2003 - millions watch live as Columbia breaks up in the sky over Texas, killing all on board. NASA, loved ones and investigators share how an incredible journey ended in tragedy. Chapter 1: As Nasa prepares Space Shuttle Columbia for its 28th mission, excitement and trepidation build amongst the astronauts and their families as they count down to launch. This programme hears from the seven astronauts - a mixture of veterans and rookies - and their families as they train for an awe-inspiring journey of a lifetime. Chapter 2: Nasa engineers analyse film footage of a piece of debris striking the shuttle Columbia 81 seconds after launch. What no-one yet knows is whether any serious damage has been done to the vehicle or the tiles which protect the vehicle against the intense heat of re-entry. But calls for photographs to be taken of the shuttle using satellites go unheeded. Meanwhile, in space, the crew continue their mission, unaware of any concerns inside Nasa. Chapter 3: Sixteen minutes from landing, mission control lose contact with the crew of Columbia. On the shuttle landing strip, families waiting to welcome their loved ones back home are swiftly ushered away. In the skies over Texas, locals hear a loud explosion, and debris strikes the ground in multiple locations. The fears of some Nasa engineers are coming true: Columbia is lost and there are no survivors. Following the disaster, Nasa comes under increasing pressure from the media to provide answers.
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More than three decades after the debut of Carl Sagan's ground-breaking and iconic series, "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage," it's time once again to set sail for the stars. Host and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson sets off on the Ship of the Imagination to discover Earth's Cosmic Address and its coordinates in space and time. Viewers meet Renaissance Italy's Giordano Bruno, who had an epiphany about the infinite expanse of the universe. Then, Tyson walks across the Cosmic Calendar, on which all of time has been compressed into a year-at-a-glance calendar, from the Big Bang to the moment humans first make their appearance on the planet.
S1E1 • Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey • 2014 • Astronomy
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
In summer 2013, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way was getting ready to feast. A gas cloud three times the size of our planet strayed within the gravitational reach of our nearest supermassive black hole. Across the globe, telescopes were being trained on the heart of our galaxy, some 27,000 light years from Earth, in the expectation of observing this unique cosmic spectacle. For cosmic detectives across the Earth, it was a unique opportunity. For the first time in the history of science, they hoped to observe in action the awesome spectacle of a feeding supermassive black hole.
Even with a surface temperature of -180C, Saturn's moon, Titan, could be another Earth. There's evidence of dunes made of quantities of organic material that could contain the building blocks for DNA. Astrobiologists are conducting studies on the possibility that life could be present on Titan.
12 • Cosmic Front • 2014 • Astronomy
Venus is a gorgeous naked-eye planet, hanging like a diamond in the twilight -- but it’s beauty is best looked at from afar. Even though Mercury is closer to the sun, Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, due to a runaway greenhouse effect, and has the most volcanic activity in the solar system. Its north and south poles were flipped, causing it to rotate backwards and making for very strange days on this beautiful but inhospitable world.
14 • Crash Course Astronomy • Astronomy
Twenty years after its launch, we bid farewell to the Cassini spacecraft as it plunges into Saturn’s atmosphere in a planned death spiral. Productive right to the end, Cassini has rewritten the textbook on not only Saturn and its moons, but our whole solar system as well.
1 • Science Breakthroughs • 2017 • Astronomy