Episode 1 Stargazing Live

Tim Peake is on board the International Space Station getting

ready to make history on Friday as he becomes the first British

astronaut to complete a spacewalk. He has taken time out to tell us all

about it and have a bit of fun showing us how to drink in space.

Plenty of that coming up, I am Brian Cox, he is Dara O Briain, this is

Stargazing Live. Well, I think this is one of the

most exciting Stargazing Lives we have ever had, because not only are

we going to speak to Tim directly from the space station, but we will

be covering the spacewalk on Friday, when we will be joined by Chris

Hadfield. Always a joy to talk to, and we will try to explain how the

space station does not spin out of control, by making this very shed

appeared to defy gravity. It is defined gravity because there is a

cable attached, but you will see what we mean! We want you to enjoy

the stars, but unfortunately the weather tonight has different ideas,

we are in a very wet Cheshire, and at Jodrell Bank, which this year

marks up its 70th anniversary of astronomy. This is our home for four

nights, and we will be hoping the clouds clear so we can see some

stars, and Lucie Green is here to show us the way, what can we hope to

see if we get lucky? It is cloudy at the moment, and it has just started

to rain, but when the weather clears, now is a great time to look

for the planet Mars. That is because it is making its closest approach to

us in its orbit around the son. Head out in the early hours of the

morning, look towards the south of the constellation Virgo to see the

red planet. You might even be able to make out its polar ice caps with

a telescope. We are all about the planets at the moment, and if you

are out before dawn, you might catch a glimpse of venous and Saturn, very

close together in the sky. Towards the end of the month, all five

planets that are visible to the naked eye will be lined up along the

horizon, and that has not happened in over a decade. As ever, we are

going to be asking for your help in a nationwide bit of astronomical

research, how would you like to find a previously undetected pulsar, a

spinning neutron star? And on top of this, we will be finding out what it

takes to become an astronaut, Liz Bonnin will be joining us from the

European astronaut training centre, and a guinea pig will be comedian

and amateur astronomer John Bishop. He will be undergoing a series of

demanding physical tests which all astronaut, including Tim Peake, at

to go through. Tim is the first British astronaut on the ISS, many

of you will remember the moment when he launched into space just before

Christmas, let's take a quick look at what he has been up to since

then. It has been four weeks since he said his final farewells to his

family and took a seat on top of 300 tonnes of rocket fuel. He hurtled at

17,000 mph towards his new home. After a tense manual docking...

Capture! He could stretches legs and take a tour of his new digs. Since

then, he has been clocking up the miles, 11.7 million of them, to be

precise, orbiting the planet 16 times a day. And it has been a busy

month up there, he has had to master like in microgravity. -- life. Not

quite there yet. Practice makes perfect! He has helped his

colleagues make a spacewalk to repair the robotic arm, and thanks

to social media he has shown everyone back home his day-to-day

life in space, his dodgy space haircut, his apology when he

accidentally made a prank call from orbit, and he sent Christmas cheers

from 250 miles up. I would like to wish everybody on planet earth a

very happy New Year and a fantastic 2016. Since the launch, he has

orbited at 450 times, just another 2300 to go! Let's see where he is on

the map. He is near Hawaii. At the end of the programme, he will be

another two thirds around the planet. He has been sending

messages, this is the first, which he sent at Christmas. Hello, I am

Tim Peake, welcome on board the International Space Station. I have

been here about ten days, and I feel like my body has finally

acclimatised to living and working in space, but that was not the case

for the first 24 hours. I felt really quite dizzy, a couple of

times quite nauseous as well. On the second morning, when I woke up, it

was as if my brain had sorted out what was going on, and now I do not

feel up or down, so it doesn't matter what orientation I talk to

you in, my body can work it out. Something else my body has had to

get used to is fluid shift. All of the body fluids that normally pool

in our legs as shifted up and centralised around the chest and

hard area, and that causes an increased pressure in the head. It

also causes this puffy faced look. I suspect, in about a month, all of

these symptoms will be completely resolved. The best bit about being

in space is not really the view, it is the fact that you are allowed to

be five years old again and play with your food answering.

