Planets

VHS cover

*Planets* is the eleventh episode of the third season of Eyewitness. The topic of this episode concerns the solar system, in particular the nine planets identified at the time from Mercury to Pluto - looking at their exploration and role in human culture. The episode aired on 24th November 1997.

Planets is based on a book that was first published in 1994 [titled: Astronomy], and has been republished various times based on new scientific findings.

## Episode

### Introductory sequence

The camera pans slowly over the surface of the moon, before flying out towards a large red planet (presumably Mars) and into the bright light of the sun shining around the edge of the planet - the title sequence then begins.

### Episode outline

Click here for the full transcript for Planets.

The introductory segment is about the fascination with space in the night sky humans have had, before discussing the early theories people made to explain the sight of it, such as mythology, before revealing the truth: the formation of our sun and the planets around it. The narrator notes the vast distance of the solar system as the hero is introduced, a starship which flies out of the museum.

The first planet out from the sun is Mercury. It has an extreme climate and its day is twice as long as its year. It passes through the night sky with such speed that it got its name from the Roman messenger god Mercury, a symbol of agility and speed.

Viewed from Earth, the planets govern our sense of time. The Solar System has served as a calendar and provides directions for travellers. The heavens were mapped without any specialist equipment. The role of the astronomer in ancient Chinese culture is shown, as they predicted celestial events of significance to the emperor and his court. To this day astrology, fortune telling from the positions of stars and planets, continues to be used.

The second planet out from the sun is Venus. Named after the Roman goddess of love, it is the brightest planet. The beauty is deceptive, coming from a toxic atmosphere reflecting the sun’s light. The surface of Venus is as close a place to Hell as anywhere else in the Solar System, with hurricanes, acid rain and permanently-active volcanoes. The conditions have made it a difficult planet to explore, with only one probe surviving long enough to transmit data back to Earth.

Earth is around the same size as Venus and not much further from the sun. Part of the reason why Earth does not choke on poisonous gases or fry in lava flows is because of the presence of life. Four billions years ago, Earth was like Venus but as it matured the water vapour in the air cooled and it began to rain. The rain formed oceans where primitive lifeforms evolved. In turn these living things broke down carbon compounds and released oxygen. This began to balance out the temperatures. Life now teems on Earth, creating forests and cities and has become a critical component of the planet’s structure.

We had no way of appreciating the beauty of Earth until we saw it from space – the sight was enough to move astronauts to tears. Long before humans headed into space, film-makers were already acting out their fantasies with generations of people thrilled by adventures of characters like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Fantasy began to become reality in 1961, when Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth.

So far, the moon is the only extra-terrestrial body humans have walked on. In 1969, Apollo 11 took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on a half-million-mile round trip where they collected rock samples, played golf, took photographs and demonstrated that the moon’s gravity is only one-sixth that of Earth’s. The lack of atmosphere means there is no rain or wind, so the astronaut’s footprints may remain undisturbed for thousands of years. The moon orbits Earth in just over 27 days, about the same length of time to spin on its axis, so we never see the dark side of the moon. The moon has long been shrouded in mystery and superstition. Sometimes the moon and Earth line up to form a solar eclipse. They happen on average every 360 years and are still greeted with fear.

Today, we observe space in much more sophisticated ways. Modern observatories allow us to look into space but are still constrained by Earth’s atmosphere so telescopes in space, like the Hubble telescope launched in 1990, are used to capture images of the stars and planets.

Beyond Earth lies Mars, the planet that has held more hope of life than any other. Stories about the scientific study of potential life on Mars, as well as the cultural appearances of Martians, are detailed here. In one sense, we are constantly being invaded by Mars – a 1996 meteorite thought to come from Mars contained what could be fossilised bacteria, perhaps demonstrating there was once life on Mars. There is probably no life on Mars now, as the temperature rarely rises above freezing and most water is locked away in icecaps. Mars has the Solar System's tallest mountain, Olympus Mons. Named after the Roman god of war, Mars appears to be blood-red and has been associated with anger and conflict. In fact, the colour comes from iron oxide, better known as rust. Although forbidding, Mars seems the only place where a human colony could be established. By introducing bacteria to stabilise the climate in a process known as terraforming, it could create a new home in space after a few thousand years.

