Space Oddysey
06/12/2004 . Source: Stephen Hunt 

Imagine crashing through the acid storms of Venus, taking a space walk in the magnificent rings of Saturn, or collecting samples on the disintegrating surface of an unstable comet.

From the makers of Walking With Dinosaurs, this magical new drama-documentary series, narrated by David Suchet, takes viewers on the ultimate space flight and, by pressing the red button on the remote control, transports them right to the heart of the European Space Agency's mission control room.

Seen through the eyes of five astronauts on a six-year mission to the new frontiers that make up our solar system, it reveals the spectacle - and the dangers - they face when landing on and exploring the exotic worlds of our neighbouring planets.

Using the latest scientific findings and feature film digital effects, Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets is the ultimate grand tour, brought to life in a beautiful and moving journey packed with peril and excitement.

Along the way, it uncovers the immense physical and emotional challenges that would affect those taking such a trip.

From a daring fly-by of the Sun, to a marathon mission to the frozen realms of Pluto, this epic voyage takes viewers on the adventure of a lifetime.

In a first for a TV series, the actors were filmed on parabolic flights to simulate zero gravity conditions so that they really are floating weightless in some of the scenes.

Series Producer, Chris Riley, continues: "We worked closely with cosmonauts, astronauts and space agencies in Russia, Europe and the USA to bring a gritty reality to the series that reflects over 40 years of their experience of human space flight and robotic exploration of the planets of our solar system."

Facts, figures and the science lowdown are available via interactive TV and the web, plus there's also a special touring show, designed for families, which will be visiting science centres around the UK.

The interplanetary spacecraft Pegasus and her five-strong crew are launched into Earth orbit. Their epic six-year mission has begun.

Forty one days from Earth lies their first encounter - with Venus.

Although Earth's nearest neighbour, it could not be a more different world. With clouds of sulphuric acid, surface temperatures pushing 500 degrees centigrade, snows of metal encrusting mountain peaks and atmospheric pressures that could destroy a submarine, this is a hell-hole of a planet.

Astronauts Zoe Lessard and Yvan Grigorev make the nail-biting descent in a landing craft called Orpheus.

Enveloped in a shroud of gases and plummeting to the surface in a fireball, Pegasus loses contact with them. Cocooned in the supremely re-enforced Orpheus, though, the astronauts land safely.

Encased in an ultra-toughened titanium spacesuit, Yvan takes mankind's historic first steps onto the planet.

His objectives are to collect samples, lay sensors to listen for volcanic eruptions and to retrieve a piece of a robot from a previous Russian mission - but it proves almost too much as the temperature inside his suit soars.

With everything that's keeping them alive at its design limits, these two planet pioneers make their escape with only seconds to spare.

Mars is 150 million miles and 62 days of interplanetary travel away.

Mission Commander Tom Kirby, medic and geologist John Pearson and exo-biologist Nina Sulman make their descent in another specially designed lander, Ares.

This frozen, red planet should prove comparatively easy to explore compared to the ferocious conditions on Venus but, as Tom steps onto the surface, a dust devil, five times larger than anything on Earth, engulfs him.

Fortunately, the Martian atmosphere is so weak that even these giant twisters are harmless. It does Tom no permanent damage, bar leaving a red hue all over his spacesuit!

Supported by a host of robotic explorers, they head for the edge of Valles Marineris - a canyon system a thousand times the size of Arizona's Grand Canyon.

Their quest is to search for water in an attempt to discover life on Mars.

Marvelling at the breathtaking views, the team is suddenly alerted to the imminent arrival of a solar storm carrying lethal levels of radiation.

The safest place is inside Ares. Desperate to complete the experiments, their struggle back becomes a race for their lives.

Battling against radiation and giant dust storms, the team eventually complete their exploration of Mars and return to Pegasus.

They must now cross the inner solar system for an unsettling, but necessary, close encounter with the Sun at temperatures approaching a staggering two million degrees centigrade.

This accelerates Pegasus briefly to one million kilometres an hour, which helps propel them the next half a billion miles to Jupiter.

On the way, however, a scary brush with a rogue fragment of rock begins to erode the crew's trust in Mission Control back on Earth.

As they crash into the top of giant Jupiter's immense atmosphere a few weeks later, there is concern that Control might have betrayed them again.

Even more worryingly, flight medic John Pearson seems to be getting very sick.

Just over 200 days of travel from the Sun, Pegasus reaches the largest planet of the solar system, Jupiter.

