BBC The Sky at Night - Mysterious Mars [HD]

this month there's a majestic sight in our night skies Mars is the closest and brightest has been for many years Mars captures the imagination like no other planet so come with us and let us take you to this amazing world let's journey to Mars [Music] we're in Stevenage where airbus has built a small slice of mars here on earth to test out prototypes for europe's ExoMars Rover and coming up geologist Ian Stewart will reveal how these rocks help unlock the secrets of Mars through here in the past once flawed a Mighty River Pete Lawrence will be showing us the great things we can see on Mars from right here on earth that's fantastic with so much detail there we'll be giving one of you the chance to capture your very own photograph of Mars by taking control of the most powerful camera in Martian orbit and away from Mars could this be the scientific discovery of the century but first our journey to Mars begins above the Red Planet it's astonishing what discoveries have been made without even landing on the surface although we're used to thinking of Mars as a dry and dusty red desert it's actually an amazingly varied and even a dynamic place the hi-rise camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter allows us to see the planet in exquisite detail it reveals a series of extraordinary landscapes from these vast fields of ice sculpted into varied and wonderful forms to shifting seas of sand dunes there shady sides covered in frost there are areas covered in polygons where ice has thawed and cracked creating these almost lifelike structures and impact craters but help tell us the age of the surface of the planet and the hi-rise camera has revealed that this dynamic world can also change almost in front of our eyes this is an image of spring arriving at the polar icecaps on Mars Mars is tilted on its axis just like the earth and so it too has seasons what you can see here in this sort of brain like image is the ground emerging through the ice as it begins to thaw but this is actually frozen water and frozen carbon dioxide otherwise known as dry ice well this atmosphere is so thin they can't sustain liquid water on its surface in most circumstances but have a look at these images from near the Martian equator there seems to be something flowing down this slope now this is quite controversial because there's debate as to what it is some people think water and some people think it's salt water which is actually fluid it's a much lower temperature other people think it's just carbon dioxide or maybe some dust rolling down the slope if not though this could be the first images to show liquid moving on the Martian surface now the Martian atmosphere might be incredibly thin but it doesn't mean there's no weather there as you can see in this image this spiral is a dust devil half a mile high a huge tornado in the Martian atmosphere now this is one of my favorite images this is a uniquely Martian scene this is the result of blocks of dry ice getting down a slope almost as if they were skiing now be used by ice here on earth a true temperature to create a nice atmospheric smokey scenes but on Mars the atmospheres that mine is a hundred and fifty degrees C and so the dry ice stays frozen so what we're seeing here is something that couldn't happen on earth mass is a funny planet sometimes it looks so earth-like and sometimes it does something like this that's uniquely Martian a little later we'll be giving you an exciting opportunity to take control of the hi-rise camera and get your very own image of Mars thanks to high rise and the other orbiting cameras we've been able to explore the Mars of today what's really exciting is trying to understand the Mars of the past today the Red Planet is a hostile environment for life but it now seems over three and a half billion years ago it was very different this history has been uncovered by a succession of Rovers they have traveled to Mars as our surrogate explorers in 2004 two Rovers Spirit and Opportunity arrived on the planet they were designed to survive for 90 days but opportunity is still going strong 10 years later and then in 2012 the much larger Curiosity rover arrived in just a single decade these missions have transformed our understanding of Mars by allowing us to read the secrets contained within its rocks geologist Ian Stewart has been investigating how the rocks on Mars have allowed us to search for signs of ancient water and recreate the planet's astonishing past inside here it's something really precious that there's a slice of another planet this tiny rock is a bit of a meteorite which fell in a mine and the desert 1990 name but actually it's from Mars it's one of about a 130 or so meteorites that came from Mars blasted off by asteroid impacts I think as you could tell a lot about a place of its past from the rocks and the leaves behind so this I know is an igneous rock it's our Bassel which means at some point in the past volcanoes were erupting on Mars it's Little Rock tells us a great deal about how Mars formed but it doesn't help us with a really big question could the planet of ones harbored life the Mars rovers are roaming the surface of the red planet searching for rocks that reveal clues to what the environment was like in the past reading this evidence is a skill we've perfected here on earth this rock face as parts of the Jurassic coastline in Devon it was formed around 240 million years ago and it provides a