Venus • 2020 • episode "S1E3" • Secrets of the Solar System

6:31

It's hard to get to space.But there is a concept that might make it possible: the space elevator. How exactly does it work.

In a Nutshell • 2016 • Astronomy

88:55

Professor Brian Cox fulfils a childhood dream by going behind the scenes at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), mission control for Mars 2020 – one of the most ambitious missions ever launched that may finally reveal if life ever existed on the red planet. In 1980, a young Brian Cox wrote to JPL asking for photos from some of their missions to the planets. The pictures they sent him from Voyager and the Viking mission to Mars were a source of inspiration that set him on the path to becoming a physicist. Now, over 40 years later, he has been granted privileged access to JPL, including key mission areas that are usually off-limits to film crews. Brian spends a week following the team who guide the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter - the first powered aircraft ever sent to another planet - across the surface of Mars during a critical stage of the mission. Perseverance's goal is to search for signs of long extinct life on the surface of Mars in an area called Jezero Crater, which, 3.8 billion years ago, was filled by a vast lake. If it finds evidence of that life, it could change everything we know about life in the universe - and even transform our understanding of our own origins.

2022 • Astronomy

42:02

From the furthest reaches of space to our own cosmic backyard, we count down the discoveries that changed everything we know about our universe.

S5E1 • How the Universe Works • 2016 • Astronomy

60:25

Carl Sagan opens the program with a description of the cosmos and a "Spaceship of the Imagination" (shaped like a dandelion seed). The ship journeys through the universe's hundred billion galaxies, the Local Group, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way, the Orion Nebula, our Solar System, and finally the planet Earth. Eratosthenes' successful calculation of the circumference of Earth leads to a description of the ancient Library of Alexandria. Finally, the "Ages of Science" are described, before pulling back to the full span of the Cosmic Calendar. Note: This revised version of the series adds an introduction by Ann Druyan, in which she discusses some of the changes that occurred in the years after its broadcast.

1/13 • Cosmos: A Personal Voyage • 1980 • Astronomy

42:28

Quasars are the brightest and most powerful objects in our universe, and though they have shaped the cosmos, they might ultimately destroy everything that exists.

S6E7 • How the Universe Works • 2017 • Astronomy

58:46

In the final episode, Professor Brian Cox journeys to the remotest part of the solar system, a place that the most mysterious planets call home.

S1E5 • The Planets 2019 • 2019 • Astronomy