I was dragged or sucked along, however you want to look at it, into this wonderful experience, of becoming the first experimenters to look at Mars through a close-up camera. This is Mariner Control Center at JPL. The spacecraft is 134.217 million miles from Earth and 50,142 miles from Mars. After a journey of eight months, Mariner 4 was homing in on its target. The first picture will cover an area of approximately 176 miles square on the sunlit bit of the planet.

Over hundreds of millions of years, mountain ranges have risen up, entire continents have drifted apart. Is this how other worlds would be? Earth's celestial partner, the Moon, could hardly be more different. Nothing has happened on this dusty world for billions of years. Its surface shows only the scars of countless impacts by asteroids.

In August 1977, two spacecraft called Voyager began an incredible journey. If they survived the hazards that lay across billions of miles of space, they would reach worlds so distant and strange; they defied the imagination - the gas giants. Voyager was heading for four vast planets that could swallow Earth thousands of times: Jupiter, with its strange bands of cloud and its great red spot, a world crackling with radiation that can be heard from Earth.

On April 12th 1961, the Soviets put their supremacy beyond doubt. Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. Enough was enough. America's new president needed to make his own grand gesture. "The eyes of the world now look into space, to the Moon and to the planets beyond. And we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We choose to go to the Moon."

In 1973, nine astronauts were sent to live and work in the world's first space station Skylab. Their mission was to observe the sun, free from the Earth's distorting atmosphere. They witnessed what no human being had seen before, a sun more powerful than they had ever imagined. To our ancestors, the sky was a patchwork of puzzles. At night, it was brimming with pinpoints of light - stars. Then there was the sun, the yellow sphere whose arrival banished the stars and brought warmth and light. It was hailed as the giver of life, the first god.

Without its atmosphere, the Earth would not be a home to us. Rain on our faces, wind in our hair, the very air we breathe. Atmosphere is what turns our planet into our world. To understand the other planets, we have to understand their atmospheres. The journey of discovery began here on Earth.

In July 1976, NASA's Viking 1 spacecraft attempted a monumental test. For hundreds of years, people had been asking the question, when planets were first discovered, "Is there's life on Mars?" It's been one of those prevalent questions throughout history. This was the first time we would look at the possibility of life, any life other than life here, on the Earth.

The sun is the life-force of our solar system. The Earth is wholly dependent on its energy. Their fates are entwined forever. But in the future the sun will change. One day its benevolent influence will turn against the planets it has nurtured for so long.

The Planets movie series | Different Worlds movie - Closest to the sun lies Mercury, a tiny world of iron and rock, barely discernible in the glare. Then Venus, perhaps a second Earth, hidden beneath a blanket of cloud. Then Earth. And beyond us, Mars, the Red Planet. It has seasons, polar caps, and the possibility of life. Far beyond these rocky worlds are the distant giants. Jupiter, over 1,000 times bigger than the Earth, and Saturn, with its distinctive and dramatic rings. The two remaining planets are 15 times the size of the Earth, yet they are so distant that they appear as the faintest of stars. Uranus - an aquamarine mystery. And finally, Neptune, a world that moved unevenly across the sky. This irregular movement suggested the presence of a more distant planet, whose gravitational tug might be toying with Neptune's orbit - Planet X.




The Planets movie series online | Terra Firma movie - The story of the other planets must also be locked on their surfaces. But they are so far away that they are just dots of light in the sky. Astronomers gazed at those dots, but only on one of them could they make out anything that looked remotely like the landforms of the Earth. It was the red disc of Mars. Over a century ago, an Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, began to chart the dark and light regions of Mars. His maps were the best we had until space probes came along. In 1964, NASA launched Mariner 4. Its mission was to fly past Mars and try to send back close-up pictures. The mission was a technical success, but the fuzzy images showed nothing particularly interesting - just craters like those on the Moon. Astronomers were convinced that the probe had looked in the wrong place.