-- your food and drink. You can see we are excited about this, and it is

a huge week for Tim, he is doing his first spacewalk on Friday, and since

the announcement, his schedule has been changed, so he is not allowed

to stay up past eight o'clock, and they use Greenwich Mean Time on the

ISS. We did catch up with him earlier and asked what he had been

doing. The primary purpose of the spacewalk is to actually fix a box

which transfers all the power from one of the solar panels downstream,

and the three and a half hours that I will have after replacing this box

will actually be laying lots of electrical cables for future

capability of the space station. Do you have time to look down a little

bit? It is a great question, and for every first-time spacewalk, there is

a bit of time built into the schedule for adaptation. I will have

a few moments when I will be hanging beneath the airlock, when I can have

a look around, becoming bit more familiar with life outside the space

station, and of course to look down on planet earth and see how that

appeals from outside the space station in a space suit. -- how that

deals. How are you preparing and getting ready for the moment when

you step out for seven hours? Really, the preparation and training

is done back in Houston in the neutral buoyancy laboratory, and for

me it was the most enjoyable and rewarding and challenging and

demanding aspect, so in terms of preparing for what we have to do on

Friday, we have enormous support teams who have helped us to get the

procedure is ready and choreographed the spacewalk, the whole six and a

half hours have been planned in meticulous detail. Myself and Tim

Kopra have run through the procedures, we have used computer

simulations to see where we are going to be going and what we are

going to be doing. We have had our hands on the equipment and tested

everything, including the suits, and so we are really ready to go. We

have heard you will be out for six and a half hours, we know the suits

are inflated, only 20% of your normal movement, tell us how arduous

this job will be. That is right, Dara, inside the pressurised suit,

every motion you make you are fighting against the suit,

constantly moving your fingers, and doing wire ties, connecting

electrical connectors, and I can show you an example of one of the

bags, and one of the electrical coils that I will have to lay down.

In addition to this, I have another bag with three more electrical coils

at least as big as this, and you can imagine working with this kind of

thing in weightlessness is brought with peril, not only in terms of,

you know, getting tangled up, but also lots of hard work in terms of

metal wire ties to undo and having to attach this cable to the space

station, and all of these electrical connectors as well. I know you must

have been thinking about this, that moment, since you wanted to be an

astronaut, following in the footsteps of great names - how will

it feel, how does it feel to become one of those people? I think it is

going to be the most exhilarating feeling imaginable. Obviously, it is

going to be tremendously exciting, there is also going to be moments of

apprehension, I am sure. Everybody I have spoken to says it is not a very

natural thing for the mind of the body to take account of. You are on

the edge there in terms of performance of equipment, in terms

of what we are capable of. It is extremely physically demanding and

very mentally demanding too, but it is what I have trained for, it is

something I am really excited about doing. More from Tim later, and we

will be showing you the spacewalk on Friday. We have come out because you

might imagine that the space station orbits so really, but it takes

ingenious technology just to keep it stable. We are going to show you how

it works by making this shed appear to defy gravity. This is what we

lifted it by one cable, you can see that it tipped over, it is not

particularly stable. But in this case, there is a gyroscope in it, so

let's see what happens. Are you ready? Let's lift the shed! It is

only being held on one side, so you would expect it to tip over, but it

remains standing, but spinning. What we are seeing is the strange

property, the strange property of spin. Essentially, the gyroscope,

the shed was trying to fall over, as it was earlier, but because of the

spinning drum inside, you can trade off that tendency to fall over into

that motion, which is a stable motion, as you can see. Now, that is

essentially the main way that the space station remains stable. The

spinning drum does not want to get out of the angle that it is spinning

done. The space station has four gyroscopes, faster than that,

spinning at 6600 rpm, and they wait 100 kilograms each, so it is a lot

of spin. So if the space station starts to tumble, and it can happen

for many reasons, if the astronauts are moving around, a spacecraft

docks, or even the pressure of sunlight on the solar panels can

spin the space station. The gyros keep it stable, Tim will demonstrate

that, actually, but you can move them and potentially trade the spin

of the space station for the spin of the gyroscopes. That whole control

mechanism, which is based on the physics of the spinning things,

allows the space station to remain stable and orientated correctly. And

saves it having thrusters and needing fuel to be delivered to the

space station. You have to do and sometimes, it is not a perpetual

motion machine, and the Russian station BLEEP part of the station

has thrust is to reset the system. This is very different when you are

in space, if you want to see what a gyroscope looks like in space, Tim

showed as one earlier on. Once the gyroscope is spinning, you can see

how stable it becomes. And however I knock it, it is not going to change

its plane, it is going to remain in the same plane. I can put it

physically into a different plane, but it will still hold that same

plane, and it is much more stable, it gives you an idea of how we use

spin stabilisation and gyro stabilisation for control on board

the International Space Station. This is amateur astronomy, isn't it,

standing in the rain? With a shed! The great tradition of astronomy!

The ISS is nothing without the astronauts on board, and Tim has

been through six years of intensive training. Liz Bonnin has travelled

to Cologne to go behind the scenes at the astronaut training centre.

