Final Frontier The Sky at Night

Two, one, zero and lift off.

The final lift off of Atlantis on the shoulders of the Space Shuttle,

America will continue the dream.

Good evening.

This programme, we're going to concentrate on the Space Shuttle.

That programme's come to an end.

It was a success. Not an unqualified success.

There were one or two hiccups but nevertheless, it's achieved great things

and shown the way for what can follow.

I'm delighted to be joined by Piers Sellers,

who's been in the shuttle three times

and Anu Ojha of the National Space Centre.

And of course, Chris Lintott.

Piers, may I come to you first?

You've been to the shuttle three times,

what are your main memories of it?

What are your main memories?

There's a lot to remember, Patrick.

You think about it,

this programme went on for 30 years, 135 missions.

An awful lot got done.

I was there for the last half or third of it,

which was the construction of space station.

A lot of work was involved with space science

with shuttle before space station and of course the Hubble mission

and the Chandra launch and other things.

Are you sorry it's come to an end?

I'm very glad actually that it's come to an end safely

because after the Columbia accident in 2003,

there was a lot of discussion

about whether we should fly the shuttle at all after that.

The decision I think came down correctly,

which was to fly out all missions necessary

to finish of the space station.

And we got another Hubble repair mission out of it too.

All that was accomplished safely

and all three surviving shuttles are back on the ground and everyone's home safe.

-The idea goes back a long way.

-Absolutely, Patrick.

If we think back to the golden days of Project Apollo.

The problem that we tend to overlook is if you want to get a space capsule,

not much bigger than your study,

back to the Earth with three human beings,

you needed a rocket that was the height of the 36-floor building.

And all of those stages fell into the sea, you couldn't reuse them.

If you could develop a spacecraft that could get you orbiting the Earth

but you could reuse as much of it as possible,

not only could you reduce the costs, but you could have that spacecraft flying again and again.

The original plans for the Space Shuttle programme were to try and have 50 missions a year.

-That just didn't happen.

-It didn't, Patrick.

Widely optimistic and some of that was down to politics,

some of that was down to the final design they had.

Exactly.

So many designs, US Air Force came on board with their requirements

and what you finally had, was an engineering challenge

that really pushed the science capabilities and the engineering to its very limits

and in some ways, limited the programme.

It was hard to meet everybody's expectations.

The Department of Defence wanted a big shuttle, a huge payload bay

to carry large reconnaissance satellites among other things.

NASA wanted something that would be able to lug equipment up into orbit and so forth.

The resulting design was rather fragile in engineering terms.

It had some weak spots as we found out with two accidents.

Not only that, it was operationally fussy to work.

It took a lot of care and feeding to get one of these things out of the pad,

all three million parts working at once and launched safely.

Yes, exactly.

I go back to the days of the Von Braun space wheel

and the founding of the British Interplanetary Society,

he was a founder member, it was a long time ago now.

That was the era of blue-sky thinking,

of anything we could think of to do the difficult bit of space

which is actually the first few seconds of a launch,

that's where you put most of the energy in, that initial acceleration.

One thing people forget about shuttle and Piers, you can talk more about this,

is how complicated a machine it was.

Apollo was a great success but it was relatively simple,

simple enough that the astronauts could do their calculations

and literally decide that that flap needs to move or that engine.

That's not what flying on shuttle was like.

This machine could fly itself.

It didn't need as large a ground team to do all the work, if you like,

then fax up the calculations and then Apollo would go and do what it was told.

That was the way that worked.

Shuttle carried all its computers and it took itself off,

did its mission and brought itself back.

What does the shuttle mission feel like?

What does it look like and where were the scary bits?

You're not a shuttle astronaut anymore,

-tell us the real story.

-And I was never scared.

-Of course not.

-No fear, not even a little bit.

-OK.

You experience all your fear - and you do experience fear - in simulation.

The training is really good.

The first few emergency events in the simulator, your mind is completely...

they call it a helmet fire, your mind goes completely blank.

I had no idea what to do, "How to I get out of this?"

Everyone experiences that in the simulator.

By the time you've moshed through that, 30, 50 times,

and you're ready to get into this, it's a familiar environment.

When things do go wrong, you don't feel frightened.

On the day, there's this big gantry here and with your six best friends,

you take the elevator up,

you use the last bathroom on Earth which is about here.

-A toilet over here.

-I'm sorry we don't have a model of that!

-It's right there.

Then, come across the gangplank, get in, you all strap in.

There's four guys upstairs looking out these windows,

two looking out these windows

and two can crane your necks and look out these top windows.

Everyone else downstairs with no windows.

-It's a strange place to be.