Beyond Mars is the asteroid belt, consisting of billions of rock fragments left over by the formation of the Solar System. Fragments sometimes dislodge from their orbits and fly towards planets such as Earth, where they either burn up in the atmosphere to form shooting stars or crash into Earth to form craters. In 1972 a huge meteorite scratched the surface of Earth’s atmosphere – if it had hit it would have exploded with the force of five atomic bombs.

The asteroid belt is the limit of the rocky planets – beyond them in the realm of the gas giants. Jupiter, named after the Roman ruler of the gods, is the biggest planet in our Solar System. Jupiter led to a revolution in thought, with scientists Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei inspired by studying Jupiter and its moons to claim that the sun was the centre of the universe and all other planets revolved around it. This was in conflict with the Christian church had the fixed idea that humanity and the Earth was the centre of the universe. Jupiter has sixteen moons in all. Everything about it is massive – Earth could fit inside it 13,000 times and it is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets combined. Jupiter is driven by wind systems and has a giant hurricane that has raged for at least 300 years. Jupiter’s core is the twice the size of Earth and made of hydrogen compressed until it behaves like metal. Were Jupiter much bigger, the heat and pressure would generate nuclear fusion and it would be a star rather than a planet. In some ways, it defies our understandings of nature.

Although Galileo worked out that planets orbited the sun, he had no idea what kept them there. According to legend, the answer came to Isaac Newton while he was sat under an apple tree. A force that Newton called gravity was responsible; when an object is too far away to fall into a larger body but too close to escape into deep space, it starts to orbit. This keeps planets orbiting the sun and also creates features like the rings of Saturn.

Saturn posed a problem to Galileo, who thought he was looking at a large planet flanked by two smaller ones. Only more powerful telescopes could discern the rings. The rings are made up of small ice cubes. All the gas giants have rings, although Saturn’s the brightest, easily visible from Earth. Saturn is mostly gas, with a density so low that it would float in a bath. It has eighteen moons in all, more than any other planet. The strange beauty of the planets has led to some fanciful notions, such as the music of the spheres. Several great astronomers were accomplished musicians. William Herschel was a music teacher and amateur astronomer who built his own telescope. This allowed him, in 1781, to discover a new planet.

He named the planet Georgius Sidum after King George III but when the king went mad it was decided to give the planet the name of a Roman god. Uranus is the seventh planet out from the sun. When studying it, irregularities in its orbit were noticed, with scientists working out that its movements must be caused by another body. In 1846 astronomers found the eighth planet Neptune, exactly where they expected to find it. Uranus and Neptune are often called sister planets, even though they are ten times more distant from each other than the Earth is to the sun. Uranus is almost featureless, being bright green in colour while Neptune is broken by patches of white coming from clouds and storm systems in its atmosphere. The blue colour of Neptune comes from methane gas.

Just as Uranus was affected by Neptune, so Neptune seemed to be being affected by another planet further out. The American astronomer Percival Lowell searched for it without success, as he was looking for something the size of a gas giant. It wasn’t until 1930 that it was discovered – a small rocky planet so distant that even the Hubble space telescope struggles to see it. The new find caught the public imagination and many names were suggested. It was an 11-year-old Oxford schoolgirl who suggested the name which stuck – Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld. Pluto is so far from the sun that it is always barren and cold, with the nitrogen and methane atmosphere sometimes freezing and falling as pale blue snow. It is about as unattractive a place for human life as can be imagined, although visiting is unlikely as a round trip there would take thirty years. Its single moon, Charon, was discovered in 1978 and the many mysteries of Pluto are still waiting to be discovered.