Joining her for the next three days is a human guinea pig, one of the

astronaut John Bishop, I am loving what we are putting him through! He

is a keen astronomer and a friend of the show, and he is pretty fit and

intrepid as well. With a bit of luck, Liz will be ready to chuck him

in at the deep end. We are here, Dara, welcome to the

European astronaut Centre, we are here to show you some of what it

takes to get to the ISS but we are also here to put John Bishop to the

astronaut test. This is the Neutral Buoyancy Facility, very specialist

pool that is kitted out with all sorts of good things, including a

replica of Columbus module. This is the European space lab on the ISS

and there is also a full fully operational airlock, submersible

platforms with handrails and work stations. This is where astronauts

begin to train for spacewalks or extravehicular activity is, EVA, as

it is known. Tim Peake is doing his first spacewalk on Friday and it all

began here. He embarked on 150 hours of the training it takes to make it

up there, what has to be the most challenging and difficult thing you

can do on the ISS. John Bishop is embarking on the first hour of that

training. How are you feeling? What made you sign up in the first place?

To be honest, it was Stargazing Live. The show got me into astronomy

and I have got to thank Tim O'Brien are Jodrell bank, he informed my

wife about what telescope to get for my birthday, and I have just had it

calibrated because we haven't had a clear night. And if you have

interested in astronomy -- an interest in astronomy and someone

says do you want to come and be a spaceman pro weekend, who will say

no? You have had a little deeper and you are going to do the training

session. Tim proved he had the right stuff, but I was looking at other

criteria you might need should you like to take it further and some of

it, aside from having superb physical fitness, as you obviously

have, a scientific or technical qualification as well, you have to

have the right personality. Live and work with people in a very close,

confined space for months on end without going mad, are you a people

person? I have been on a caravan holiday and I have shared a dressing

room at Dara O'Briain, so that takes some doing. You must be a good

multitasker, mechanic, scientist, plumber, guinea pig... So you mean

being a dad, I can do it. John is going to put many of these criteria

to the test all at the same time very shortly. But he only arrived

this morning so we thought it was only right to show him around the

place. So I am here, I have made it, I am

at the European astronaut Centre. That is Yuri Gate Caryn's head. Not

his real head, a copy -- Gagarin. These are actual live shots coming

from the Space Station. You can see Tim in the top right-hand corner. It

looks like a couple of fellows who have come to fix a washing machine.

So this is a centrifuge, which basically spins around. Now... I

have been in many rooms that have been spinning but normally that has

been after I have had a drink. This is a space bed. It is exactly what

Tim Peake and everyone else in the group will be sleeping in. It is

like going on the most stressful, most involved, longest caravan

holiday ever. Would be great, though, wouldn't it?

So you have had a good look around, anything surprising, anything making

you feel a little bit petrified or you good to go? I don't like the

centrifuge, which I have to do in a couple of days, I am not looking

forward to that but the main impression you get from here is

everybody is working towards one goal, working at peak performance.

You get a real sense of it here, don't you? And you meet real-life

astronauts, Andreas Mogensen, he qualified in Tim Peake's class,

Denmark's first astronaut, he is your mentors for the next few days

-- mentor. What is the most challenging part of this class? Just

getting used to working under water, especially with your safety tethers,

because obviously there is a lot of focus on safety. You don't want to

let go of the Space Station but in case that happens, we are reattached

with safety tether. If you're not careful, you quickly get tangled in

it. Any other invaluable advice for John before he gets in the pool?

Slow and steady wins the race. Don't rush it, if you do, that is when

things go wrong. Wise words, are you ready? I am, this is

things go wrong. Wise words, are you activity that Tim and Andreas have

done. I am nearly there. And you have do really imagine you are in

space, one foot or one hand wrong, you are cosmic dust. Is that

helpful? Yes, it does help, thanks for that. Good luck, see you on the

other side. And with us is Herve, he will be the instructor and will

supervise the entire procedure. John basically has to practice what

astronauts do when they are translating, moving along the ISS

with handrails. He will have to move one tool from one place to another.

It seems pretty straightforward, but how complex can it get? It is very

complex. Imagine I am a space walker and I see part of the Space Station,

and I am carrying all of these tools. I don't want to be lost in

space like in the Gravity movie, so for safety reasons, I have to be in

contact with the station at two different points, always two. The

first point is the safety tether. It is a real with a safety line

attached to the airlock. So this is really important, it get you home.

My second attachment point is my arm. What will happen if I run out

of cable, out of this stuff, I know I need to proceed further. For that,

I have to do what we call a safety tether swipe. That is the reason I

am carrying a spare safety tether with me, to extend. I will show you

the process, how to do it. So first of all, I have do secure myself with

one tether to be able to work with both hands. Second point, I attached

the cable of this one to the station here. Then I have do remove this one

in order to attach it here, but if I do it that way and I let it go, it

is a giant snake floating away and I am lost. So before I do that, I take

this tether, attach it to the real, then remove this one and attach it

to the other real. -- reel. Then this one back to this. You make it

look simple but I lost you halfway through that procedure, far more

complicated than I thought I'd you also have to do it... You have to do

the work with these gloves. John Still has a few safety text to do

before the water, come back to us for his first training session.

