across, which is, you know, like driving from Phoenix to Las Vegas. One feature immediately stands out. A gigantic crater that makes it look like the Death Star from Star Wars. When the Cassini probe makes a second pass around Mimas in 2014, it picks up strange readings. The tiny rock is vibrating as it travels through space. Mimas also has a very weird wobble, and scientists aren't really sure why. It wobbles like this as it goes through space. Moons don't do that. Without an immediate explanation, there are those who will continue to believe that Mimas may be the real Death Star. Cassini mission researchers launch an investigation into this strange phenomenon. Our first instinct was to look at the most recognizable feature on the surface, which is Herschel crater. The crater is so big compared to the size of the moon that if we had a similar crater on Earth, it would be the size of Australia. It's almost a miracle that this moon stayed together. It should have been smashed apart by this object that created the crater. Researchers still don't know how Mimas survived the Herschel impact. But Radwan Tajeddin develops a theory that whatever hit Mimas compacted its rocks so much, the entire moon is unbalanced, producing what scientists call a mass anomaly. Usually impacts create mass anomalies beneath the surface. Such a big impact should have created a very large mass anomaly that might explain the wobble. When you change the way the mass is distributed around a moon like that, you can change the way that it spins. Tajeddin runs computer simulations to model the Herschel impact. He compares the model's data to the vibration observed on Mimas. But the math doesn't add up. After testing, we noticed that the mass anomaly is not big enough to explain this wobble. This wobble is two times bigger than we expect for models. Researchers suggest something else hidden deep below the surface of Mimas could account for the unnatural vibration. Scientists turn to another of Saturn's moons for clues. Enceladus. Enceladus is one of the most amazing bodies in the entire solar system. Enceladus also has a puzzling wobble. In 2015, scientists discover the cause. A massive subterranean ocean. It has geysers. Dozens and dozens of geysers spewing out water. And so we know that Enceladus has a water ocean beneath its surface. Having this liquid in there kind of gives it a sloshing around action that creates a wobble. This makes sense on Enceladus. Maybe the same thing is happening on Mimas. If there was a subsurface ocean 15 to 18 miles underneath the surface of Mimas, it could account for this motion. Almost a billion miles from the warmth of the sun, Mimas is made mostly of ice with only a small amount of rock. If the hidden ocean theory is correct, Mimas is far stranger than anyone imagined. In order to have a liquid water ocean that far from the sun, you need to have some sort of an internal heat source. It's about the heat source. If we can identify a heat source, we can have a subsurface ocean. Examination of the moon's surface reveals no trace of activity that could produce enough heat to melt the ice on Mimas. If Mimas was heating, you would expect to see some geological activity on the surface. But Mimas doesn't seem to have an active surface that's been shaped by tectonic activity. From what we can see, Mimas is a cold, frozen, dead world. But something about Mimas doesn't fit the ocean theory. Its orbit. Over time, moons with subsurface oceans tend to fall in a spherical orbit. Mimas travels in an ellipse. If Mimas did have a liquid water ocean, then gradually its orbit would settle into a more regular circular path. And that's not what's happened. So we're kind of back at square one. A moon that is spherical, without a subsurface ocean, that has an elliptical orbit around the planet, and it wobbles? That's just weird. For now, scientists are still unable to explain the behavior of Saturn's mysterious satellite. Imagine Earth visited by creatures from an electric world. Beings created by electricity. Who live by electricity. Who feed on pure power. Who, by their very makeup, are able to harness and shape electricity. To use it to defend and attack. This is the stuff of science fiction. At least, it was. Until NASA makes an extraordinary discovery among the dunes of Titan. What monster could move these mountains of sand? June 30th, 2004. NASA's Cassini probe goes into orbit around Saturn. It is the first spacecraft to do so. And beyond that, the first to study closely the planet's largest moon, the remarkable and mysterious Titan. Of all the worlds in the solar system, Titan is actually the one that is arguably the most like Earth. You've got mountains. You've got rivers. You've got oceans. You've got clouds. But in other respects, Titan is quite different than Earth. It's something like minus 250 degrees. You'd freeze to death. This frozen world is a terrifying place. There's no oxygen in the atmosphere. It's all methane and nitrogen and even molecules