Our Violent Sun

An Educational Favorites VHS from the NATURE SERIES featuring Leonard Nimoy

A brief visualisation of NASA’s historic spacecrafts Mariner, Pioneer, Voyager, and Dawn, exploring the solar system, culminating in the New Horizons mission.

Short educational film of our solar system

The first American space station Skylab is found in pieces scattered in Western Australia. Putting these pieces back together and re-tracing the Skylab program back to its very conception reveals the cornerstone of human space exploration.

At the edge of our solar system supposedly lies an immense planet. Five to ten times the size of the Earth. Several international teams of scientists have been competing in a frantic race to detect it, in uncharted territories, far beyond Neptune. The recent discovery of several dwarf planets, with intriguing trajectories, have put astronomers on the trail of this mysterious planet. Why is this enigmatic planet so difficult to detect? What would a ninth planet teach us about our corner of the universe? Could it help us unlock some of the mysteries of our solar system?

Nowadays we associate Johannes Kepler with his famous laws of planetary motion. But the history of his discoveries is a drama of Shakespearian proportions - full of intrigue, passion, depravity and corruption.

To help visualize the dramatic final chapter in Cassini's remarkable story, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory produced this short film that features beautiful computer-generated animation, thoughtful narration and a rousing score. Producers at JPL worked with filmmaker Erik Wernquist, known for his 2014 short film "Wanderers," to create a stirring finale video befitting one of NASA's most successful missions of exploration.

What if you could get behind the wheel and race through space? We scale down the Solar System to the continental United States and place the planets along the way to better appreciate the immense scale of the Universe. See space as never before, with Mars looming over the Freedom Tower and Jupiter towering above the Lincoln Memorial. Join former astronaut Chris Hadfield - a YouTube sensation for his performance of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” aboard the International Space Station - and his interstellar hitchhikers Michio Kaku and astronomers Derrick Pitts and Laura Danly. It’s a joyride from coast to coast - and from the sun to Pluto.

From the territories of the Arctic to the farthest reaches of the universe, Worlds of Ice shows us the astonishing omnipresence of ice.

Blue Peter presenters Helen Skelton and Barney Harwood want to learn more about the solar system so they challenge scientists Helen Czerski and Jem Stansfield to find out more. They look at how to make telescopes and rockets, and use a toilet roll to measure the distances between planets.

Host Neil deGrasse Tyson tackles one of science's major challenges in each segment of Where Did We Come From? He will guide us as he explores dramatic discoveries and the frontiers of research that connect each central, provocative mystery. Program includes: Revealing the Origins of Life; Origins of the Solar System; Lice and Human Evolution; and Profile: Andre Fenton