Yes, we are dunking him in the water soon. It is difficult enough without

a space it. If you want to ask anything about Tim Peake's mission

on the Space Station, if you have any photos, send them to us by

e-mail, Twitter or Flickr, details are on the screen. We have online

coverage of all of the scenes tonight in stargazing and for those

of you who like to watch two screens, go to the website. Now, the

last year has been a tremendously exciting one for missions across our

solar system. We all remember the Rosetta's successful rendezvous with

comment 17 months ago. We are sending more information back from

the probe. Tomorrow night, we will be catching up with the project.

That is a very good model. We will find out more tomorrow from Matt

Taylor. Cassini has been in orbit around Saturn for over a decade,

arguably the most successful space mission of all time. At the moment,

it is investigating Enceladus, probably my favourite moon in the

solar system, I think. It is about the size of Wales. And before we got

there, before Cassini arrived at Saturn, we thought it would be a

dead world but is absolute as you see from the image, it is anything

but. It has jets of water ice from the surface, so there may be water

below the surface. What Cassini has been doing is making very close

flyby is over Enceladus, because we want to know what is happening --

fly bys. One of the things Cassini is looking for in the Jets is

molecular hydrogen, one of the components of water. The reason is

that on Earth, there are systems called hydrothermal vents and this

is a video of the event system. They produce molecular hydrogen,

chemically heated sea water seeping up into the ocean, but any

biologists think that these are the places on earth, 4 billion years

ago, which essentially functioned as the cradle of life, so the chemistry

of where life began on Earth could be there. So if we find that there

is evidence that those kinds of structures in the ocean or in the

liquid water below Enceladus, it makes that little moon possibly the

prime candidate for life in the solar system beyond Earth. It is a

fascinating place. In March last year, the don't grid Dawn probe

reached Ceres -- the Dawn probe. It was thought to have a large icy

ocean and we were excited about some of the blackspots, lots of theories

about the bright spots and why they were transmitting light. People were

saying is a delight, is it an alien city? It obviously isn't but what is

it Mr Mark the probe flew just 240 miles above the surface and these

incredible pictures have found out that they are a type of salt, like

Epsom salts. And it is not boring. It means Ceres might form somewhere

in the distant solar system. Perhaps the biggest story of the year was

from the most famous Dwarf Planet, Pluto. After nine years flying at

36,000 mph, this thing, the new Nasa Horizon probe, about the size of a

car, arrived. We were excited about it back in March when it was a long

way off and we are revealing the first tantalising glimpses of Pluto.

Here to discuss the latest data is Dr Carly Howett. Welcome. For a long

time, the best image we had Pluto was from the Hubble telescope, which

is very exciting image, but not particularly detailed. No, it is

very blurry, but you can see that there are some differences. Pluto

isn't uniform, light and dark regions. And then this image gets

delivered to us. Yes, so much more, again, light and dark, so it is

great but so much more geology in this. And varied geology as well.

Yes, we didn't realise how active Pluto was and how varied the geology

would be, it has been phenomenal. It has become very famous, this heart

shaped structure. What is that? It is the smoothness of the region that

is interesting. Everywhere is bombarded by meteorites so where the

region is smooth, it tells us the surface has been re-coated, so

something has happened and on Earth, it is erosion, wind and water and on

Pluto, it can't be the reason, so it is geologically active, which is

very exciting. So where is it coming from? That is one of the big

questions, the radioactive iso- times in the rock, but whatever is

there is warm enough to create this large-scale circular patterns that

are eradicating the craters on the surface for some how old are we

think the service is? Less than 10,000 years, so incredibly new. It

may even be active today. And it is rising up like a lava lamp, the heat

at the bottom creates a flat surface. If you zoom in on the

image, there are little cells and we think they are individual

circulation cells. That must have been a great shock. I don't think

you could have found a planetary geologist or astrologer who would

have said this world would be active now. Absolutely not, it is so far

from a big gas giant or back of the right and they are usually closed to

other big planets that can steal the energy, but Pluto is out on its own.

And this is a tantalising picture on Enceladus. We think this might be an

extinct cryovolcano and we think that because it is mounted with a

hole in the middle and in terms of geology, it is difficult to explain

if it is not a volcano, but we don't think it is active, we think it is

probably extinct. So not volcano that spews lava, it throws out...