detailed record of different environmental conditions there's a whole set of layers in this class and I think is if you'd like to read them properly you can can create these different environments so here we've got a layer of cobbles there's a layer of sand coming through and here's more of these these cobbles sand cobbles and then we get this here it's more of a soil this is an ancient land surface and above that it's just sand blown around by the wind that these these are really distinctive you can see how beautifully rounded all those pebbles are look at them incredible so they would have started off it's just general angular rocks but what made them all smooth is water they've been Chand around in a turbulent flow you imagine a big river of debris come along knocking the edges off the the clasts as they go it just create these beautifully smooth pebbles so this really is evidence that through here in the past once floored a mighty river the one key condition that most scientists agree is needed for life to have existed on Mars is water so the rover's have been searching for rounded pebbles there might be signs of riverbeds but just along the coast it's a different kind of rock formation that she was a very different kind of evidence of contact with water and potentially an even more favorable environment to search for life follow me seers it's just a wall of sand just layer upon layer of sand dunes piled on top of each other but in amongst it it's these little bands here there's another one and they get a little bit thicker and they look different to the sound the bomb if I keep looking here I Crumley this is because what we've got here is a deposit that's been laid down by really fine sediment settling out of standing water essentially this is a temporary lake long fan you only get rocks with this incredibly fine green structure if they were formed when water becomes a really still as it is in lakes and ponds just take it a big dog Sandhya and as I swirl it round you see that as long as I keep the swirl going and most of the sediment still in the water but watch what happens if I stop the flow immediately the finer sediment the modern the salt just settles out so that means that whenever we see a fin a thin band of really fine sediment we know that it must have fallen out from still water this cane of sediment is much more likely to preserve signs of life because it formed in a much gentler way using the geological tricks we bail up this detailed and compelling picture of the history of water on earth what does all this mean from Mars NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has been taking close-up images of rocks on Mars and sending them back to earth for scientists to analyze Sanjeev Gupta is a geologist on the curiosity team so this is a photograph taken by curiosity's alright that's right this is curiosity and Gale Crater and you can see these beautiful grabber planes that my curiosity is driving over searching for rock layers that might contain evidence for past life so so what kind of rocks that encounter them so here we are we can see these beautiful rock layers here if we zoom in you can see that it's actually made up of lots and lots of small particles pebbles but what's really exciting about this rock is that the pebbles themselves are actually rounded so we actually interpret this rock layer to be actually an ancient streambed and that's the first time we've had that sort of evidence now rivers aren't that great for looking for ancient life you know you can imagine these pebbles are being tumbled in these flows it's just too high-energy and what geologists really look for for searching our quiet water environments calm environments where particles sediment particles can settle at a suspension and trap organic matter for example you know the best environment would be an ancient lake now we never dared expect to find an ancient lake but this is what we saw so here's one of the first ever drill holes on the surface of another planet that's extraordinary that's something we do all the time I know that's right we do it all the time earth this is the one of the first ones and you can see this drill hole is about two and a half centimetres in diameter and you can see the rock powder yes resulted in the drill tailings over here the next images is fantastic because this is actually an angled view into that drill hole into the drill hole and you can see the grains over here very very fine-grained this drill hole is about 2 and 1/2 cent so these are smaller than sand grains that's the smaller than sand grains and these layers basically built up through time in an ancient lake and this is a perfect environment to look for clues for ancient life curiosity has been able to go even further creating the clearest picture yet of Mars over three and a half billion years ago using its onboard laboratory its analyzed these samples to show that not only did Mars of water but that the water would have been fresh you know it's amazing to think how much we've managed to learn by studying the rocks on another planet but actually to code ourselves the picture reveals is Mars over three and a half billion years ago a wash with fresh water and praying with the ingredients to support life not only that but we now have a good idea about where to look for direct signs of past life on Mars and that's exactly what the next ruler will do [Music] Mars has captivated us for millennia and one of the reasons is that as our