that could be toxic to us. Titan would be hell for humans, but a perfect home for another very different kind of creature. It's got all the ingredients for life, but not as we know it. In 2004, NASA's Cassini spacecraft reaches Titan and maps a vast desert of what looks like sand dunes around the equator. These dunes are as tall as the Statue of Liberty. Earth's dunes are made out of sand, out of silica, out of ground-down rock, but Titan's are made out of frozen hydrocarbons and other organic molecules. The dunes seem alive. What's more, they're pointing in a direction that defies logic. When scientists looked at the shape of the dunes from Cassini, we noticed that, hey, you know, the dunes are all pointing in one direction. They're moving from the west to the east across Titan. But when we talked to the atmospheric modelers, they said, no, the atmosphere of Titan is moving from the east to the west. So how is it possible that you have these giant dunes facing the opposite direction that the wind is blowing? It just doesn't make sense. To investigate further, Cassini sends the Huygens landing module to Titan's surface. Could there be something other than the wind that is acting on these dunes? Scientists come to an incredible conclusion. The dunes are electric. And this electricity is generated by Titan's super-powerful winds. As the wind blows them around, these grains of frozen hydrocarbons rub up against each other and form an electrostatic charge, like clothes in a dryer. And that electrostatic charge clumps them together and holds their shape even in the face of the wind. This whole desert is zinging with electricity. An electric planet, alive with power. Currents licking the surface and permeating the landscape. Electricity explains the dunes, but not the direction of them. What could drive a massive sand dune back on itself and reverse its natural direction? Once again, scientists are forced to contemplate something truly amazing. Is there something living in the sands of Titan that are actually causing the direction that we see happening? We know from our own Earth science that electric creatures could exist on an electric planet. Incredible new research on Earth has uncovered a new kind of life form that might be right at home on Titan. These are microbes. They can take electricity in its simplest form and produce that into energy and grow and reproduce. These microorganisms that we are discovering now can actually eat and breathe electricity directly. Bacteria that feeds on electricity, well, that just opens up all kinds of possibilities for life. The deserts of Titan would be like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Titan is just a ball of fuel. You're the right kind of organism. There's a huge amount of energy to be gained from all that stuff. There are indeed creatures who eat and breathe electricity. But on Titan, they may be far bigger than the tiny electricity-eating microbes found on Earth. For the scale of landscape engineering that we're seeing here, these creatures have to be massive. Life forms on Earth show the potential for such creatures to evolve. On Earth, we have sandworms. We have creatures that generate electricity, even creatures that could survive on Titan. One of the most successful body plans in effect are nematode worms. Nematode worms are extremophiles, able to survive in the most hostile environments on Earth, such as volcanic deep-sea vents. You can find them living almost everywhere on Earth. In fact, about four out of every five creatures on this Earth is a nematode worm. They are all over the place. You've eaten some today, I guarantee it. In the atmosphere of Titan, creatures that are tiny on Earth could grow to enormous sizes. Life on Earth is limited by the forces of gravity. This is why we don't see organisms like a butterfly that gets as big as an eagle, because gravity keeps them smaller. Titan has gravity that's about one-seventh the Earth's, and that could potentially allow creatures, if they evolved on Titan, to be bigger than what you would expect on Earth. You can even imagine that on Titan, that we have something like Frank Herbert's Doom, a famous sci-fi novel and movie where you have these gigantic worm-like creatures that are just marauding through the deserts on their planet. Maybe the same thing's happening on Titan. What if space debris from some asteroid collision or an infected probe were to carry organic material the short distance from Titan to Earth? What's the first thing it would go for? Would our power grids be the best buffet that it's ever had? They would have a voltage smorgasbord and suck all the power out of the Earth's electric system. We would go back to the Dark Ages. The next NASA craft heading to Titan could be Dragonfly, due to land there in 2034. Until then, we don't know what might be roaming the sands of Titan. We cannot tell what electric beings might look like. We can only hope that when Dragonfly arrives, what happens on Titan stays on Titan.