-You took this wonderful ride without a view?

-Were you downstairs?

-I've taken the ride up twice without a window seat.

It's a very strange experience.

-You just had a wall of lockers?

-Yes, in front of your nose and your friend next to you.

When the appointed time comes, everything starts shaking

and bouncing off the lockers and you're just being thrown around.

In a very mild way, I know what you mean.

My first couple of trips in a bomber aircraft, I hadn't got a window.

There you go, you're a navigator in the bowels of some Wellington or something.

You've just got be brave, sit there and be brave, right?

My first flight up there,

I was sitting under this window and I had a mirror

so I could point it up like that and watch in my rear-view mirror.

I watched Florida getting smaller and smaller behind me

and tip over the horizon.

I could see the plume going all the way back down to Florida

and a shadow across the ocean of the plume.

Then just hammering up into orbit.

It is exciting, particularly launches are very exciting.

They're not like anything else you experience.

-Then you're in space.

-Then after eight-and-a-half minutes and 10 years of training, you're finally in space.

There's this big blue planet, this black sky

and you're sailing along faster than you can imagine.

So what are the biggest achievements for the shuttle?

We made access to space semi-routine with very large payloads.

It gave us a space station.

We assembled a large structure in orbit, something we're going to have to do

if we're going to go into deep space.

-Fixed some space telescopes.

-Thank you.

-That's all right!

Launched others and several planetary probes as well.

That's right, did a lot of science and taught us a lot about how to operate, just operate in orbit,

how to plan something and do the engineering in space.

There was a lot of science done and a lot that science is overlooked

when we think, "Oh, it was just there for space station, the European space lab missions."

In fact Europe's Astronaut Corps got its experience because of Space Shuttle.

The way history works out and can conspire against you is that,

in a huge effort to make space station, science and shuttle definitely took third place

after everything else that needed to be done.

Now I'm hoping we redress the balance in the out years of space station -

we built it, it works, now it's time to get back to science.

Do you think it's been worthwhile?

I can remember 11, 12 years ago, speaking to my students

and I used to say, "The ISS, it's just been politically driven."

I was a big cynic of space station

and my view now is, we have this world-class science facility.

We spent, some say, 100 billion.

That money's been spent, we've now got these facilities on orbit, world-class facilities.

The challenge is to make sure they are used to produce world-class science.

That's where we are.

The groundwork's there and it's a question of what science we can get to come out of there.

For me, the jury's out on the ISS as a laboratory.

I think two years, the length of a research grant with three docks

for running experiments, looking at results,

let's see what science comes out of it.

How much did you think about the science when you were building it?

You were distracted by the engineering, I guess.

How much were you motivated by where we are now?

I went into the business as a scientist

and I thought that I'd be doing science.

I guess they changed their minds about me

and found me more useful in the assembly areas.

-OVER COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM:

-'Hey, Piers?

-Yeah.

'Take a second and look at the Earth to your left.

'I think you got Ireland and England coming up there.

'Oh, good heavens.

-'Wow!

-Oh my goodness.'

I literally spent ten years thinking about nothing except how for how to assemble this thing in orbit and all

the engineering challenges that needed to be overcome to do that.

They say that if you want a bad engineer, start out with an average scientist.

-THEY LAUGH

-I'm sure that's not true!

-That was my contribution.

But now, you know, I'm trying to take the long view.

The build is complete, so now we have this facility, you know.

Let's see what happens next.

So let's look forward -

the present shuttle programme has come to an end.

So, um, what next? Can I come first to you, Anu?

It's a very good question, Patrick.

President Obama has made very clear that NASA itself should concentrate

in terms of human exploration, of really going beyond Earth orbit.

It's high time. Since 1972 we haven't gone anywhere further than a few hundred miles.

President Obama has said that that should be NASA's focus,

developing human deep-space exploration capability, and that is so exciting.

I feel the hairs on my arm rising when I think about it.

But in the meantime, there has to be a capability to keep crews going to and from

this world-class facility we finally have orbiting the planet - the International Space Station.

And that's now going to be down to private industry.

NASA will contract effectively space taxi services to get its crews to and from the Space Station.

When I was a boy the whole idea of space travel was pure science fiction. "It'll never happen."

Then we come to the Apollo, which did happen, and then we have over-optimism.

We're going to get to Mars in 30 years.

Well, we know a bit more now and what's your forecast for the next 30 years?

I worry that I will not see humans on Mars in my lifetime,

but I'm still optimistic and I may see human beings visiting an asteroid,

and I think that is the real excitement and challenge for me,

that we are going to see a return to human exploration of deep space.

-What about you?

-Oh, I think we're going to go to Mars.

