91热爆

Space Odyssey: The Robot Pioneers

To accompany Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets, 91热爆 FOUR broadcasts a documentary that looks at the history of space exploration to reveal the science behind the series.

It tells the story of the human ingenuity that has dispatched robotic missions to all the planets except, as yet, Pluto.

Voyager 2 - which accomplished the original grand tour of the planets in the Seventies and Eighties - is a prime example.

Incredibly, more than 25 years since its launch and now over seven billion miles from Earth, we can still hear its whispers from deep space.

It carries the spirit of human exploration like a metal Christopher Columbus as its sensors probe the edge of our planetary system.

Human space flight has always overshadowed such extraordinary robotic quests but this documentary seeks to unveil their secret history.

Since the first Russian robot flew round the moon in 1959, more than 160 incredible metal explorers have diced with disaster, enduring multi-billion mile missions to unwelcoming worlds and dramatic journeys of discovery and survival that rival the tale of Apollo 13.

They've trail blazed a priceless path for any future manned missions, with their maps, measurements and images providing the knowledge for Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets.

Every amazing event, experience and danger portrayed in the series is based on the findings of these real robotic missions.

The sturdy Russian Venera landers survived blistering temperatures, acid storms and submarine-crushing pressures to snap tantalising images of the surface of Venus in the Seventies and Eighties.

This allowed the production team to accurately recreate this most extreme volcanic surface and know that, to ensure their survival on the surface long enough to carry out their mission, a human explorer would have to be equipped with a super-cooled titanium suit.

Nasa's Viking landers endured five years of daily sub-Siberian winter temperatures whilst hunting for life on Mars.

Their experiences on the surface of the red planet enabled Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets' depiction of this frozen desert world and left the fictional Pegasus crew with no doubts about the stamina they'd need to leave their own footprints in the Martian dust.

Braving the debilitating radiation belts of giant Jupiter, the Galileo mission survived for eight years.

It watched the planet's weather systems and charted the four big moons - snapping tantalising details of the volcano fields of Io and the ice-rucked surface of Europa - enabling the accurate digital representations of these exotic worlds created for the main series.

Thanks to the dedicated spacecraft engineers and the glass eyes and metal limbs of these remarkable mechanical explorers - and many more not mentioned here - this series is able to accurately portray the gruelling reality of a deep space human journey to the planets.