Astronomy

It bursts from the Sun with the power of ten thousand nuclear weapons... and when it hits our planet, it could create the largest disaster in recorded history. A magnetic storm from the Sun could wipe out electrical power, television, radio, military communication, and nearly every piece of electronics in the Northern Hemisphere. It's a "Solar Katrina" -- a planet-wide "hurricane" of magnetic forces that scramble all 21st Century technology, possibly for good. What causes this magnetic superstorm? Why is magnetism so powerful -- and yet so poorly understood? And is there anything we can do to prevent the Magnetic Storm?

Mars is filled with mysteries, Volcanoes 77 000 feet tall, Huge canyons, 3000 miles across and 6 miles deep, all kinds of interesting features. Awaiting you is some of the greatest scenery in our Solar System, on a world where water once ruled, then vanished into thin air. Where lost microbe empires may still survive underground. We've seen the postcards, and we do wish we were there.

Visit the planet most like Earth. There is a discussion of what life on Mars would be like and about the life forms that could've evolved there

In the last few years, the Red Planet has yielded up many new clues that life may have once existed there...and may even exist there today. There is now have proof that water once flowed on the surface, that Mars once had lakes, and that the frozen poles are mostly water, not carbon dioxide as previously thought. Mars has snow--an aurora--and lightning generated by dust storms. Most intriguing of all are the seasonal plumes of methane that just may point to bacteria living below the surface.

Professor Brian Cox travels from the fossils of the Burgess Shale to the sands of the oldest desert in the world to show how light holds the key to our understanding of the whole universe, including our own deepest origins. To understand how light holds the key to the story of the universe; you first have to understand its peculiar properties. Brian considers how the properties of light that lend colour to desert sands and the spectrum of a rainbow can lead to profound insights into the history and evolution of our universe. Finally, with some of the world's most fascinating fossils in hand, Brian considers how but for an apparently obscure moment in the early evolutionary history of life, all the secrets of light may have remained hidden. Because although the universe is bathed in light that carries extraordinary amounts of information about where we come from, it would have remained invisible without a crucial evolutionary development that allowed us to see. Only because of that development can we now observe, capture and contemplate the incredible wonders of the universe that we inhabit.

The Rosetta mission was a ground-breaking expedition to land on a comet for the first time, the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet. The Rosetta mission tries to answer our most fundamental questions and to change our understanding of the cosmos forever. Special access reveals what this cutting-edge journey discovered and how these mysterious objects helped create life on Earth.