Anu just has to concentrate on clean living, so he lives long enough to see it.

-But in the last few years, we're finding out more and more about Mars.

-We are near, I realise that.

Now we have these streams of brine water...

-It's getting there.

-..flowing. So there's plenty out there.

-If we get to Mars, it's all right.

-Yes, we have to get there, but now I think there's more and more reason to go.

-I agree.

Mars, two billion years ago, it was wet, it was warm, had an ocean.

So who knows what might've evolved back then?

I think the only way we're going to find out is send one of our kids, at this rate, to go and dig it up.

Well, you'll find out more than I will because after all, I am 88, so I haven't got much time left...

-You're in your prime, man!

-..but you have. What's your forecast?

30 years - American space flight or human spaceflight?

Cos I think there's a difference. Which do you want to know about?

-You mean you don't regard the Americans as human?

-Well, I'd...

I'm not sure why.

You're pretending to be British, Piers. We know that.

No, but, I mean, if you look at the American space programme,

I'm afraid unfairly pessimistic about the next 30 years.

-You know, I do believe...

-I hope you're wrong.

I hope I'm wrong, too.

I think private space flight will take care of the station,

but I just don't see any political will in the States to spend money on this.

Elsewhere though, you've got the Chinese, who are in some ways back in the old space race.

-And the Indians.

-That's true, and both of those countries are in the space race mentality.

-It's about national prestige.

-Yep.

-And we know, cos we've seen it happen in the '60s, that that can

drive at least a programme to touch the lunar surface.

So I think within your 30 years, we'll have had a Chinese equivalent of the Apollo Programme.

Whether they do more with it afterwards than the Americans did,

or whether they go a different route, it's not clear.

We've got to wait and see. Well, Piers, Anu, thank you very much.

It's been a great programme. One that's never going to be forgotten.

-Certainly not by you since you've been there.

-Thank you.

-COMMENTATOR:

-'Having fired the imagination of a generation,

'a ship like no other, its place in history secured,

'the Space Shuttle pulls into port for the last time,

'its voyage at an end.'

So now, where next? I'm going to ask Chris Lintott to take up the story.

Mars, the next frontier for man, seems such an obvious step in space exploration.

So why aren't we on our way?

After all, we're always talking about it as if it's only around the corner.

In the early half of the last century, we had such bold ideas about space flight.

These drawings by RA Smith assumed that we'd be on Mars

by the end of the 20th century at the absolute latest.

These wonderful old science fiction books of Patrick's,

mostly written in the 1950s, are a reminder that space travel

hasn't always been about arguing about money and politics, but that it used to be a place

for visionaries who could think up space craft, the likes of which we can only dream of today.

Those dreams soon started to become a reality.

This programme from 1957 is about space flight,

featuring a prototype RAF spacesuit.

Here is a very familiar young man

talking about his dreams of interplanetary travel.

Well, nobody in the British Interplanetary Society underestimates the difficulties,

but they have made very considerable contributions to what has been going on,

and in particular, a good deal of the early theoretical work

on Earth's satellite was carried out by its members.

The space race accelerated our ambitions for space travel and the success of Apollo

fuelled expectations that Mars must be the next stop.

But it was not to be. The commitment to the Space Shuttle

and then to the Space Station proved to be nothing more than a space cul-de-sac.

The last manned mission to the moon was Apollo 17 in 1972.

Its commander Captain Eugene Cernan has a very personal stake in America's space programme.

It's been, er...

it's got to be one of the most proud moments of my life, I guarantee you.

Roger 17, and we, er, thank you very much.

His final boot prints on the lunar surface, now nearly 40-years-old,

remain the high watermark for human exploration of the solar system.

This is how he felt about it back in 2008.

I'm a little disappointed with what's gone on

for the last 30 years. You know,

we don't have the capability to go back to the moon today.

We're trying to redevelop it all over again.

We're living relatively in the comfort and confines of our own home planet

239,000 miles away.

We've been spending time trying to exploit space.

From my point of view, it didn't go anywhere.

You know, when you've been to the moon...not once, but twice,

staying home, you know, this sounds a little arrogant,

staying home is no longer good enough.

We've been there, done that. Let's get on with it.

Three, two, one, ignition.

We're on our way, Houston.

Decks are good.

Astronomer Stuart Clark has been following the space programme closely.

I chatted to him about why we've become so disappointingly tied to Earth.

In a sense, its lack of money and it's also a product of the time

at which those early dreams were born.

So we were coming out of the Second World War, there was a feeling

of optimism and that now was a new start

and that new start dovetailed with the beginning of the Space Age

and so those kind of utopian visions...