next-door neighbor it's an unmissable presence in our skies and so Pete Lawrence begins this month's star guide with some tips on how to observe Mars now is a great time to go and view magnificent Mars and you can see it up there just off to the left of the moon the reason why this is such a good time to look for it is that the earth is currently located between Mars and the Sun and that means that Mars is at its closest to us this occurs roughly every two years or so when it happens Mars appears bright in the sky and is really easy to find with the naked eye the motion of Mars across the night sky is extraordinary it appears to wander back and forth performing a giant loop a Mars isn't actually moving around the solar system in an unruly fashion what's happening is that we're seeing an illusion caused by the fact that the earth is orbiting the Sun faster than Mars as we overtake the red planet so Mars appears to loop back on itself in the sky an effect known as retrograde motion of course it's most obvious attribute is its color the color comes from the rocks on the surface of the planet but it's not uniformly red which means with a good telescope you can still see some splendid features on its surface and that's exactly what the members of the Bedford Astronomical Society are doing oh this looks interesting well that's an imagery captured of Mars last Friday I was really pleased there we've got some nice detail showing up you've got that lovely v-shape feature that which is syrtis major of course and then further to the south of syrtis major you've got that bright patch there we're just seeing a bright it looks to me like it's a polar cap but it's not is it no it's the it's the hello space and this huge impact feature it's nine kilometres deep and it just must be full of cloud at the moment which is why it's so quite reflective but that bright patch you've got at the top there that is a pillock that's the genuine polar cap that is decreasing all the just fantastic so much detail there now we've seen some fabulous images of Mars tonight and if you manage to get any of your own send them through and we'll put up a selection on our website now Mars is an amazing object of view and observe at the moment but this plenty on offer around that part of the sky as well so here's this month's Star Guide Mars is currently rising in the southeast in the constellation of Virgo as darkness falls and throughout the month tracks west it begins close to the bright white star Spica and ends the month just south of the middle bright star polymer polymer sits at the bottom of a large semicircular pattern of stars known as the bowl of Virgo if you have a telescope select a low power eyepiece and sweep through the region close to the top of the bowl it's known as the realm of galaxies this part of the sky is full of distant galaxies which appear like faint smudges the region to the left of the bowl currently plays host to dwarf planet Ceres and Minor Planet veste veste is currently on the verge of naked-eye visibility from a dark sky site but both objects are well within binocular range finally let's return to Mars the most distinctive feature you can pick out with the telescope is known as the syrtis major a large dark v-shaped pattern the best time to look for it throughout April is around 11 p.m. between the 18th and the 28th [Music] more from Mars in a few minutes but first last month we showed you how to take amazing images of the night sky with a smartphone and you've been sharing your results with us this image by Andrew Carter shows the clavius crater on the moon in fantastic detail Paula Newton caught Venus transiting the Sun and you can make out the shadow of Jupiter's moon Io in this image by Damien Weatherly a Mitchell Reitsma and it should capture Saturn and its famous rings now it's time for this month's Astro news and there's been a lot happening in the astronomical well since we were last on air certainly has for starters the solar system has a new member and here it is this is 2012 VP one one three snap you get a better name soon but we can see here is images taken over six hours and colored so that you can see that something's moving and that's actually a dwarf planet in the outer solar system now this thing's in a really unusual orbit much further out than Pluto two and a half times as far from the Sun as Neptune is and orbiting in a place where it's got no right to be the only other thing around there is something called Sedna which we found just over a decade ago but those two things are on orbits that we can't explain using conventional solar system mechanics so it's a very exciting time and another potential a dwarf planet that's right another dwarf planet assuming it it holds up we don't quite know its size yet but there have been other weird discoveries in the outer solar system as well and this time much place to hate it was a collection of asteroid light bodies but lie between Saturn and Uranus they're called the Senators and on one of these the largest of them has actually been discovered to have rings and this is an artist impression of it so that's the object and here are the two rings around it now this was actually discovered in about 20 seconds of data because the asteroid was passing in front of a star and you get a dip in the light level on occultation now usually with a large object like this we'll just get a single dip but what happened here is they got five its offer four little ones and one big one which