Pluto is one of the Smaller than our own Moon, Pluto has never had a single visitor from Earth - until now. We keep saying, 'This is it, this is humanity's trip to Pluto. For the first time in human history, Pluto is about to be revealed. We can expect surprises, it's almost guaranteed. Until then, we can only guess what Pluto looks like. And recently, astronomers decided not to call it a planet any more. Once thought to be an isolated oddity, Pluto now marks the beginning of a whole new frontier. it's as if the explorers had climbed up to the top of the Rockies and were looking over and could see the lands of California on the other side. There has never been a better time to venture where no human has gone before. To follow in the footsteps of our robot pioneers and explore beyond the planets of our Solar System.

20 years ago, two astronomers made a remarkable discovery, one which would change the way we view the universe for ever. A planet outside our solar system, orbiting a distant star - an exoplanet. Since then, we have found worlds where it rains diamonds, ones that boil at 3,000 degrees centigrade and even a world with four suns in its sky. But the big question is - will we ever find another Earth? As we close in on the discovery of the 2,000th planet outside our solar system, or exoplanet, we investigates the techniques that are revealing so much about these alien worlds. The documentary asks if we are really any closer to finding another world like our own - a second Earth.

In episode 3, Artemis arrives on the exoplanet Minerva B, but will she find evidence of life? This is a vision of our future, the fateful day in a far-flung corner of the universe, when a probe from Earth initiates the first descent onto an alien world, looking for proof of life beyond our solar system.
There are no witnesses, no cheering crowds in the control room. A decade or more will pass before news finally reaches us, back across the dark oceans of space. But the seeds of this mission are already being sowed today by the first generation of scientists bold enough to believe it could be possible.

New planets are now being discovered outside our solar system on a regular basis, and these strange new worlds are forcing scientists to rewrite the history of our own solar system. Far from a simple story of stable orbits, the creation of our solar system is a tale of hellfire, chaos and planetary pinball. It's a miracle our Earth is here at all.

Discoveries of new planets have revealed countless worlds much stranger than Earth. Some of these strange worlds don’t have stars; others are made out of diamonds. Will we ever find a planet like Earth, or are these distant worlds stranger than fiction?

As NASA releases the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, this film tells the inside story of the telescope's construction and the astronomers taking its first picture of distant stars and galaxies. Will it be the deepest image of our universe ever taken? The successor to Hubble, and 100 times more powerful, the James Webb is the most technically advanced telescope ever built. It will look further back in time than Hubble to an era around 200 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies appeared. Webb's primary mission is to capture the faint light from these objects on the edge of our visible universe so that scientists can learn how they formed, but its instruments are so sensitive it could also be the first telescope to detect signs of life on a distant planet.
The James Webb Telescope is an £8 billion gamble on the skills of its engineering team. It’s the first telescope designed to unfold in space – a complicated two-week operation in which 178 release devices must all work - 107 of them on the telescope's sun shield alone. If just one fails, the expensive telescope could become a giant piece of space junk.
From its conception in the late 1980s, the construction of Webb has posed a huge technical challenge. The team must build a mirror six times larger than Hubble’s and construct a vast sun shield the size of a tennis court, fold them up so they fit into an Ariane 5 rocket, then find a way to unfold them in space. This film tells the inside story of the James Webb Space Telescope in the words of the engineers who built it and the astronomers who will use it.