-Anything can happen.

-Anything can happen.

What in fact happened was a collapse of that optimism

in to really a kind of market-driven force and what can space do for us?

It's not just the lack of money that's stopped us surfing the solar system,

there are considerable obstacles to overcome if we're ever to go to Mars.

Mars is one of the trickiest places to land in the solar system

because the planet is large enough to have quite a strong

gravitational field, so you have to have extremely powerful retro rockets to bring you down safely.

And the other thing about it is it's a far away and that means you spend a lot of time getting there,

which apart from the boredom factor and taking enough food

and all the rest of it, it increases the risk of radiation from the sun.

Cos in nipping to the moon be upon her astronaut just gambled that they'd be lucky?

There would've been an Apollo mission on the moon

at the point of an extremely large flare in 1972

and that flare would have killed the astronauts.

We've only talked about getting there. Getting back is a problem as well, of course.

What would you do? Build your own fuel on the surface?

That's pretty much the way people think now, is that you have to try and manufacture the fuel actually

on the surface of Mars itself because it would just be too big and too heavy to take with you.

We do still have dreamers.

Meet Icarus, a visionary design for a robotic mission to the stars,

developed by the British Interplanetary Society

and their colleagues.

It may look like science fiction today, but who knows? In 200 years this may be science fact.

With the end of the Shuttle, NASA's relying on hitching a ride

on Russian rockets to provide the Space Station with its supplies and with fresh crew.

This month's disaster, when an unmanned Russian rocket exploded,

losing its cargo, suggests that problems might lie ahead.

But let's take a moment to appreciate what's been achieved,

both with the Space Shuttle programme and the International Space Station,

the results of literally millions of hours of hard work.

Overhead, the Space Station passes at around 28,000 kilometres per hour

and completes 16 orbits of the Earth every single day.

It's something we can all sit back and marvel at.

These images of the station come from our Sky At Night Flickr site,

which can be found at bbc.co.uk/skyatnight.

I can get it in my binoculars!

These images of the station, taken by Tom Haridean in Australia,

show the last Shuttle mission Atlantis in July

on its final fly around of the International Space Station.

You could almost imagine them waving goodbye to each other.

We're lucky enough to have a pass of the ISS, which should be dazzlingly bright.

In Patrick's garden, Pete Lawrence and Paul Abel are waiting for it to rise above the horizon.

Well, here we are, Pete, in Patrick's garden.

Lovely clear night and our cameraman here, Andy...

I hope you've got it in sight.

You're going to try and film it, aren't you, as it goes past over the house.

Why don't you tell us, Pete, where exactly, what path's it going to follow as it goes over?

Well, this one's coming up from the west-south-west,

-and it's going to head up over Patrick's roof...

-OK.

..and then go very close to that really bright star up there,

-which is Arcturus...

-Right. I know what it is!

..and then it's going to head more or less overhead.

-It's about 87 degrees off...

-Oh, this is a good one then.

So 90 degrees is overhead, so that's virtually overhead,

and then it'll head all the way down there into the north-west.

-And there it is over there.

-There it is, we've got it.

-It's already quite bright, isn't it?

-That's about the same brightness, slightly dimmer than Arcturus

at the moment, but it will get much, much brighter as it goes overhead.

It's hard to believe, isn't it, there are human beings on board.

You know, that's really quite impressive.

-I'm going to have a look at it through the binoculars.

-Can you actually see any detail?

-Well...

you can tell it's irregular in shape.

-Um...I can't really tell much more than that.

-Isn't that amazing?

Just think of the view they would be having now.

You've got the Earth coming into darkness

and the lights of the big cities would be sadly spilling out.

-It'd be quite an impressive sight from space, wouldn't it?

-That is really impressive.

How would you recommend that people look them up and find out when they're going to happen?

Well, the easiest way to do it is to go on to a website.

-It's called www.heavens-above.com.

-Yeah, I use that one.

And if you go on there and then you can enter your location details

and once you've done that it will give you a customised table

for every ISS pass that you can see.

Now throughout September,

unfortunately they're actually going to stop in the first part

of the month and they pick up again right at the very end of September.

So if you want to see the ISS, if you go out, say...

or check, from about 25th September onwards, that's when you'll start to see them again.

It's starting to fade now. You can see that noticeably. There it goes. It's almost gone. And it's gone.

No, I can still see it!

-Can you still see it?

-No, you're right. It has gone. It's definitely gone now.

It's gone into the Earth's shadow. So that's the ISS.

Now, the ISS is something that you can go out and you can see,

so long as it up there, with your naked eye.

Brilliant! Well, that was a lovely ISS pass, Pete, wasn't it?

