Chris Lintott’s Universe

I’ve had a couple of requests for the text Brian used as part of his speech on Saturday. It’s taken from the first in the series of Sky at Night books, and was written not by Patrick but by the first producer, Paul Johnstone. He writes
It has always seemed to me that television is above all a means of communication to a mass audience. That does not mean it should debase subjects or avoid difficult or so-called minority ones. But it is not like a book, where you can re-read a difficult sentence. Nor can it ever replace books as permanent sources of wisdom or knowledge. On the other hand, the combination of immediacy, personality and illustration can impart information more vividly to a wide audience than any book or magazine, provided always that this essential clarity and simplicity is kept.

and I don’t think much has changed since then. Mind you, he also said

One must also mention the dancing girls. We claim happily to be the only serious scientific programme on television which regularly employs dancing girls.

so maybe some things do change!

Apologies for being a day or two late with this, but I now feel the run-up to the 50th anniversary has begun; the royal mail stamp issue is out. Have a look here – I think they’re rather good, even if they did miss the chance to have the Queen’s head wearing a monocle!

Meanwhile, Brian let slip at Astrofest that he was going to be our Mars correspondent for the 50th anniversary show, and I can reveal that we’ll be filming in a studio (YES! A proper studio!) at the weekend. More details soon, and hopefully a behind the scenes shot or two.

Let me tell you the story of this weekend’s program. The first few months of my time on the Sky at Night were dominated by thoughts of Mars. Looking back at the list of programs, it appears that we didn’t do as much as I thought we had to cover the arrival of Mars Express, Spirit and Opportunity at the planet but they were much in our mind throughout.

One of the first questions Patrick asked in our February 2004 program was ‘why only a 90 day mission’ for Spirit and Opportunity, and at the time we’d agreed that we’d do another Mars program once their mission had ended. Eventually, we gave up and this month’s program is, as I’ve already said, a double length special about missions to Mars.

I went up to Birmingam on Thursday to record the last of the voiceover, and – thanks to the hard work of the producer and (small) team – it’s looking good. There are so many incredible images around that it’s easy to make a beautiful program. Enjoy!

I’m so looking forward to the next couple of months of working on Sky at Night. We spent the weekend putting the finishing touches to our Mars special, to go out next weekend. This is 40 minutes long on BBC2, and a full hour on BBC4 and well worth it! It contains all of the interviews from my California trip last year, and a long chat with the creator of Spirit and Opportunity, Steve Squyres.

Mon 5th Feb – 00:05 (late Sunday night) on BBC2
Mon 5th Feb – 19:00 Extended edition on BBC4

We also spent a lot of time writing the script for the 50th anniversary show, to be broadcast in April. Those of who who watch probably realise we don’t often have a script, but this is going to be something rather special…I can’t (and won’t) say too much now, but I’m sure you’ll be surprised. Watch this space for more in the meantime.

JPL was personally something of a disappointment. We got some wonderful interviews – which you’ll see in due course – with many of the people involved in Mars missions past and present, and I feel like I’m finally getting my head around exactly what the current state of our knowledge of the planet is. Why the disappointment? JPL has always had iconic status and yet, partly through pressure of time and partly through the security restrictions that applied to us as foreign nationals, I didn’t get to see much more than the outside of the buildings. I’m sad in particular that we didn’t make it to the control room.

We then drove across the desert to Tuscon, Arizona, where many of the people involved in the Phoenix mission are based. This is a lander, not a rover, which will stay in one place for three months, analysing the soil that we believe has significant amounts of water ice just beneath it. NASA’s strategy is to `follow the water’ on Mars, in the hope that it will lead us to an understanding of where life is, was or could be. (Incidentally, despite all the prompting from the Bush administration, it’s clear that landing man on Mars is as far off as it ever was; no-one is talking about even a robotic sample return mission this side of 2020.)

I’ve been musing about whether `follow the water’ is the right tactic. It’s true that the presence of water has an enormous influence on the geology and chemistry of the planet, and that that in itself constitutes a reason for investigating. But it seems to be that by pitching the program of Mars exploration as a quest for life, we (the scientific community) risk shooting themselves in the foot. The people I’ve talked to on this trip – for the most part geologists – are interested in Mars for its own sake, and for what it can tell us about the evolution of planets in general. Life is part of that story, but it would be a shame if in a decade’s time this enormous effort were to be seen as a failure because the answer was not the `correct’ one.

Of course, that’s easy for me to say! In the meantime, you are all required to go and marvel at the images provided by the HiRISE camera on MRO. There’s a LOT still to come.

We arrived in California yesterday evening following an extremely long and uneventuful flight. We even managed to rescue all of our luggage – eventually – which is always reassuring. We’re here to film a series of interviews, mainly for our Mars special which goes out early next year, and first up is a trip to somewhere I’ve always wanted to go: JPL.

I’ll be posting reports throughout the week, wireless access permitting.

Housekeeping: I am ignoring comments for now due to an influx of spam. Longer term solutions to follow.

For reasons a long way beyond our control, this month’s Sky at Night will be broadcast on Sunday 11th, rather than this Sunday as normal. Your first chance to catch up with Venus Express and the world of extra-solar planets will therefore be on Monday 6th at 7pm on BBC4.

In the meantime, you could celebrate the successful launch of Stereo, NASA’s new solar satellite (with substantial UK involvement) by watching our coverage from a couple of months ago, available here.

This month’s Sky at Night, as those of you who have seen it might have noticed, was a little different than normal in that we essentially had three seperate topics (on the extended, BBC4, version). I would be very interest to receive ANY feedback – positive or negative, in the comments or via email – about any of the three items.

I’ll try and remember to ask this again once the program goes up on the web…