actually was an indication of your passing through these that's the first time that we've actually seen being sort of body their size and what mystery is is why were they forward where did they come from because you just don't get them on things their size but I think what we're looking at for them in the future but of course the story dominating the news at the moment is the results from by Feb 2 in the South Pole which if confirmed could liters and Nobel Prizes but more importantly it seems to be telling us about a time just a 10 million billion billion billionth of a second after the Big Bang when something called cosmic inflation took place with the universe expanding from a tiny subatomic particle to something much larger setting the stage for everything that's happened since the idea of inflation was introduced to explain some oddities about the universe around us no matter which direction you look on a large scale everything's the same get the same number of galaxies and the universe is at the same temperature it seems like a cosmic coincidence what you might expect is a universe that's far lumpier the expansion introduced by inflation means that any lumpiness would be smoothed away but until last month we had no direct evidence that inflation took place at all one of the leaders of the experiment that may have discovered the signature of cosmic inflation is clamp right now to look for the signal you have to go of all places to the South Pole so here's your here's your antarctic telescope but bicep2 is actually in this dish here yeah in this kind of conical shaped shield is the bicep2 telescope itself on why Antarctica so we go to Antarctica because the atmosphere there is fantastically dry now this is very counterintuitive this is water when you get off the plane you're standing on two miles thick of ice 10,000 feet of ice and they tell you it's a hyper desert and what little moisture there is in the atmosphere is in the form of ice and not liquid water now liquid water is a killer for these kind of observations because it basically run as the atmospheric pike essentially we can look straight out into outer space without the atmosphere getting in the way okay and you're looking at the Cosmic Microwave Background the oldest light we can see and here's an image of the whole sky in microwaves and it's a picture of the universe as it was what four hundred thousand years or so after the Big Bang right so these blobs these hot and cold spots red and blue spots are places where there's a little more manna and a little less matter and these blobs actually evolved into the galaxy clusters and galaxies that we see in the universe today now what bicep2 has given us seems to have given us is the first evidence for the first direct evidence for this inflation so what is it in this light that gives you this signal so inflation was already a popular theory and but in some sense it was kind of made up to fit observational facts but what it also did is it made an additional prediction which was not observed which haven't been observed and this was this is to do with gravitational waves ripples in space especially ripples in space-time right so that was an additional prediction so when you have a theory which is a very nice theory a lot of people like it you want to find some prediction that it makes that you can additionally go and check right and that's so the the detection of these gravitational waves has been called a smoking gun for inflation right right now what they do is they impose on the polarization pattern of the microwave background a small additional signature a small degree of swirling us okay so let's have a look so this is the patch of sky this is the bicep2 so with that swirl enos that we were talking about so you so these little arrows are the polarization signal right but here we've subtracted out the expected part as it right and we're left with the so-called B mod right which is the swirl enos of the pattern now only gravitational waves crucially only gravitational waves can make the swirly part of the band so it's the detection of this swirling asst is the signature of that inflationary moment it's the signature of gravity waves and the only plausible source for such strong relatively strong gravitational words is the inflationary theory the competing theories don't predict so that's why this is such an exciting result I think you were surprised by the signal when you're not that necessarily that it was there but it was stronger than some people thought yeah so it's it's perhaps about as strong as was originally expected from the simplest inflationary theories the ones that were formulated back in the 80s since then more sophisticated theories have tended to predict lower levels so this week's result was quite a surprise it must be personal satisfaction in this I mean people have been talking it's way too early talked about this but people have been talking about Nobel Prizes and speculating and so on does Gigi wander around the lab but late at night thinking well you know maybe this is it well it's only been a week but before that no we were before that we were just very focused on doing the most careful possible job that we could in the data analysis and just really being as sure as we possibly could be it's very very nerve-wracking actually to be sitting on something like this yeah quite stressful all right well let you get back to it thanks a lot you very much [Music] now pack tamales and a mission