It was really fantastic.

And, of course, September now. The hours of darkness have increased.

Yay! More night, more night!

So we've picked up a few nice things to look at in September, haven't we?

Shall we start off with the harvest moon?

Yeah. We've got the autumnal equinox in September.

So that's the time when the hours of daylight and the hours of night are equal

and the full moon, which falls closest to the equinox,

is given the name of the harvest moon.

That gives you a sort of static, natural light that comes up

at more or less the same time.

Are you going to use your photographic skills on that

-to create some sort of nice image, do you think?

-No.

I might go and get the harvest in.

It actually casts a light on the fields and, of course, that helps the farmers get their harvest in.

It's a lovely colour as well cos it's quite low down.

Sticking with bright objects, we have the planet Jupiter. Have you been following it?

I have. Jupiter's been getting higher and higher in the sky

earlier in the evening and it's so intensely bright.

It's great to have it back, and we have a nice little event.

If you go out on 28th September,

you'll see the satellite Io quite close to Jupiter

and if you watch over the course of the next few hours what you will see

is Io passing over Jupiter's disc, what we call a transit,

and Io, its shadow and the great red spot are all together.

-That'll be fantastic.

-It'll be a lovely view.

So will Io actually appear over the great red spot?

It will, and will move to the side of it.

They'll all move off together,

so that'll be a lovely event.

-So that's the 28th?

-That's 28th September, yes.

-And we have Mars.

-Oh, yes.

-By the time this programme comes out,

I will have started on Mars already because it's getting bigger,

it's coming closer and it's getting brighter.

-Telescopically, it is still quite small, isn't it?

-It is, yeah.

But it is doing something interesting at the end of the month because it's starting to move closer to

that wonderful naked-eye open cluster, the Beehive Cluster.

It'll be quite nice. It's going to pass quite close to it, isn't it?

It'll pass in front of it, actually.

The first two days of October,

with the naked eye, you should be able to see Mars

and if you look very carefully towards the end of the month,

you'll see the cluster stars around it.

But if you have a pair of binoculars and you look at it,

then that'll be a fantastic view.

There are still things like open clusters that binoculars, really,

that's the only thing that does them justice.

-Well, plenty to see, Pete, so let's hope that we get lots of clear skies.

-Absolutely.

And we have one other passing object for you to look at this month - a supernova in the Pinwheel galaxy

M101, which you can find just above the handle of the Plough.

It should be at its best in the first few weeks of September,

and in fact, it's the brightest and the closest supernova of its type

for the past 30 years, so it's really something special.

The ghostly remains of a star that exploded some 22 million years ago.

Let's hope for some clear skies in September.

And now for our news notices, Chris. Begin, I think, with Mars, don't you?

Absolutely. So, remarkable discovery on Mars in images

taken by the high-rise camera on Mars' reconnaissance orbiter.

What you're seeing here are channels on the Martian surface that change throughout the year,

that have these deposits laid down over the course of the year

and we think this is evidence that liquid is actually flowing today on the surface of Mars.

-The last thing we expected.

-One slight tweak though

is that the temperature here is actually lower than we'd expect

for pure water to be able to be on the surface.

-Must be salty water then.

-Exactly.

Think of it as quite a briny liquid.

This seems to be seasonal, so this might be being released by volcanic activity,

or just the action of the seasons causes these seasonal floods.

So these are immediately the most fascinating places on Mars.

Yes, well, there's certainly a lot to learn.

Meanwhile, Opportunity is still carrying on towards the crater Endeavour.

Well, it's actually arrived. It feels like every month for more than three years we've sat here

and reported that Opportunity, the plucky rover, is heading across the dunes towards Endeavour.

It's at a place called Cape York and you can see immediately that we're somewhere different.

The train has changed. There are all sorts of interesting, unusual spiky rocks

and what that means is we're probably looking at a different epoch of Martian history.

We will eventually go up to the crater rim and peer down inside it,

but we're beginning the exploration of Endeavour crater.

It's a remarkable achievement for a rover that landed seven years ago

-and was only supposed to exist for 90 days.

-Further out, Jupiter.

The Juno probe on it's way there.

That's right. Launched last month and safely on its way to Jupiter, where it's due to arrive in 2016.

And Juno will be the first mission to visit Jupiter since Galileo,

so we're really looking forward to getting a proper study of Jupiter's cloud tops.

-And there's a lot to learn there.

-There are.

-I wonder. Well, we'll talk about it when it arrives.

-Chris, Thank you very much.

-My pleasure.

Well, next month when I come back,

we get to talk about two interesting constellations - Pegasus and Andromeda.

So until then, goodnight.

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