Space Age Adventures on the National Geographic Channel
Coming up on November 2nd, the National Geographic Channel will take us on a journey into space with two new specials, Five Years on Mars and Calling All Aliens.
Five Years on Mars is the real-life odyssey of two solar-powered robotic rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The one-hour special dramatizes the trials and tribulations of the two rovers using photo-realistic animation based on the actual landscape as captured by the rovers’ cameras, and highlights new scientific information on the planet’s geology and water history.
Spirit and Opportunity were launched in 2003 and were originally expected to collect data over 90 Martian days, called “sols.” Now, almost five years later, they are still going strong and collecting data. They’ve trekked miles across hostile plains, climbed mountains, ventured in and out of deep craters, gotten stuck in sand dunes, survived dust storms and mechanical failures, and cheated death so often no one will venture a guess as to how much longer they might last.
Five Years on Mars airs November 2nd at 8pm ET/PT.
Later that same night, on November 2, at 10 p.m. ET/PT, Calling All Aliens will take a look at the ways scientists are searching for extraterrestrial life. The one-hour special takes viewers to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute in Mountain View, California, where scientists have activated 42 out of the planned 350 giant radio dishes that make up the Allen Telescope Array. The dishes collect datastreams from outer space that are then analyzed to determine if they carry any unusual frequencies. They haven’t found anything yet…but they are still listening.
“Our galaxy has a few hundred billion star systems, so it doesn’t surprise that me we haven’t found other intelligent life yet,” says SETI astronomer Seth Shostak. “But the search is speeding up, and I think everybody deep down inside wishes that the experiment would succeed while they’re still around to see that happen.”
In between the two specials you can catch an encore presentation of Naked Science: Life on Mars at 9 p.m. ET/PT. Join NASA’s Phoenix Mission to determine if life could have existed — or can exist — on our closest planetary neighbor.
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