Ice. There is not a lot of rock, on Pluto, so we think this erupted ice

in the past, so different to the volcanoes we are used to. This is

one of the most beautiful pictures I have seen in the history of space

exploration. This is the tiny Dwarf Planet, 3.5 billion miles from the

sun, but look at that. There is so much, you can see the mountains, the

flat parts, and the atmosphere, we didn't know there would be an

atmosphere when we got to Pluto, we thought it would be collapsed on the

surface, but you can see there is clearly an atmosphere and a very

complicated one. So we are looking at mountains of ice. Water ice that

forms because Pluto temperatures are very strong, but it is not very

dense, so other ice would float on top, so you are seeing water ice

mountains floating on a sea of other ice. Methane, carbon monoxide, that

sort of thing. We even have a shot of an eclipse. This was an image we

took up the New Horizons had passed by Pluto, looking back, so the sun

is behind, just to the top right, so it is brighter to the top right, but

we can tell the colour of Pluto's sunrise and sunset. It would be

blue. So many mysteries with Pluto, we have a lot of data to come back,

so if there is one question you could answer about Pluto, what would

it be? If there is still activity going on, that is a key one. How old

are the ice volcanoes? Whether this resurfacing is continuing to this

day, that is the key thing, it helps us page and date these regions. June

into Back to Earth later immediately to find out what is next for New

Horizons and send questions. One of the big questions we hope

that New Horizons will answer is where Pluto came from, did the

planets in our solar system formed in the order we see them today, or

did they start in different orbits? One recent discovery might shed some

light on that. It is not hard to see why Hawaii is

viewed as a paradise, golden beaches, tropical climate, what is

not to like? But for astronomers like Michael, it is a paradise for

entirely different reasons. Astronomers like it because, at

night, Hawaii is really, really dark. There are not that many people

who live in Hawaii, so we have extremely Dark Sky Reserve, clear,

the night is still. Every night, people are using this telescope to

study the edge of the universe. Most of the time he uses Hawaii's ink

black skies to search for failed stars called brown dwarves, but his

greatest discovery was a total surprise. In 2011, he saw a faint

red dot. It stood out very sharply in our images as something very

strange, we did not know what it was, if it was faint because it was

not releasing much energy or because it was very far away. At the two

years of observation, he reached a surprising conclusion - the dot was

just eight light-years away, our backyard in galactic terms. We did

some calculations and found it was only seven times the mass of

Jupiter, it was not a star, it was not a brown door, in fact it was a

planet floating all by itself. -- brown dwarf. Michael had found

something never seen before, something almost mythical in

astronomy. This world was not orbiting a star but was alone in the

blackness of space, a rogue planet. This was the first confirmed

free-floating planet found today, we are very excited that we know this

exists, we are eagerly looking for more. We think there are many more

out there, possibly billions, but how did they end up drifting alone

in space? One theory is that these planets were not always without a

star to call their own. If this is true, it might shed light on a

mystery in our own planetary system. 2500 miles from Hawaii, two

scientists are grappling with a problem. How did our earth survive

the chaotic early solar system? You can think of the solar system today

as a pool game in progress, and at some point there was a giant break,

everything went flying all over the place, and you come in and look at

it and try to understand, how did it all start out? Here is the issue -

we note the planets did not start life in a current positions. Their

orbits have moved over time. But the team cannot just run time backwards

to find out where they started. Instead, they create computer

simulations, modelling different positions. Then they run time

forwards to see what happens. Within the context of the computer

simulation, we try to programme in all the laws of physics that are

relevant, that we understand well, and using these laws of physics, we

try to recreate the history of the solar system. But no matter how they

set up the planets to begin with, and no matter how many times they

ran their models, they were struggling to create the solar

system we see today. The big problem that we have is that the terrestrial

planets, Mercury, Venus, earth and Mars, were often injected from the

solar system and destroyed, and that is kind of a bad thing when you are

trying to reproduce the solar system. The mass of Jupiter is the

problem. Time and again, it's huge gravity violently disrupt the

growing solar system, with the earth often being thrown into space. But

when that rogue planet was discovered, it offered a bad goal

solution to the Jupiter problem. -- a radical solution. We thought, what

if we introduce an extra planet into the solecism and dejected such that

it is no longer there, could we then save the earth and the other

terrestrial planets? -- into the solar system. With another giant

planets between Saturn and Uranus, they ran the computers again. In

most of the simulations we ran, that extra giant planet was rejected to

be Gameiro planet out in the galaxy. -- was objected to become a rogue

planet. Strangely enough, that is what saves the terrestrial planets

from being injected themselves. They cannot be certain, but this is the

most convincing explanation yet, suggesting that out in the blackness

of space there roams an orphan planet that was once part of our own

family, a planet which we may have to thank for the survival of the

earth. Where is it now, I wish I could do a

Serb Patrick imp! After 4.5 billion years. -- Sir Patrick imp.

Astronomers have been studying that rogue planet in more detail than

ever before, and this is what they think it might look like, we know it

is cloudy, we know it is hard, and we know there are dust storms and a

chance of showers of molten iron, this is six times the mass of

Jupiter, it is a bizarre world. Earlier we spoke to Tim Peake, and

in the 30 minute since then, he has travelled a third of the way around

the planet. Let's find him, we have lost him, he could be anywhere!