The Planets movie series online | Giants movie - They announced a mission to the giants called Voyager. It marked a new era for astronomers who would struggle to understand the hazy views they could see through Earth-based telescopes. As Jupiter formed, its immense gravity must have attracted a cloud of dust and gas, from which its moons were born, just as the planets around the sun. Close to Jupiter are small, dense, active worlds, Io and Europa. A mirror of the inner rocky planets, Venus, Earth and Mars. Further out, Ganymede and Callisto are larger, icy worlds, the giants of the Jupiter system. Voyager's next goal was Saturn. As Voyager encountered the planet itself, it found that Saturn was made of the same gases as Jupiter. These two worlds are the great gas giants of the solar system, dwarfing all the other planets. Yet Saturn held mysteries of its own. Saturn is smaller and colder than Jupiter. The last two giants were very different from their more massive cousins. Uranus and Neptune are not gas giants but ice giants. From Earth, nobody had seen a full set of rings at Neptune. Some scientists believed they had seen incomplete segments of a ring, which they called arcs.




The Planets movie series online | Moon movie - One of them was William Hartmann. In the early 60's there were three theories about where the Moon might have come from. First one was that the Earth and the Moon had just grown side by side, had been close together the whole time. Then there was another theory that, well maybe, the Moon just formed in some entirely different place in the solar system. And later on it came in and got captured into orbit around the Earth. So then there was the third theory that maybe the Earth was spinning so fast that it spun the Moon off. And the Moon just sort of flew off like a drop of water off a spinning ball. Discovering the origin of the Moon became the stated scientific goal of the American lunar program.




The Planets movie series online | Star movie - The planets are bound by the gravity of our sun. They were formed as a by-product of its creation. But there's a more fundamental bond between the planets and the stars. The very stuff of life is built inside them. A core of a star is the ultimate fusion reactor. 1995 saw the launch of a new era of solar exploration. The start of a journey that may take us to the heart of the star. The solar observatory SOHO can view the sun in X-rays, ultra-violet and visible light. But SOHO doesn't just look. It listens. The surface of the sun is heaving. Every six minutes the entire star breathes in and out. Its gaseous ocean swells and dips, and a complex pattern of ripples shimmer across its surface. Clues to the structure within. The sun is like a chorus of people, of instruments, playing, but not in tune. The sound waves move back and forth inside the sun, and give tones, just like the tones of a musical instrument. Already SOHO has revealed new surface phenomena. In the aftermath of the solar flare, seismic quakes spread out for thousands of kilometers. But there's much more. We've learned the great deal about the outside of the sun from studying the sound waves, the seismic waves from SOHO.



The Planets movie series online | Atmosphere movie - If you were plummeting down through the atmosphere of Venus, first of all you'd have to make it through the clouds which are quite extensive. They are not like clouds on Earth. They, first of all, cover the entire planet, and that card deck is more than ten-miles thick, so it would take you a long time just to get down through the clouds. In 1971, two Russian spacecraft were on their way to Mars. As the probes barreled in, Mars was suddenly enveloped in a giant dust storm. After transmitting for just 15 seconds, the craft fell silent. The flight controllers had no doubt that the violent dust storm was to blame. Jupiter's Great Red Spot has been around for three centuries, but its future is by no means certain. The Great Red Spot is two or three times the size of the Earth, but it's only one of a whole class of large storms.



The Planets movie series online | Life movie - Others thought that its clouds were caused by a planet-wide dust storm on a parched desert world. Mariner 2 was built to find out. It took with it the hopes of the world's first space biologist, Dr Carl Sagan. Many theories of the Venus environment have been suggested. However, new information eliminates at least some theories. Measurements with radio telescopes show that there's a region on Venus where temperatures are greater than 600 degrees Fahrenheit. It is just possible that the hot region exists at a high altitude, in the ionosphere of Venus. The surface temperature could then be almost Earth-like, and life, as we know it, could exist there. In 1969, Apollo 12 made man's second trip to the Moon, and changed all the ideas of life in the solar system. The truth about Martian life will not come so easily. If life did once exist on Mars, it only had a billion years to evolve, before the planet lost its atmosphere and became too cold and dry.



The Planets movie series online | Destiny movie - We are so obsessed with finding other life forms, and understanding how life originated. It's like life needs to seek out itself. That's manifest in our thinking. Almost certainly, any expedition we mount to another solar system will be to a solar system that looks like it's going to be most like our own. It's not beyond the stretch of imagination to think of sending a probe, an automated probe. Imagine that you're sitting at a control room, 50 or 60 years in the future after this probe is launched, and suddenly this signal comes back, and you're not quite sure what it is and you scratch the computer archives - and by the way this probe is actually one we sent to Beta Hydra - 50 years ago and now it's telling us what that remarkable place is like.