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Stairway To
Stairway To
For thousands of years, man has looked to the Heavens in awe and wonder but, as of next year, the amazing story of our solar system can more conveniently be seen on our television screens. Currently in pro- duction, BBC TV’s The Planets will be a landmark series of eight 50-minute episodes focusing on different aspects of the solar system we call home. Aimed at a broad audience of all ages and backgrounds, the series should pro- vide answers to questions we have always wanted to know, or never thought of asking.
And, with the Millennium approaching, it seems more than ever that this is the right time for an authoritative, entertaining and educational series to remind us of our real place in the overall giant scheme of things.
Even for series producer David McNab, veter- an of previous science shows Tomorrow’s World and Future Fantastic, this groundbreaking series has provided more than the odd frisson of excite- ment and many moments of incredible revelation.
“It’s a fantastic area both in visual terms and also with the various astronomers and scientists at the very top of their chosen field,” he enthuses. “I still can’t quite work out why astronomy as a subject hasn’t caught on in a bigger way, perhaps because things in space are such a long way away, but once you get up close to some of these things they’re absolutley magnificent.”
Combining state-of-the-art graphics, inter- views with scientists and astronomers and vivid illustrations of the complexity and variety between the nine planets and their many moons of our solar system, The Planets promises to grip even the most science-phobic viewer with some of the amazing facts that are out there in space.
“For instance, a surprising number of people actually don’t realise that our sun is a star,” McNab continues. “But there’s lots of more mind boggling stuff, such as the fact that Jupiter’s near- est moon, Io, has a continual bolt of lightning with a charge of about a million amps arcing between itself and Jupiter as it orbits the planet.
“You can even see the disturbance in the clouds as Io follows it around. Io, is in actual fact unmappable, its surface is so volcanic and it’s con- tinually being pulled and tugged about by Jupiter’s gravity. Its surface is seething molten lava and is
so volcanically active that if you were to make two visits a year apart, most of it would be totally unrecognisable.
“Then there’s the fact that there are acetylene snows on Titan, the largest of Saturn’s moons. One of Saturn’s other moons has seas of methane with waves 20 times larger than any you would see on Earth. And then there’s Venus, which has metallic snow, is the hottest planet in the solar system and has a surface atmos-
phere that would
crush a deep sea sub-
marine. It also has sul-
phuric acid rain so it’s
not the sort of planet
you’d want to go live
on or holiday to!”
But it is exactly
the kind of place we
can visit during this
most fascinating new
series, an astronomi-
cal equivalent to the
BBC Natural History’s
consistently popular
and respected wildlife
documentaries. For
McNab and his team
the challenge has
been drawing in all
the various elements,
discarding intriguing
favour of a clear narrative and a selection of themes that will be covered in each episode.
“I’m hoping the series will be a beguiling mix of a lot of things. We’ve got access to recently declassified Russian space archives that haven’t been seen in the west or the east, so we’ve got very high hopes for them. We’ve also got a fabu- lous graphics team who are working round the clock to bring the planets to life, and of course we’re talking to the people who discovered all the important things we know about the planets, and the solar system and the sun.
“Our interviewees are like a Who’s Who of planetary scientists, and it’s a great time to be doing it really, with the millennium approaching and NASA about to crank up its number of mis- sions. But we’re not focusing one programme on
but irrelevant details in
each planet, that would make for an imbalance in the programme because clearly there is more to say about some planets than you can say in one programme, and next to nothing to say about oth- ers which we know very little about, like Pluto.
“I think we’ve got the balance right though, and in every programme you get a trip through the
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