Literally anywhere around the globe. He is down here, there he is! He has

gone again! On this scale... How far above the surface is he? About 1.9

centimetres on this scale, so the altitude is not that high relative

to the size of the earth. The space station is angled at about 52

degrees to the equator. And it just goes around and around and around,

it does not make many orbital corrections, but it goes around 16

times a day, so in 90 minutes, the earth will have moved a bit. So that

means the space station sees most of the earth's surface, it goes

directly overhead of a very large fraction of the surface. And even if

it does not go above, they can see it. Just low on the horizon, you can

essentially see the space station from most places, but it goes

directly over most of southern Britain. Lucie Green can tell you

how you can see it for yourself. Thank you, yes, the International

Space Station is surprisingly easy to spot, and to help you to do that

there are several websites, where if you enter your location, it will

return to you exactly the right time to go out and have a look, and

whereabouts in BSkyB space station will be seen. It helps that it is

incredibly bright. -- where about in the sky the space station will be

seen. It is still in sunlight when we are in darkness, and it's a vast

solar panels reflect sunlight back towards us. I went out and so it

going over, it looks like a bright star streaking across the sky, and

it takes around five minutes to get from one horizon to the other. That

gives you plenty of time to try to take a photo of it, and all you need

for that is a camera that allows you to take a long exposure and a tripod

to put your camera on. Using that kid, I managed to get a great photo

of the space station streaking across the sky, and I even got three

planets in there. For those of you who are more adventurous, try taking

a photo where you can capture the details of the space station, see

the solar panels and the modules that Tim Peake is working and living

in at the moment. In fact, there is even a video guide on the website to

help you see that. I am joined by members from the Macclesfield

Astronomical Society, who were hoping to catch a glimpse of the

Crab Nebula and the Crab Pulsar, and we are interested in pulsars because

we need your help to find more of them, and Dara and Brian are going

to come back to that later. I have been told that the clouds might

clear later, I remain optimistic, but here to tell you what your

chances are of spotting the space station and other objects is the

weather with Arbilla Vereen. -- with Phil Avery. I bring good

news of improving weather conditions, but it may well be that

part of Northern Ireland and the south-west of England will have good

conditions, and then towards midnight the south-west of Wales may

begin to clear up. We have a planetary conjunction between Saddam

and Venus, and later in the night it may well be that the cloud clears so

you can get a view of Tim Peake as he hurtles overhead. As we move

forwards towards tomorrow night, no disguising the fact that we have

another area of low pressure throwing weather fronts across many

parts of the British Isles with cloud, wind and some snow. Only the

northern parts of Scotland have any chance of half decent viewing

conditions. Tonight make the most of it as it clears, tomorrow night

little chance, I am afraid. As you know, it is traditional that

every year we ask for your help in some astronomical research, and what

you have found has been genuinely important, even published in

astronomical journals. This is from two years ago, very catchily titled!

You did that! Our names are on it! That is my entire academic career

right there! You have helped us map the surface of Mars, find a new

planet, distant galaxies and super navy, and this year it is pulsars.

-- supernovae. Tim O'Brien, what is a pulsar? About the name means a

pulse, it comes from something that flashes, it flashes in the radio

sky, the remnant of an exploded star. The central part of the DRS

collapses on itself, you have something about the size of a city

but weighing about 1.5 times more than the sun. -- the central part of

the star collapses. It is like a lighthouse as it goes around. We

should step through some of that again, classic astronomer's

understatement! We have an audio recording so you can get a feel of

what it sounds like, you are seeing a star the size of a city more

massive than the sun spinning around, 11 times a second. It is

incredibly regular. They are very massive, very stable, like the

flywheel you had a spinning, it is very hard to dislodge them, so that

is very regular. That was a supernova remnant in the southern

sky. Why are we interested in them and finding more of them? Two

reasons, they are test of our physical theories, so extreme

places, and when you have that much mass in such a small volume moving

quickly, unusual things happen, so if you want to test general

relativity - and I can see that you do - we can use them. And the

Voyager spacecraft, the one with the cold disc telling aliens where to

find us, the navigation we give them is through pulsars, and the map of

the galaxy is useful for physics as well as spaceship navigation. These

are radio phenomena, so we have data from a radio telescope in Effelsberg

in Germany, and we have put that data online. It is on the Stargazing

website. That will work, it takes about a minute and a half to learn

how to recognise a pulsar, you are looking for repeated blips, which we

have shown on the site. If you find one, click a button, it will go

through, and we hope to follow up the discoveries using a nearby radio

telescope. Have only we had a massive radio telescope(!) Hopefully

there will be people, we are looking for about 1 million classifications

in the next couple of hours! What would be the Holy Grail? What would

be the discovery that would merit... Any pulsar is good, adding to the

catalogue. We are looking for the most extreme, the rarest, the ones

that push physics to the limits. A pulsar in a black hole would be very

handy. There are only three people who can win the Nobel Prize, though!

