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Private Notes
The Sky at Night team investigate the latest science in the hunt for extraterrestrial life. Scientists have never been more obsessed with finding aliens than they are right now. And they’re using the most advanced engineering and technology to look in some pretty weird and wonderful places across the universe.
Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock visits Professor Mark Sephton at Imperial College London – one of the scientists leading on the Perseverance Rover mission to Mars. This is the first mission to bring samples of rock from another planet back to earth, and Mark shows how they use images sent from the rover to decide the best places to take the precious samples. He reveals the latest technology used to analyse the samples of Martian rock for signs of life.
April 2023 sees the launch of a major European Space Agency mission to explore habitability on Jupiter’s icy moons, with the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer aka Juice. Professor Chris Lintott meets leading scientist Professor Michele Doughert
The Sky at Night team explores the threat of an asteroid impact on earth and meets the space scientists who are developing methods of planetary defence that sound like the stuff of science fiction.
The Sky at Night team investigates the science and engineering helping the UK to blast into space. Chris visits a rocket company near Glasgow to find out how rockets are built.
The team investigates the controversial world of alien communication. If we discover aliens, how would we contact them, and should we communicate with them at all?
For August 2023, The Sky at Night team investigate the science of black holes and discover the incredible techniques being used to uncover their secrets, and even help us answer bigger questions about our universe. Chris meets Dr Becky Smethurst at the University of Oxford to learn how a black hole forms from the death of a star. He also investigates whether black holes deserve their menacing portrayal in popular culture. He describes what would happen if we got too close to the event horizon and how black holes might actually play a role in lighting up the universe. Maggie explores how scientists are trying to understand more about black holes by meeting Dr Tessa Baker, who works on LIGO. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory is one of the world’s largest physics experiments and is not your usual type of observatory; instead of looking - it listens. The next observation run has just started, and Maggie learns what they are hoping to find.
The Very Large Telescope has been responsible for some of the greatest astronomical breakthroughs. For September 2023, the team travels to the heart of the Atacama to explore one of the most advanced observatories in the world, a site at the forefront of astronomy.
A special ‘Question Time’ edition of the programme, recorded at the University of Exeter as part of the British Science Association’s Science Festival.
In a special episode to mark the end of another season, The Sky at Night teams up with Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage to talk all things amateur astronomy.