that's been planned to take our exploration of the planet to a whole new level the European Space Agency's ExoMars mission is aiming to be the first Rover to directly search for life on the red planet it will be equipped with a drill that will let it dig 2 meters relay the Martian surface to a level protect it from deadly Seiler radiation if all goes to plan will be traveling to Mars in 2018 I'm currently standing on what appears to be a patch of the Red Planet right here on earth this is the Mars yard built by Airbus to test the x-ray Mars rover and put it through its paces now that's really necessary because XA Mars is good to go to a very alien environment I've got a bee hottie here who is a structural engineer on the ExoMars project so what are the challenges that XA Mars will face on the real Martian surface one of the first things that we've got to consider is that Mars is really very cold so we've got nighttime temperatures that go down to minus 125 degrees Celsius that's brisk a little bit chilly and then during the day it might not even get much warmer than minus 85 so you're going all the way between those two and materials as we know expand and contract as they go through the different temperatures and that's especially a problem where you've got structures that might be made of more than one different type of material because we're those two materials meet they actually just tear themselves apart from each other I guess radiation is a problem to you well yes we've only got 1% of the atmosphere on Mars to what we have on earth so down on the Martian surface you're receiving a lot more of that radiation dose and that can be really damaging for your electronics and also for optical devices like lenses can blacken with that radiation dose and that can obviously have a huge impact on how far you can see or your senses that require those optics so this is a prototype called Brian it's one of a series of prototypes and looking at it the wheels are a bit freaky how do these work well we've actually had to develop these specifically for the Mars project because we can't take a rubber tires with us rubber is an organic molecule looking for signs of life absolutely so we've got very strict regulations in place to make sure that we don't take anything with us that could be in any way confused for an organic molecule so you've developed these wheels they're entirely metallic but you've also got to retain the flexibility of the wheel so you'd get from rubber so we've got these very thin wafers of metal that actually are still flexible because they're so thin how do you navigate across the Martian surface well that's one of the really big developments with ExoMars and that's one of the reasons that we've got this Mars yard here because you've got such a long distance to Mars it means you've actually got a 22 minute delay between sending your signal and being received so all of our Rovers are going to be able to actually autonomously navigate around the surface we've got two cameras at the top of the mast so that we can see in 3d it can build up a map of how big the obstacles are and where they are in front of it and then it can actually classify the different areas into this is too big a rock I can't climb over this or this is a safe flat bit this is good to climb over and then it can pick its own path through that map well I can't wait up ExoMars gets to Mars and thank you so much for sharing this with us absolutely it's been a pleasure [Music] now for that special treat we mentioned earlier the team behind the hi-rise camera that showed us the amazing images earlier in the program giving you the opportunity to take control a select for location for a next image of bars it's a spectacular opportunity and what we need is a scientific justification for your choice so it could be an unusual formation some strange colors or maybe a famous place that you'd like to see for the first time with high-rise resolution to take part you can go to our website and tell us where you think the cameras should be pointed will close the entries on the 27th of April and we'll announce the winner in the next month's program it's a fantastic opportunity so please do enter we can't leave you without showing one last image from the Martian surface and here it is this is an image taken by the Curiosity rover on the 31st of January and meiting high in the Martian sky is a fabulous evening star but that's no star that's Earth and I find it wonderful and humbling that we can see ourselves in the sky of an alien world it is a fantastic image but that's it for this program next month we'll be coming from the Brecon Beacons asteroid cab we'll be looking deep into space and you'll also have the chance to discover your very own asteroid as part of a real scientific search for near-earth asteroids so until then get outside and get looking up good bye and the sky at night how to read the solar system BBC book is available now spending time with a pop queen next this evening definitely dusty in just a moment [Music] you

Channel: Miguel Monteiro

Views: 3,023

Keywords: bbc the sky at night, sky at night (tv program), astronomy (field of study), space, mars, life on mars, universe, planets, solar system, journey to mars, exomars, esa mission to mars, exomars rovers, mars reconnaissance orbiter, opportunity rover, curiosity rover, mars express, cosmos

Id: svxoBP5Lnu0

Length: 29min 22sec (1762 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 07 2018