The Planets - Life

After 9 months of interviews with former space travellers and scientists, former astronaut and geologist Jack Schmitt and researcher Christopher Riley got the chance to rummage the NASA film archives. This enabled them to present a comprehensive and thorough survey of 40 years of space exploration in the series THE PLANETS. Those places on earth that look somewhat similar to planets in our galaxy, like Death Valley, are child’s play compared to a planet like Venus, for instance, where temperatures average 500 degrees Celsius. Consequently, advanced computer simulations had to be used to visualise what ‘life’ on those planets must be like. And the images are absolutely spectacular. Two episodes from this series are screened: THE PLANETS GIANTS reveals the secrets of the massive planets in our solar system and THE PLANETS LIFE takes a look at the most recent exploration of planets with the help of robots.