Its danger lies in a menace lurking at its core - a churning mass of liquid metallic hydrogen that inflates a magnetic bubble around the planet, producing levels of radiation 500 times the dose that would kill a human.

To repel these lethal rays, Pegasus generates its own magnetic field.

Mission geologist Zoe is to land on Io, one of Jupiter's moons. As the most volcanically active world in the solar system, it's a geologist's heaven.

This scientific bounty does, however, come at a price. Perilously close to the most lethal Jovian radiation belts, Zoe risks severe exposure but she's trained hard for this day and nothing is going to stop her exploring these exotic lava flows.

Her exhilaration at being on the surface quickly turns to frustration when her spacesuit malfunctions. Even the most cutting-edge technology and millions of pounds of development still cannot guarantee safety in these other worlds.

She is forced to cut the mission short. No samples are returned and, to her despair, half the expedition is a failure.

The ringed world of Saturn is almost a year of interplanetary travel away. By the time they reach it, medic John is seriously sick and deteriorating rapidly.

He seems to have been exposed to a lethal level of radiation as Pegasus passed the Sun.

Amongst a mesmerising trillion shards of ice and rock tumbling in endless rings around this gas giant, crew member Nina Sulman conducts a spacewalk.

She collects a fragment for testing, hoping it will help establish the rings' origins and age.

By the time she returns, John has passed away, no longer able to fight the radiation in his body. His death is a terrible blow to the astronauts.

Torn between returning to Earth or venturing on to Pluto, at the edge of the solar system, the psychological stress takes it toll and the crew take the unprecedented step of cutting contact with Mission Control whilst they make up their minds.

Eventually, the astronauts re-establish communication having decided to continue on their Plutonian path.

Almost two years elapse before Pegasus draws close to the tiny frozen world of Pluto, its massive moon hanging close by.

Tom and Yvan make the descent and spend 10 days constructing a telescope which will remain on the surface after they leave, scouring the Galaxy for other Earth-like planets.

Heading for home, there is one final mission: to land on a newly observed comet, Messier, to sample pristine material from the birth of the solar system in a search for the organic building blocks of life.

Resting inside their lander, the comet suddenly starts breaking up without warning, shedding material into space and blocking their safe return to orbit.

Zoe and Nina make a dramatic emergency launch to bring them within sight of Pegasus, but comet debris has breached its hull, injuring Yvan.

Tom is busy fighting a fire on-board. The safety of Earth suddenly seems a long way off...

The Robot Pioneers

To accompany Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets, BBC FOUR broadcasts a documentary that looks at the history of space exploration to reveal the science behind the series.

It tells the story of the human ingenuity that has dispatched robotic missions to all the planets except, as yet, Pluto.

Voyager 2 - which accomplished the original grand tour of the planets in the Seventies and Eighties - is a prime example.

Incredibly, more than 25 years since its launch and now over seven billion miles from Earth, we can still hear its whispers from deep space.

It carries the spirit of human exploration like a metal Christopher Columbus as its sensors probe the edge of our planetary system.

Human space flight has always overshadowed such extraordinary robotic quests but this documentary seeks to unveil their secret history.

Since the first Russian robot flew round the moon in 1959, more than 160 incredible metal explorers have diced with disaster, enduring multi-billion mile missions to unwelcoming worlds and dramatic journeys of discovery and survival that rival the tale of Apollo 13.

They've trail blazed a priceless path for any future manned missions, with their maps, measurements and images providing the knowledge for Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets.

Every amazing event, experience and danger portrayed in the series is based on the findings of these real robotic missions.

The sturdy Russian Venera landers survived blistering temperatures, acid storms and submarine-crushing pressures to snap tantalising images of the surface of Venus in the Seventies and Eighties.

This allowed the production team to accurately recreate this most extreme volcanic surface and know that, to ensure their survival on the surface long enough to carry out their mission, a human explorer would have to be equipped with a super-cooled titanium suit.

Nasa's Viking landers endured five years of daily sub-Siberian winter temperatures whilst hunting for life on Mars.

Their experiences on the surface of the red planet enabled Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets' depiction of this frozen desert world and left the fictional Pegasus crew with no doubts about the stamina they'd need to leave their own footprints in the Martian dust.

Braving the debilitating radiation belts of giant Jupiter, the Galileo mission survived for eight years.

It watched the planet's weather systems and charted the four big moons - snapping tantalising details of the volcano fields of Io and the ice-rucked surface of Europa - enabling the accurate digital representations of these exotic worlds created for the main series.

