This is the story of the James Webb Space Telescope, told by the people who have devoted their lives to it. It is the world’s largest, most advanced, and most expensive telescope, and building it has been fraught with challenges. But it will all be worth it if the December 2021 launch is successful.
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NASA’s Space Launch System is the most powerful rocket ever built. This is the story of the incredible engineering that went into building it, told first-hand by NASA’s best rocket engineers. Building the rocket that will take us back to the Moon is no easy task, but the payoff will be phenomenal.
2021 • Technology
Before the ISS, there was Skylab: NASA’s first mission to build a home beyond our planet. This is the spectacular story of the first astronauts who lived on a space station, and the incredible things their work taught us about what it takes for human beings to live, work, and play in outer space.
2022 • Astronomy
This is the story of the James Webb Space Telescope, told by the people who have devoted their lives to it. It is the world’s largest, most advanced, and most expensive telescope, and building it has been fraught with challenges. But it will all be worth it if the December 2021 launch is successful.
2022 • Astronomy
We’re going back to the moon. This episode explores how we did it in the past and how and why we will do it again. The moon is critical to future exploration. It will be where we learn to build sustainable colonies on other worlds.
2021 • Astronomy
In just one generation, our ability to search for planets beyond our solar system has transformed. With modern techniques and telescopes, planetary scientists have found thousands of exoplanets in our universe, and many of them have the perfect conditions for life. Are we about to find Earth’s twin?
2020 • Astronomy
This is the story of two of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of the 21st century, told by the incredible scientists who made them happen. The first is LIGO’s measurement of gravitational waves coming from a black hole merger, and the second, the Event Horizon Telescope’s image of a black hole.
2021 • Astronomy
For decades, scientists have dreamed of finding life on Mars. But despite their best efforts, no signs of life have been found. Could that be about to change? This is the story of the scientists and engineers behind Perseverance: the rover that could change our view of Mars forever.
2021 • Astronomy
Scientists on the BICEP and Planck missions are attempting to solve a mystery about the earliest moments of our universe, by searching for patterns in the cosmic microwave background. If successful, the missions will help to answer the biggest question anyone can ask: how did our universe begin?
2021 • Astronomy
Thanks to the wonders of physics, astronomers can map a timeline of the universe’s history. Today, Phil’s going to give you an overview of those first few minutes (yes, MINUTES) of the universe’s life. It started with a Big Bang, when the Universe was incredibly dense and hot. It expanded and cooled, going through multiple stages where different kinds of matter could form. It underwent a phenomenally rapid expansion called inflation, which smoothed out much of the lumpiness in the matter. Normal matter formed atoms between 3 and 20 minutes after the bang, and the lumps left over from inflation formed the galaxies and larger structures we see today.
44 • Crash Course Astronomy • 2016 • Astronomy
It’s a golden age for planet hunters: NASA's Kepler mission has identified more than 3,500 potential planets orbiting stars beyond our Sun. Some of them, like a planet called Kepler-22b, might even be able to harbor life. How did we come upon this distant planet? Combining startling animation with input from expert astrophysicists and astrobiologists, “Alien Planets Revealed” takes viewers on a journey along with the Kepler telescope. How does the telescope look for planets? How many of these planets are like our Earth? Will any of these planets be suitable for life as we know it? Bringing the creative power of veteran animators together with the latest discoveries in planet-hunting, “Alien Planets Revealed” shows the successes of the Kepler mission, taking us to planets beyond our solar system and providing a glimpse of creatures we might one day encounter.
Across the Milky Way, galaxies are going dark, and scientists don't know why the stars are losing their shine; astronomers race against time to uncover the truth behind how galaxies are born and how they die before all of the lights go out.
Space's Deepest Secrets • 2020 • Astronomy
Saturn's secrets are out. The ferocious weather, the evolving ring system and the discovery of active geology on Saturn's moons has rewritten the textbooks. Scientists are looking for life on Saturn's moons and they may have found it on Titan.
S3E5 • How the Universe Works • 2014 • Astronomy
The inner planets, Mercury and Venus, orbit closest to the Sun, making them literally an Inferno of heat. NASA and other space agencies have attempted to learn more about these rocky planets. Follow the plucky probes that attempted to decipher the secrets of the Solar System's inner circles of hell.
S1E4 • Space Probes • 2016 • Astronomy
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