Few believe any planets exist beyond Pluto, with the areas beyond being a place where the leftovers blown out by the formation of the Solar System came to rest. Beyond the edge of our Solar System lies deep space. It takes light five and a half hours to reach here, but it takes four years to reach the nearest star. The furthest star is a staggering fifteen billion light-years away. Our Earth once seemed the centre of the universe but we now know it is but a tiny blue gem floating in space and time.

## Animal species filmed for the programme

### Studio footage

No animals were used in studio footage for this episode.

### Stock footage

* Egyptian fruit bat, *Rousettus aegyptiacus*
* Grey wolf, *Canis lupus*

## Stock Footage Sources

* Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe(1940) - Flash Gordon Clips

**Space footage**

* Vostok 1 (1961)-Footage of launch and Yuri Gagarin in flight
* Gemini 4 (1965)-Ed White Spacewalking
* Apollo 10 (1969)-Crew in command module, Earthrise
* Apollo11 (1969)-lunar landing and Neil Armstrong`s first steps
* Apollo 16 (1972)-John Young jumping and saluting next to flag, Lunar Grand Prix
* Great Daylight Fireball (1972) -footage of fireball
* Apollo 17 (1972) -Jack Schmitt on moon, Gene Cernan Jumping, moonwalkers standing next to lunar rover
* Skylab (1973) -Sun Footage
* Voyager 1 (1979)-Jupiter footage, Great Red Spot footage
* Horizon: Encounter With Jupiter (1980)-Jupiter closeups montage
* Venera 13 (1982) -Surface footage
* Mars: The Movie (1989) -Mars Surface Flyover
* Galileo (1990) -Earth Rotation footage
* Magellan (1991) - Venus surface flyovers
* STS-64 (1994) - Earth from orbit

## Credits

* Director - Alex Hearle
* Writer - David Stafford
* Music - Guy Dagul
* Graphics Director - Morgan Almeida
* Graphic Design - Piers Helm
* Camera - Nick Squires and Martin Bobbin
* Set Design and Visual Effects - Chris Reynolds and Andy David
* Research - Fred Casella
* Production Co-ordinator - Maryrose Upjohn
* Production Team - Louisa Bowman, Phillip Whelan and Jackie Byrne
* Unit Manager - Jackie Williamson
* 3-D Animation - Paul Kavanagh and Andy McNamara
* Videotape Editor - Malcolm Cowan
* Dubbing Mixer - Craig Irving and Kian Wong
* With thanks to:
	+ Simon Carroll
	+ NASA
	+ European Space Agency - ESA
	+ Lowell Observatory

## Making this programme

The production team had a dilemma in creating a complete Solar System in the Eyewitness Museum - whether to use models or CGI. In the end, both methods were used, with the models being ideal for creating surface detail. Each model took several days to create. Lighting and camera moves completed the effect. For the shot of Saturn floating in a bathtub, a red ball was used as a guide to create a splash and the planet was then added digitally. To illustrate the freezing conditions of Mercury, an apple was submerged in liquid nitrogen and filmed shattering in slow-motion. Recreating the Big Bang required explosives to be brought into the studio. The camera was protected by high-strength glass while the explosion was detonated overhead. With some additions on the computer, the first moments of the Solar System were created.

## Errors and corrections

Perhaps most notably, Pluto is still referred to as a major planet in the video - but the video was made prior to 2006 when Pluto was reclassified. In the video, Pluto is also shown as being slate-grey and covered with craters - though this was also before any high-resolution pictures would be taken of Pluto - as they only were in 2015. Various facts about the planets, namely those regarding the number of moons, have been rendered outdated following new discoveries. The segment regarding Mercury refers to the fact that 'its day is twice as long as its year' - a fact more usually attributed to *Venus* and not Mercury.

## Further Information

* The episode is tied with Human Machine as having the least animals featured in it, with only Egyptian fruit bats and Grey wolves appearing via stock footage, and not studio footage.

