Link to Voyage to the planets: 5- Venus and Mercury documentary
Documentary Description
Everyone likes a vacation in a warm climate, but fancy a trip to a place
as hot as Hades? Voyage to the Planets heads in towards the Sun to find
two quite different sun-drenched worlds that both lay claim to that
title.
Tiny Mercury, almost invisible in the glare of the Sun,
is the place to go for the ultimate suntan. But if your sun protection
isn’t up to scratch, you can always get out of the oven by chilling out
on the Dark Side. Step into the shade and Mercury’s mercury plunges over
600 degrees.
And it’s here, in Mercury’s deep freeze, that
things begin to get interesting. There’s an exclusive night show, caused
by the Solar Wind that bombards the planet’s feather-thin atmosphere.
And on the closest planet to the Sun, there is even the prospect of ice.
In Mercury’s eternally shadowed polar craters, radar observations have
detected what could be thick deposits of frozen water. And however it
arrived on this sun-drenched, ancient surface, it certainly has a story
to tell.
But it is our nearest neighbour, pale and beguiling
Venus, that hides the biggest secret. The Goddess of Love will literally
melt your heart and crush your defences at the same time. Once the twin
of Earth, it’s thought that Venus had oceans for billions of years and
even the likelihood of life.
Our first attempts to unveil Venus
were confounding. Every spacecraft that plunged beneath her clouds
inexplicably vanished. It wasn’t until 1975 that the first robotic probe
made it to the surface and revealed the horrible truth: Smothered by a
climate gone mad, a romantic visit to our sister planet’s volcanic
scenery means diving into an atmosphere hot enough to melt lead, where
acid smog eats bare metal for breakfast and the pressure could crush a
submarine.
Something happened here to make Venus turn bad. And
it could have something to do with why the planet is the only world in
the Solar System to rotate backwards… and slowly. Could life have ever
survived such a catastrophic climate change? If so, could Venusian bugs
really be floating around in the thick, acid atmosphere?
Voyage
to the Planets reveals the many reasons for a visit into the Hot Zone on
our planetary doorstep. What happened to turn our neighbours so
astonishingly alien? And what can a jaunt to these worlds tell us about
our own?
