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2025: Maggie Aderin-Pocock - Is There Life Beyond Earth?: 2. Searching the Solar System

In this lecture, Maggie continues her journey, this time in a search for life in the rest of our solar system. From the ancient Greeks’ first observations of 'planetai' (wandering stars), she starts by tracing the evolution in our understanding of the solar system and how it came to be, before exploring its central powerhouse, the sun. \n\nMaggie is joined by Dr Nicky Fox, Nasa’s head of science and lead scientist for the Parker Solar Probe, the first ever mission to ‘touch’ a star. Nicky demonstrates with Maggie how the processes going on inside the sun provide all the energy and raw materials for life to exist, and why, ultimately, we are all made of stardust! \n\nNext, Maggie explores Mercury, where a day is twice as long as a year, and Venus, the hottest planet in the solar system, thanks to a runaway greenhouse effect. Is there a chance that Venus could host life in its thick atmosphere?\n\nWe next reach Mars, the current target for Elon Musk with his plans to set up a million-strong human colony. Maggie has always been keen to go herself. She explores the possibilities of living and building a human colony on the red planet. Crucially for us, Mars has also long been considered a candidate for alien life. We learn the latest findings from recent Mars Rover missions, including new data from the Perseverance Rover, which are providing evidence of a time when Mars was awash in water, with good conditions for supporting microbial life. Maggie then demonstrates how we think Mars might have lost its water and atmosphere, leaving any remaining life now buried deep underground. She brings into the theatre a working twin of the UK-built Rosalind Franklin Mars Rover, which is due to launch in 2028 and will be Europe’s first ever rover on Mars. It will drill two metres below the surface for fossilised microbes and other evidence of ancient life. \n\nNext on the grand tour are Jupiter and Saturn, with their breathtaking images captured by recent Juno and Cassini missions. Lecture theatre demos illustrate why these gas giants themselves don’t present much hope for finding life... but, Maggie will reveal that, between them, the two planets host over 300 moons. We explore some of the most weird and wonderful that have the potential to harbour life: Europa, with a salty ocean beneath its frozen crust, and Titan, where the Huygens space probe landed, to reveal a mountainous landscape covered with liquid methane lakes. We also check on the flight of the Europa Clipper – a probe on its way to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa to search for conditions suitable for life. \n\nThere's a brief fly-by of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, where Maggie demonstrates how the planet Neptune was actually predicted using maths before it was ever seen through a telescope. \n\nFinally, we catch up with the two Voyager space probes, which have now flown through space for almost 50 years and made it to the edge of interstellar space. Maggie plays and explains the extraordinary audio of Voyager 1 leaving the 'heliosphere', the life-giving bubble created by our sun, and venturing out beyond the boundary of our solar system. \n\nThis is the 200th anniversary year of the Christmas Lectures. They are the most prestigious event in the Royal Institution calendar, dating from 1825 when Michael Faraday founded the series for children. They have become the world’s longest-running science television series and promise to inspire children and adults alike each year, through explosive demonstrations and interactive experiments with the live theatre audience.

Source: BBC 4