## Home media releases

As well as being released on VHS, Planets had several DVD releases. These include a release in the USA, as one of the free DVDs provided with the UK's Daily Mirror newspaper and one of eight interactive DVDs.

The programme on the DVD includes sixteen hotspots (represented by an egg-shaped planet with two orbiting moons) - unlike the other interactive DVDs, most of the hotspots were made for the DVD and do not link to clips from other Eyewitness episodes.

1. Sun's effect on Earth's weather (from Weather) - Linked to birth of the Sun
2. Sun fact-sheet - Linked to images of the Sun
3. Mercury fact-sheet - Linked to Mercury
4. Venus fact-sheet - Linked to the surface of Venus
5. Earth fact-sheet - Linked to viewing Earth from space
6. The Moon fact-sheet - Linked to Moon landings
7. Mars fact-sheet - Linked to the climate of Mars
8. Mass-extinctions (from Prehistoric Life) - Linked to meteorite strikes
9. Beginnings of life and the age of Earth (from Prehistoric Life) - Linked to Galileo and the orbiting planets
10. Hurricane generation (from Weather) - Linked to Jupiter's great red spot
11. Jupiter fact-sheet - Linked to Jupiter's size
12. Saturn fact-sheet - Linked to Saturn's low mass
13. Uranus fact-sheet - Linked to the orbit of Uranus
14. Neptune fact-sheet - Linked to appearance of Neptune
15. Pluto fact-sheet - Linked to the mysteries of Pluto
16. Possibility of life on other planets (from Prehistoric Life) - Linked to the unexplored universe

The interactive DVD also includes a ten-question quiz:

1. Which of these is at the centre of the Solar System? Correct answer: The sun
2. In the Roman pantheon, who was the messenger of the Gods? Correct answer: Mercury
3. Which of these planets has a methane atmosphere? Correct answer: Neptune
4. Which country first successfully put a man in space? Correct answer: Soviet Union
5. What grazed the Earth's atmosphere in 1972? Correct answer: A meteorite
6. Which is the biggest planet in our Solar System? Correct answer: Jupiter
7. Who is credited with discovering gravity? Correct answer: Isaac Newton
8. Which planet would float in your bath if you had a bath big enough? Correct answer: Saturn
9. What lies beyond Pluto? Correct answer: Deep space
10. What is Jupiter's great red spot? Correct answer: A hurricane

Eyewitness Planets America-release DVD coverEyewitness Planets Daily Mirror DVD coverEyewitness Planets interactive DVD coverEyewitness Planets interactive DVD alternative cover

**Writing staff**: Anne MacLeod • Ben Southwell • Ben Steiner • Brian Meehl • David Hanson • David Stafford • David Helton • George Bloom • Lynette Singer • Mike Tomlinson • Paul Thomas • Stan Cullimore
**Directors**: Gavin Maxwell • Justine Kershaw • David Hutt • Andrew Jackson • Justin Hardy • Ludo Graham • Jerry Foulkes • Derek Hall • Sanjida O'Connell • Caius Julyan • Bonni Cohen • Leanne Pooley • Edwina Vardey • Alexandra Beazley • Sam Hodgkin • Karen Walsh • Jack Weber • Richard Simkin • Alex Hearle • Brian Cummins • Ben Southwell
**Composers**: Guy Michelmore (season one) • Guy Dagul (seasons two and three)

**Season One**: Cat • Fish • Horse • Dog • Jungle • Bird • Amphibian • Insect • Shark • Elephant • Reptile • Dinosaur • Skeleton
**Season Two**: Desert • Tree • Ape • Mammal • Butterfly and Moth • Volcano • Rock and Mineral • Seashore • Pond and River • Weather • Arctic and Antarctic • Prehistoric Life • Shell
**Season Three**: Flight • Bear • Sight • Island • Survival • Mountain • Monster • Human Machine - Plant • Ocean • **Planets** • Life • Natural Disasters