Thanks to the dedicated spacecraft engineers and the glass eyes and metal limbs of these remarkable mechanical explorers - and many more not mentioned here - this series is able to accurately portray the gruelling reality of a deep space human journey to the planets.

Did you Know?

- The crew of Pegasus were weightless for three times longer than the first American in Space - Alan Shepard - whose Freedom 7 spacecraft carried him on a parabolic trajectory producing just five minutes of weightlessness on his 15-minute flight in May 1961.

- The Mars scenes were filmed at "the most Mars-like place on Earth", the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile, where the World's Space Agencies test their Mars robotic rovers. Whilst filming, researchers in Mexico University actually declared it the most Mars-like place on Earth.

- Mars was the closest it had been to Earth for 60,000 years whilst the film crew were preparing to recreate the planet in Chile's Atacama Desert.

- Since there are no oceans on Mars to hide surface details, we have been able to map more of this red world than we have of Earth.

- Just before filming the solar flare sequence for the series, the largest solar flare ever recorded erupted from the Sun. Images of this eruption were used in the scenes at Mission Control.

- The day the crew filmed scenes of the mission nearing Pluto, headlines in the papers announced that one of Nasa's robotic Pioneer spacecraft was reaching the edge of the solar system too. The newspaper was used as a prop in the scenes at Mission Control.

- On Venus, the Sun crosses the sky 100 times more slowly than on Earth. It takes two weeks for dusk to fall and the Sun sets in the east. Sunset is followed by an interminable night that lasts longer than one of Earth's seasons. It is so hot that lead and zinc form rock pools and mountain peaks get dusted with a metallic 'snow' of iron pyrites and germanium.

- In 1938, Orson Welles' radio dramatisation of War Of The Worlds - in which a realistic news broadcast described a Martian invasion of Earth - sent a million Americans into panic.

- The Sun is currently the most studied object in the solar system. Via the internet, people can watch solar storms rage, check today's solar weather forecast and find out how much radiation will be thrown at Earth in the next few hours.

- Saturn was the last planet the probe Voyager 1 visited. It used the planet's gravity to hurl it over the north pole of the planet's largest moon, Titan, and on, up and out of the plane of the solar system.

In 2003, this vintage probe reached 90 astronomical units from Earth - 90 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, a total of 13.5 billion kilometres, making it is the most distant man-made object in the universe.

It has enough power to operate until 2020, by which time it will be almost 22.5 billion kilometres from Earth.

- The space sport of zero-G tennis was invented on shuttle flights in the Nineties. The ball is a lump of gaffer tape and clipboards are used as rackets. There's no net but points are gained if an opponent misses a shot. Apart from that, it's a free-for-all - forehand, backhand, upside down, overhead, off the wall…

- Until just over 10 years ago, the nine planets of the solar system were the only ones known to man. Since then, around 120 extra solar planets have been found because it was discovered that large planets have just enough gravity to make their stars wobble a little. Once astronomers figured out how to detect this tiny wobble, planets started popping up all over the place.

- No laws of physics were broken in the making of this series. Although the propulsion systems and active magnetic shielding are still just concepts, they are more imaginable to scientists today than Concorde would have been to the Wright brothers.

How we know what we know - the real missions behind Pegasus' journey

The series-makers used facts collected by hundreds of robotic missions to the planets in order to construct the most accurate and realistic human experiences of walking on these exotic worlds.

Every detail of their atmospheres, rock formations and gravity fields has been gathered over the last 40 years.

The colours, sights, sounds and smells encountered by the astronaut explorers in the series are as predicted by planetary scientists who have already been there - experiencing these alien planets and moons through these robotic emissaries.

The information below provides summaries of the missions the astronauts in this series had to undertake and the accomplishments and discoveries of the real trail-blazing robots.

Venus

Today, 98 per cent of the surface of Venus has been mapped by radar from Earth and orbiting Russian and American spacecraft.

They revealed a world covered in volcanic features ranging from tiny craters to continent-sized features.

The Russian Venera landers took panorama images of their landing sites.

In this series, the crew's descent through the Venusian atmosphere and their experiences on the surface are based on the results of these missions.

Working with the Russian mission team who designed and built Venera 14, their robotic lander was rebuilt and aged in the way these scientists believe it would have been altered by decades sitting on one of the most extreme surfaces in the solar system.

Mars

There have been more robotic missions to Mars than to any other world and, today, there are more complete maps of its surface than Earth's.

