Coming of Age in the Anthropocene • 2020 • episode "12/13" • Cosmos: Possible Worlds

59:37

As Nasa releases the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, this film tells the inside story of the telescope's construction and the astronomers taking its first picture of distant stars and galaxies. Will it be the deepest image of our universe ever taken? The successor to Hubble, and 100 times more powerful, the James Webb is the most technically advanced telescope ever built. It will look further back in time than Hubble to an era around 200 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies appeared. Webb's primary mission is to capture the faint light from these objects on the edge of our visible universe so that scientists can learn how they formed, but its instruments are so sensitive it could also be the first telescope to detect signs of life on a distant planet. The James Webb Telescope is an ?8 billion gamble on the skills of its engineering team. It’s the first telescope designed to unfold in space – a complicated two-week operation in which 178 release devices must all work - 107 of them on the telescope's sun shield alone. If just one fails, the expensive telescope could become a giant piece of space junk. From its conception in the late 1980s, the construction of Webb has posed a huge technical challenge. The team must build a mirror six times larger than Hubble’s and construct a vast sun shield the size of a tennis court, fold them up so they fit into an Ariane 5 rocket, then find a way to unfold them in space. This film tells the inside story of the James Webb Space Telescope in the words of the engineers who built it and the astronomers who will use it.

2022 • Astronomy

42:28

Discoveries about interstellar space, the space between the universe's stars, reveal that it's not empty and unremarkable as previously thought, but filled with weird objects and strange phenomena that might hold the darkest secrets of the cosmos.

S7E3 • How the Universe Works • 2019 • Astronomy

51:01

In August 1977, the Big Ear Radio-telescope in Ohio received a strange signal from the Sagittarius constellation while searching for intelligent extra-terrestrial life. It had a duration of 72 seconds and an intensity 30 times higher than usual. Named the WAW signal (as an engineer wrote ‘WOW’ on the data as it came in!), it is still being considered as one of the best examples of having being sent by intelligent extraterrestrial life. But, nothing has revolutionised the search of extra-terrestrial intelligent life as much as the recent discovery by the Kepler Satellite, of thousands of Earth-like planets where life could be possible. Join the debate with this stunning one-hour documentary from 2015, as we ask Is Anybody Out There?

2015 • Astronomy

42:29

Black holes are not the violent monsters people think they are, and new discoveries reveal that they might have been essential to creating stars, giving light, and building the universe itself.

S7E4 • How the Universe Works • 2019 • Astronomy

42:01

Astronaut Mike Massimino reveals the answers to some of the greatest mysteries on the Red Planet. Using the most detailed survey of Mars ever created, he discovers the dark history of our closest neighbor.

S1E2 • The Planets (US) • 2017 • Astronomy

54:39

Could Mars have ever harbored life? Thanks to NASA's latest Mars rover Curiosity, scientists are finding clues to this profound question. This program tracks the first year of Curiosity's adventure, and confirms that an ancient environment could have supported life on Mars.

2 • Cosmic Front • 2014 • Astronomy