Space oddities
The crew of Pegasus were weightless for three times longer than the
first American in Space - Alan Shepard - whose Freedom 7 spacecraft
carried him on a parabolic trajectory producing just five minutes of
weightlessness on his 15-minute flight in May 1961.
The Mars scenes were filmed at "the most Mars-like place on Earth",
the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile, where the World's Space Agencies
test their Mars robotic rovers. Whilst filming, researchers in Mexico
University actually declared it the most Mars-like place on Earth.
Mars was the closest it had been to Earth for 60,000 years whilst the
film crew were preparing to recreate the planet in Chile's Atacama Desert.
Since there are no oceans on Mars to hide surface details, we have been
able to map more of this red world than we have of Earth.
Just before filming the solar flare sequence for the series, the largest
solar flare ever recorded erupted from the Sun. Images of this eruption
were used in the scenes at Mission Control.
The day the crew filmed scenes of the mission nearing Pluto, headlines
in the papers announced that one of Nasa's robotic Pioneer spacecraft
was reaching the edge of the solar system too. The newspaper was used
as a prop in the scenes at Mission Control.
On Venus, the Sun crosses the sky 100 times more slowly than on Earth.
It takes two weeks for dusk to fall and the Sun sets in the east. Sunset
is followed by an interminable night that lasts longer than one of Earth's
seasons. It is so hot that lead and zinc form rock pools and mountain
peaks get dusted with a metallic 'snow' of iron pyrites and germanium.
In 1938, Orson Welles' radio dramatisation of War Of The Worlds - in
which a realistic news broadcast described a Martian invasion of Earth
- sent a million Americans into panic.
The Sun is currently the most studied object in the solar system. Via
the internet, people can watch solar storms rage, check today's solar
weather forecast and find out how much radiation will be thrown at Earth
in the next few hours.
Saturn was the last planet the probe Voyager 1 visited. It used the
planet's gravity to hurl it over the north pole of the planet's largest
moon, Titan, and on, up and out of the plane of the solar system.
In 2003, this vintage probe reached 90 astronomical units from Earth
- 90 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, a total of 13.5 billion
kilometres, making it is the most distant man-made object in the universe.
It has enough power to operate until 2020, by which time it will be
almost 22.5 billion kilometres from Earth.
The space sport of zero-G tennis was invented on shuttle flights in
the Nineties. The ball is a lump of gaffer tape and clipboards are used
as rackets. There's no net but points are gained if an opponent misses
a shot. Apart from that, it's a free-for-all - forehand, backhand, upside
down, overhead, off the wall…
Until just over 10 years ago, the nine planets of the solar system were
the only ones known to man. Since then, around 120 extra solar planets
have been found because it was discovered that large planets have just
enough gravity to make their stars wobble a little. Once astronomers
figured out how to detect this tiny wobble, planets started popping
up all over the place.
No laws of physics were broken in the making of this series. Although
the propulsion systems and active magnetic shielding are still just
concepts, they are more imaginable to scientists today than Concorde
would have been to the Wright brothers.
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