Nasa's Mars Odyssey and Global Surveyor satellites and ESA's Mars Express orbiter provided detailed maps of the surface and subsurface, as well as detailed observations of its weather and climate.

Robotic landers and rovers have recorded the chemistry, mineralogy and microscopic textures of the ground and it has become clear that liquid water played a big part in shaping the contours of Mars.

To film the Mars scenes, the cast and crew went to the remote Atacama Desert of northern Chile, deemed "Mars-like" enough by Nasa to be a testing ground for its future missions to the red planet.

Sun

Solar science has progressed enormously in the last decade. There's now an armada of international robotic missions scrutinising it.

Nasa's TRACE mission, the Nasa/ESA Soho satellite and Japan's Yohkoh mission have been sending back stunning images of the tormented solar surface, twisted and gnarled by the potent magnetic forces emanating from deep within.

An ESA/Nasa mission - Ulysses - has made four giant, one billion mile-wide orbits of the Sun, providing the first-ever map of the heliosphere from the equator to the poles.

The views shown in the series are modelled entirely on the images from these missions.

To protect the crew from the lethal levels of radiation, they pass by the Sun during a period of quietness called Solar Minimum, with Pegasus shielded by an artificial, on-board magnetic field - a technology currently being researched at the University of Washington in Seattle for possible future propulsion.

Asteroid Belt

This 80 million kilometre thick band of debris is known to stretch out for 280 million kilometres.

Over 48,000 asteroids are catalogued but there are over a million more waiting to be found.

The Pegasus crew encounters one of these unknown asteroids. It is modelled on observations from a number of robotic missions that have flown past, orbited and even landed on these tiny worlds, in particular Nasa's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (Near).

This spacecraft orbited and mapped the surface of an asteroid called Eros for a year then survived a crash landing onto it and continued to send back useful data and pictures.

Jupiter & Moons

The first probes to visit Jupiter - Nasa's Pioneer 10 and 11 missions - discovered that its magnetic field captures charged particles thrown out by the Sun and accelerates them to incredible speeds generating dangerous radiation amounting to over 1,000 times the lethal dose for a human.

A few years later, Nasa's famous Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft sent back thousands of pictures and gigabytes of data, charting the planet's immense weather systems and imaging its moons.

In 1995, Nasa's Galileo mission dropped a probe into the planet's atmosphere which relayed data on temperatures, pressures, wind speed and cloud.

The orbiter spent eight years scrutinising the whole Jovian system and making multiple fly-bys of the four main moons.

In December 2001, Cassini also flew past Jupiter on its way to Saturn.

The details of Pegasus' encounter with Jupiter and the crew's exploration of the moons, Io and Europa, are taken entirely from the results of these missions.

Saturn & Moons

So far, three probes have gone to Saturn. In the Seventies, Pioneer 11 navigated across the ring plane and discovered its eleventh moon, two new rings and that it had a magnetic field a thousand times stronger than Earth's.

Voyagers 1 and 2 sped past in 1980 and 1981 studying the planet's vast weather patterns, the dynamics of the rings and the orbits of its moons.

In 2004, the joint ESA/Nasa mission, Cassini-Huygens, reached Saturn, going into orbit for a four-year study of the system.

In 2005, the Huygens probe will drop into the atmosphere of Titan, taking images and recording weather patterns as it falls towards the surface where, if it survives, it will conduct a series of further experiments designed to analyse the environment it finds.

The Saturn encounter in the series is based entirely on these missions.

Pluto-Charon

Pluto remains the only planet never to have been visited by a spacecraft but, since the Eighties, it has passed in front of numerous stars giving astronomers the chance to make precise measurements of its size and revealing a very thin atmosphere made mostly of nitrogen.

The best images of this planet come from the Hubble space telescope.

Through these observations, it is thought the surface resembles that of Neptune's moon, Triton.

Voyager 2 flew past Triton in 1989, so Pluto's landscape was recreated for this series using the detailed pictures it took.

A Nasa mission called New Horizons will head for Pluto in 2006.

Comet

Our first close-up look at a comet came in 1986 when ESA's Giotto mission made a spectacular flight to Halley's Comet.

Nasa's Stardust mission flew through the tail of comet Wild 2 in early 2004, catching a sample of debris which it will drop back to Earth in January 2006.

The latest comet exploration, mounted by ESA, is called Rosetta.

It was launched from Earth in March 2004 and, in 10 years, will land on comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

The comet lander in this series is modelled on Rosetta's designs.

The crew's exploration of the surface draws on all the robotic encounters with comets to date.

Stephen Hunt