Inside The Sky at Night
As several nations begin journeys to the Red Planet, The Sky at NightÕs producer Simon Winchcombe looks back through the BBC archives to see how our perception of Mars has changed in the last 50 years
Prompted by the upcoming missions to Mars, a chance conversation in the office led us to wonder how many past Sky at Night episodes had focused on the Red Planet. It turns out to be over 50, with the first broadcast in 1961. A further trawl through the BBC archive revealed more than 10 Horizon programmes on the same subject. Now, we thought, this was bound to be a treasure trove of images, ideas and discoveries – perfect for creating The Sky at Night’s August episode.
For the next fortnight all I did was watch old TV episodes until my mind was awash with images of interplanetary travel, dreams of discovering water or Martians and swirling images of Patrick Moore.
All I needed then was a location for the show’s current co-presenters – Maggie and Chris – to do their thing. A quick call to the ever-helpful Airbus meant we could film in their Mars Yard – a giant sandpit in Stevenage mocked up to look like Mars, the training ground for the Rosalind Franklin rover. Every programme always seemed to come back to the same question, ‘Is there Life on Mars?’ What has changed in the 55 years since Mariner IV’s first fly-by of the planet – taking just 22 photographs – is what ‘life’ actually means. We’ve moved away from expectations of little green men and Martian vegetation and witnessed disappointment from Viking’s failure to find microbes. More recently, Pathfinder has discovered evidence of past floods and Curiosity has revealed that Mars hosts several of the conditions needed to spark life – albeit in a rudimentary form.
Other subjects kept cropping up as well. How would we get to Mars? Could we colonise the planet? The answers here vary from the sensible – experiments in long-term space travel – to the slightly bonkers, such as a proposal for an ‘easy to construct’ 300km-wide annulus mirror floating around Mars to heat its surface!