The New Frontier (2015 - 2015)

Mercury and Venus: two planets that generate more questions than answers as we delve deeper into their workings.

Scientists and engineers have managed to land on a comet, knowledge of these celestial marauders may drive our industrial expansion into deep space.

Beyond the asteroid belt lay the gas giants, some can be seen with the naked eye, others only glimpsed once by a passing probe. We are again sending cameras to the edge of the solar system, giving us new insights into the evolution of our worlds.

These are the Moons of the gas giants. Each a unique and mysterious world of its own. Some have oceans of water, geysers of Sulphur or atmospheres of plastic. Some are just now being seen at the outer rim of our solar system, all are worthy of much more scrutiny.

It powers the machinery of nature; our weather, encourages and sustains life on land and at sea. When it sets in the West it reveals to us its many billions of sibling stars populating the night sky. We study our Sun closely, and like a Rosetta stone it can reveal the secrets of all the other stars above.

As scientists and astronomers peer closer at nearby stars with ever more fidelity they are discovering planets; exo planets, worlds outside our own solar system. With technological advances and improved techniques scientists are discovering more and more worlds every day. With confidence, scientists now calculated there could be as many as 40 billion Earth like planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone.

The night sky is a time machine. The further we look out into the universe, the further back in time we reach. What we see in the night sky is only a small percentage of the contents of the Universe, most is dark matter and dark energy. We know it exists; however, its nature eludes us for the moment.