I can tell you whether website is, that is my job. You will find a

tutorial telling you where to help, we need your help because human

pattern recognition works so much better than computers in finding the

shapes and on Thursday, we will be joined by the person who made the

very first pulsar discovery. Now, let's rejoin Tim Peake on the

International Space Station. When we chatted earlier, he told us

first-hand how his first month had been. Really, the first 24 hours was

the only difficult period in adapting and even then, it wasn't

too bad, I was able to work but I felt uncomfortable, quite busy at

times and quite disorientated, but after the first 24 hours, I felt

quite good and have felt fine ever since. I feel incredibly comfortable

living and working here in space after just one month, exercising, a

normal after just one month, exercising, a

the running machine, living as a normal person. I would have no

problem living on an International Space Station for 18 months on a

transit to Mars. Is there anything about this experience that the

training didn't experience you for and as a supplementary question, was

it worth it? I will answer the second part first, a resounding yes.

It has far exceeded my expectations, this whole experience. And I think

really, that is what the training can't give you. The training can

prepare you for all of the practical elements, all of the things that

you'd need to do, your job as an astronaut, being a good crew member

on board the Space Station, but the actual experience of launching into

space on a rocket, the noise, the feeling of acceleration

space on a rocket, the noise, the rocket is climbing skyward, the

changing colour of the sky as it goes from blue to black, all of

these kinds of experiences and then that first view of planet Earth from

space, docking to the Space Station, again, that was another exciting

moment. But seeing how large the Space Station looked outside my

window as we approached it was just remarkable and these are the kind of

experiences that you don't really get from training and that has been

absolutely wonderful. Tim, have you had any opportunity for start

gazing? It must be exciting to look down on earth but have you looked

out to the universe -- stargazing? The first couple of days on board, I

was going to the Kubla window and the earth looks magnificent during

the daytime but more recently, I have been going on the night passes

and at night time, you see the city lights, you see the thunderstorms

and you realise just the scale of thunderstorms over the planet and,

of course, you see the stars and it is incredible. I almost found it

hard to pick out familiar constellation is because there were

so many stars and they are so much brighter than I am used to seeing,

it was hard for me to orient myself. And also, the planets rising.

Jupiter is incredibly bright, so much brighter appear on the Space

Station than from planet Earth. Tim, we are nearly out of time, but to

finish, do you have any message you would like to give to the stargazing

audience from the Space Station? My message is just to say a huge thank

you to everybody. I have been so overwhelmed by the support I have

had from everybody from the UK and Stargazing Live has always been a

real favourite show of mine, I have always enjoyed it. I have always

enjoyed looking up to the stars, wondering about the universe and our

place in the universe and obviously I am sure everybody who watches the

show has the same thoughts and feelings, such as the large thank

you to everybody back home. Tim, it has been an absolute pleasure and a

privilege to talk to you as you go on your journey. We will be watching

you on Friday as you perform your first spacewalk, the best of luck

with that from everybody here on earth. Many thanks, it has been

great talking to you. I felt I have the right to speak for

everyone on earth when I said that. Our behalf of everyone here... OK,

the difficulties of moving and working in the vacuum of space will

make Tim's work particularly challenging and that is why the

training John Bishop is about to do was so vital. Liz is with John at

the centre in Cologne, how are you doing over there? John, can you hear

me OK? I can. OK, you are clear about your task? You can begin your

task now, good luck. Herve is at the helm and Andreas is with us and John

Bishop is starting his first training session, and extravehicular

training session. He has the move that white chew into a tool box and

then he has to do the safety tether swap that Herve showed us earlier

on. Andreas, there are so many things to think about and so many

obstructions. He is carrying a little trash bag that is in his way

every time he tries to get a tether to work somewhere. It is very

difficult to work because of the limited visibility, he has a very

limited view out of the helmet. He has the tools on his tool belt

blocking his vision. He can't really see his tool belt, he has two feel

with his hands and know where everything is situated. I have to

say, he is moving fast, he is moving confidently and it is really good to

see for his first exercise. Is he doing everything quite perfectly?

