Voyager The Grand Tour • 2016 • episode "S1E1" Space Probes

Category: Astronomy

Voyager 1 and 2 are truly the probes that just won’t quit. Launched almost 40 years ago these twin probes continue to stun the world. They've explored all the giant outer planets of our solar system, 48 of their moons, and are now leaving the solar system, on a journey into interstellar space.

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Space Probes • 2016 • 6 episodes •

Voyager The Grand Tour

Voyager 1 and 2 are truly the probes that just won’t quit. Launched almost 40 years ago these twin probes continue to stun the world. They've explored all the giant outer planets of our solar system, 48 of their moons, and are now leaving the solar system, on a journey into interstellar space.

2016 • Astronomy

Cassini and the Crown Jewel

Cassini-Huygens has given us a more detailed account of Saturn than we could have ever imagined. Breathtaking images of Saturn and its sparkling rings, a massive 6-sided polar storm, and 62 moons - including the most bizarre worlds in our Solar System -- we have seen them all thanks to Cassini.

2016 • Astronomy

Red Rovers

They are NASA’s first family – the wildly popular rovers. Follow the ongoing adventures of Curiosity and flash back to its precursors – twins Spirit and Opportunity, and little Sojourner - as they lift the veil on the mysteries of the Red Planet.

2016 • Astronomy

Our Inner Circles of Hell

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.

2016 • Astronomy

Pluto's Heart

A voyage a decade in the making, the New Horizons probe has travelled to the end of our Solar System to reveal a world unlike any other, Pluto. Now, as it heads deep into the Kuiper Belt, those responsible for its magnificent journey share their fears, joy and hope for this piano-sized explorer.

2016 • Astronomy

Future Missions

NASA has taken us to the outer reaches of our Solar System, but there are still many mysteries to explore. New probes are being designed to look at our sun, the deep oceans of icy moons, and perhaps even our closest neighboring system - Alpha Centauri.

2016 • Astronomy

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Jupiter Revealed

'To send a spacecraft there is a little bit insane,' says Scott Bolton when talking about Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. But that is exactly what he has done, because Scott is head of Juno, the Nasa mission designed to peer through Jupiter's swirling clouds and reveal the wonders within. But this is no ordinary world. This documentary, narrated by Toby Jones, journeys with the scientists into the heart of a giant. Professor Kaitlin Kratter shows us how extreme Jupiter is. She has come to a quarry to measure out each planet's mass with rocks, starting with the smallest. Mercury is a single kilogram, and the Earth is 17. But Jupiter is on another scale entirely. It is seven tonnes - that is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets combined. On Kaitlin's scale it is not a pile of rocks, it is the truck delivering them. With extreme size comes extreme radiation. Juno is in the most extreme environment Nasa has visited. By projecting a 70-foot-wide, life-size Juno on a Houston rooftop, Scott shows us how its fragile electronics are encased in 200kg of titanium. As Scott puts it, 'we had to build an armoured tank to go there.' The team's efforts have been worthwhile. Professor Andrew Ingersoll, Juno's space weatherman, reveals they have seen lightning inside Jupiter, perhaps a thousand times more powerful than Earth's lightning. This might be evidence for huge quantities of water inside Jupiter. Prof Ingersoll also tells us that the Great Red Spot, a vast hurricane-like storm that could swallow the Earth whole, goes down as far as they can see - 'it could go down 1,000s of kilometres'. Deeper into the planet and things get stranger still. At the National Ignition facility in northern California, Dr Marius Millot is using powerful lasers normally used for nuclear fusion for an astonishing experiment. He uses '500 times the power that is used for the entire United States at a given moment' to crush hydrogen to the pressures inside Jupiter. Under these extreme conditions, hydrogen becomes a liquid metal. Juno is finding out how much liquid metallic hydrogen is inside Jupiter, and scientists hope to better understand how this flowing metal produces the most powerful aurora in the Solar System. But what is at Jupiter's heart? In Nice, Prof Tristan Guillot explains how Juno uses gravity to map the planet's centre. This can take scientists back to the earliest days of the solar system, because Jupiter is the oldest planet and it should contain clues to its own creation. By chalking out an outline of the Jupiter, Tristan reveals there is a huge rocky core - perhaps ten times the mass of Earth. It is now thought Jupiter started as a small rocky world. But there is a surprise, because Juno's findings suggest this core might be 'fuzzy'. Tristan thinks the planet was bombarded with something akin to shooting stars. As he puts it, 'Jupiter is quite unlike we thought'.

Horizon • 2018 • Astronomy

Black Holes

We’ve covered a lot of incredible stuff, but this week we’re talking about the weirdest objects in space: BLACK HOLES. Stellar mass black holes form when a very massive star dies, and its core collapses. The core has to be more than about 2.8 times the Sun’s mass to form a black hole. Black holes come in different sizes, but for all of them, the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light, so nothing can escape, not matter or light. They don’t wander the Universe gobbling everything down around them; their gravity is only really intense very close to them. Tides near a stellar mass black hole will spaghettify you, and time slows down when you get near a black hole — not that this helps much if you’re falling in.

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Encyclopaedia Galactica

Questions are raised about the search for intelligent life beyond the Earth, with UFOs and other close encounters refuted in favor of communications through SETI and radio telescope such as the Arecibo Observatory. The probability of technically advanced civilizations existing elsewhere in the Milky Way is interpreted using the Drake equation and a future hypothetical Encyclopedia Galactica is discussed as a repository of information about other worlds in the galaxy. The Cosmos Update notes that there have been fewer sightings of UFOs and more stories of abductions, while mentioning the META scanning the skies for signals.

12/13Cosmos: A Personal Voyage • 1980 • Astronomy