Journey to the Planets

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[edit] General Information

Science Documentary hosted by Dominic Frisby, published by National Geographic in 2010 - English narration

also known as

Voyage to the Planets

[edit] Cover

[edit] Information

Journey to the Planets aka Voyage To The Planets Have you ever wondered what it would be like to leave Earth? To lose sight of our home planet and go where no human has gone before? Blast-off with Voyage to the Planets: a 6 x 50 minute documentary series exploring the pleasures and pitfalls of travel to the very alien planets of our own Solar System. What strange sights await you? What dangers must you avoid? Voyage to the Planets visits the planets from two very personal perspectives: the direct experience of the people who have sent probes hurtling to all our cosmic neighbours, and the viewpoint of any one of us who might dream of making a trip ourselves. Take a ringside seat to the splendours of the Solar System with Voyage to the Planets: an astronaut's guide to whole new worlds of possibility. A traveller’s guide to leaving earth, narrated by Dominic Frisby

[edit] Mars

Have you ever fancied catching a rocket to the Red Planet? How about road testing an alien planet as a tourist destination? Tonight you can as Voyage to the Planets blasts off from your living room in search of the Solar System’s most spectacular scenery and the chance to meet our nearest neighbours. Mars is the ruby jewel in our night sky and arguably the hottest travel destination in the Solar System. Thanks to a robot invasion from Earth that began in the 1960’s, we probably know more about Mars than every other destination in the Solar System combined. Not bad for a planet so cool that the average summer temperature makes a winter in Antarctica seem positively balmy. It might be freezing, there might be nothing for a human to breathe, but of all planets we know, this rocky, red one is the most similar to home. Pack a good spacesuit and plenty of oxygen and prepare to be amazed.

[edit] Jupiter

Do you fancy blasting off to the King of the Planets? For a truly out of this world planetary experience, you should head beyond the Asteroid Belt to the largest planet in the Solar System. Welcome to Jupiter, a world so roomy that it could swallow every planet and moon in the Solar System and still have room for more. For 400 years, we have been gazing at Jupiter and wondering. Wondering what sort of worlds the astronomer Galileo had spied all those years ago? What would it be like to pay the King of the Planets a personal visit, to step upon its many moons, or dive beneath its swirling clouds? These questions were partially answered when the Galileo spacecraft slipped into orbit in 1995 for a seven-year sojourn that would prove beyond doubt that the entire Jovian system is worth a return visit.

[edit] Saturn

No planet beats Saturn for sheer jaw-dropping beauty. Majestic, mysterious, and massive, this giant is the pin-up boy of the Solar System. But delve deeper and you find a brooding monster – with supersonic winds, fearsome storms and nowhere to stand. Revolving serenely above it all are the dazzling rings, an entire system of glistening particles nearly as wide as the distance from the Earth to the Moon, yet no thicker than one or two storeys in a modern apartment building. Like cars on a celestial beltway, the ring particles race around Saturn at speeds of 60,000 kilometres per hour, but if you could park a spacecraft in orbit doing the same speed, it would be possible to pick up a ring particle in your hand. Thanks to the continuing exploits of the Cassini-Huygens mission, one of the most successful robotic spacecrafts of all time, Saturn is being revealed to us like never before. The images alone were worth the trip, with stunning vistas of the rings, strange six-sided storms around the North Pole and similar, circular giants girdling the South.

[edit] Venus and Mercury

Everyone likes a vacation in a warm climate, but fancy a trip to a place as hot as Hades? Voyage to the Planets heads in towards the Sun to find two quite different sun-drenched worlds that both lay claim to that title. Tiny Mercury, almost invisible in the glare of the Sun, is the place to go for the ultimate suntan. But if your sun protection isn’t up to scratch, you can always get out of the oven by chilling out on the Dark Side. Step into the shade and Mercury’s mercury plunges over 600 degrees.
And it’s here, in Mercury’s deep freeze, that things begin to get interesting. There’s an exclusive night show, caused by the Solar Wind that bombards the planet’s feather-thin atmosphere. And on the closest planet to the Sun, there is even the prospect of ice. In Mercury’s eternally shadowed polar craters, radar observations have detected what could be thick deposits of frozen water. And however it arrived on this sun-drenched, ancient surface, it certainly has a story to tell. But it is our nearest neighbour, pale and beguiling Venus, that hides the biggest secret. The Goddess of Love will literally melt your heart and crush your defences at the same time. Once the twin of Earth, it’s thought that Venus had oceans for billions of years and even the likelihood of life.

[edit] Neptune and Uranus

Got time for a 24 year holiday? Then consider a journey to our most distant and least explored planets, the ice giants Uranus and Neptune. When it comes to public image, the planet with the funny name has always had it tough. But if you think Uranus is a strange name for a planet, perhaps you’d prefer its first name… George. When British astronomer, William Herschel, first discovered the planet in 1781, he christened his discovery after the King of England, George III. But the custom of naming planets after mythological characters ensued and ‘Planet George’ was no more. Cruise down the cosmic highway for another three years and you encounter the last official planet in our Solar System, and a reminder of home. Neptune is the second Blue Planet, the colour courtesy of some mysterious alchemy that’s hard at work in the frozen atmosphere. But does this chilly gas giant who takes its name from the god of the sea really a water world? You’ll need to take the plunge to find out.

[edit] Pluto and Beyond

Like getting away from it all? Pluto must be one of the loneliest places of all. For more 70 years it was counted as the ninth planet, an isolated but sentimental favourite at the end of the Solar System. But in recent years it has been at the centre of a neighbourhood dispute of cosmic proportions. Just what on Earth caused Pluto to be struck off as a planet? It now seems that Pluto has company… and lots of it. And it’s changed the way we think about our Solar System and even how we all came to be here. Although Pluto remains a distant, fuzzy dot of light at the end of our best telescopes, in 2015 all that will change. Right now, a lonely little spacecraft, known as New Horizons, is making its way to the end of our neighbourhood. And onboard is a very special passenger indeed - the cremated remains of Pluto’s discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh. But Clyde will not rest at Pluto; his destiny is to become humanity’s longest space traveller as New Horizons keeps flying eternally outward to the Universe beyond