Yes, he is doing everything he should. Before we are moving any

tool from the structure, you need to secure it with the tether, so if you

lose your grip, it doesn't drift away and that is what he is doing. I

will speak to John and see how he is getting on. I don't want to distract

him but this can be part of the training as well. John, how are you

getting on? Just asking you to describe how it is all going. Well I

made a mistake to begin with but I have corrected it. Nothing floated

off into space. What did you forget to do? Everything has got to be

tethered twice before you move it. The next thing that I want to do is

to change my position to this one, which is the docking thing. But as

you see, I am in two places where I am locked on and I remove that, I

will reduce one of my places. I have to find the other option, which is

difficult because all of your visibility goes. My range of vision

is just here and everything I need to work on is below me. So you have

to feel where all of your tools are, with hands that have no feeling. Are

you finding it frustrating? Do you see how important it is to stay calm

through the whole procedure? Oh, yes. The main thing is I can see

why, everything I have seen with Tim Peake or anybody else who is an

astronaut, they are so calm and steady people and you understand

why. There is no consequence if I get this wrong. If they get it

wrong... So they have to keep a clear mind. Come back to us later to

find out if he does complete the task but, most importantly, what it

felt like, once he is out of the water. See you soon. It is not a

trivial task we are setting him, is it? It isn't, it took me about six

months to recover when I did that will stop by bruised my ribs. It is

a difficult thing, the spacewalk. The only thing keeping you safe is

the spacesuit, fantastically complicated piece of equipment and

definitely not designed for comfort, a problem that has proved a tough

nut to crack since the earliest days of space exploration.

The spacesuit, much more than just a natty piece of sci-fi fancy dress.

Each outfit is a complex machine with over 18,000 parts. And this is

where they are made. Originally a division of the Playtex company,

better known for making bras and girdles. These people know a thing

or two about rubber clothing. They turned their hand to spacesuit for

the Apollo programme and never looked back. We have been involved

in building suits since the 1960s, so we built the suit for Apollo and

the space shuttle missions and now the Space Station. This is the suit

used by Nasa, cunningly designed to fit astronaut of all shapes and

sizes. This suit is a modular suit, so we can't say we cited for anyone

in particular, we just build parts, upper arms, lower arms, upper and

lower legs and boots and all parts can be connected together to make a

suit. It is known as the extravehicular mobility unit. Worn

during spacewalks, this suit is fully pressurised and designed to

cope with even the most pressing emergencies. So now you are in the

suit, you will be in there for six or seven hours and the problem is,

how do you go for the bathroom -- to the bathroom? We have come up with a

maximum absorbency garment. Essentially, an adult nappy. As well

as staying hygienically dry, the secret to safety in space is

layering. This seat has 14 -- this suit has 14. These layers of the

best solution yet to one of the main challenges in spacesuit design.

Because in the bed the vacuum of space, the air pressure and

astronaut needs to survive turns their spacesuit into an awkward and

clumsy balloon suit. Early ideas to overcome this problem left a lot to

be desired and even the best designs were a nightmare to move in. Today's

suits are still very cumbersome, even painful, to wear. There

actually have been a significant number of injuries that astronauts

have suffered from working in spacesuit. People have had injuries

to their fingers, their fingernails have gone black and fallen off.

There has been abrasions to various parts of the body that rubber

against the suit. Former astronaut Jeff Hoffman runs a lab that aims to

make space much more comfortable. The challenge is designing a

pressure suit that is easy to move in and light enough to wear, even in

Martian gravity. This is it. The bio suit. Our model is dressed in, I

would call this a conceptual version of what the bio suit would look

like. You can obviously see it is skintight. Yes, the first human to

visit Mars could be dressed head to toe in spandex. So this suit is

essentially made of an elastic material that is squeezing her arms,

her abdomen, her legs, all of her body, and essentially at the same

pressure as the oxygen she is breathing. That is a lot of

pressure, which means a really tight fit. So he has had to think of how

on earth, or on Mars, you would ever get it on or off. We have these load

coils of shaped memory alloy wire. When it is heated, it will remember

its shape when it was much tighter and it will actually contract,

pulling the elastic material around to squeeze on my arm. Think of this

as electric shoelaces, just to tighten the whole thing up. Jeff

hopes that his suit will become the height of space couture. It is still

in the lab at Tory stage of research but what we would like to do is make

prototypes and maybe then we can send one of the suit into one-day --

laboratory stage of research. Until then, astronaut after the Lycra luck

we'll have to wait. Maybe next season. OK, C John Bishop

has completed his task. Lives, how is he doing? -- lives. He is out of

the water, he has a microphone in his hand, he is a hero, we are so

proud of you, how are you doing? It was amazing, I just didn't want to

come up. Those guys working on the module at

their... It just gives you a little smidgen of what it must be like in

real life to be up there. I am so proud of you. Tomorrow, we put you

through your paces with a reduced oxygen supply and giving you tiny

electric shocks. Are you still willing to continue? I would rather

do this everyday! Join us tomorrow, more things to come from John

Bishop. Commander John Bishop! You didn't think he would survive. What

did we say? 20 quid. Tomorrow, we will be taking oxygen from his

brain, see how he copes with that and we will talk more about Tim

Peake's spacewalk and crushing a giant tank with nothing more than

air pressure. And send us your questions now. We will be back right

here on BBC Two, looking at pulsars and some of the biggest things in

the universe. That is next. See you in a couple of minutes.

So, no-one pays tax here? No-one pays taxes.