Catch up TV
2022: Super Telescope: Mission to the Edge of the Universe
As Nasa releases the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, this film tells the inside story of the telescope's construction and the astronomers taking its first picture of distant stars and galaxies. Will it be the deepest image of our universe ever taken?\n\nThe successor to Hubble, and 100 times more powerful, the James Webb is the most technically advanced telescope ever built. It will look further back in time than Hubble to an era around 200 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars and galaxies appeared. Webb's primary mission is to capture the faint light from these objects on the edge of our visible universe so that scientists can learn how they formed, but its instruments are so sensitive it could also be the first telescope to detect signs of life on a distant planet.\n\nThe James Webb Telescope is an £8 billion gamble on the skills of its engineering team. It’s the first telescope designed to unfold in space – a complicated two-week operation in which 178 release devices must all work - 107 of them on the telescope's sun shield alone. If just one fails, the expensive telescope could become a giant piece of space junk.\n\nFrom its conception in the late 1980s, the construction of Webb has posed a huge technical challenge. The team must build a mirror six times larger than Hubble’s and construct a vast sun shield the size of a tennis court, fold them up so they fit into an Ariane 5 rocket, then find a way to unfold them in space. This film tells the inside story of the James Webb Space Telescope in the words of the engineers who built it and the astronomers who will use it.
Source: BBC 2
Most recent episodes of Horizon
Horizon
2020: Hubble: The Wonders Of Space Revealed
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of its launch, this film tells the remarkable story of how Hubble revealed the awe and wonder of our universe and how a team of daring astronau ...
24-04-2025
BBC 2
Horizon
2020: What's The Matter With Tony Slattery?
Tony Slattery was one of the most gifted TV comedians of the late 80s and early 90s. One of the Cambridge Footlight set that included Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, ...
10-02-2025
BBC 2
Horizon
Life Story: A Horizon Special
It's 1951. There's a race on, and two of the brightest and brashest young men in Cambridge are determined to win it. The prize is glittering. Eternal fame, glory and almost cert ...
11-12-2024
BBC 2
Horizon
2020: Pluto: Back From The Dead
The incredible story of how Pluto has been propelled from an unremarkable ball of ice on the edge of the solar system to a world of unimaginable complexity - where some form of ...
28-10-2024
BBC 2
Most popular episodes of Horizon
Horizon
2021: 1. Horizon Special: The Vaccine
The extraordinary inside story of the biggest scientific challenge of our age – following a small band of vaccine scientists around the world who took on Covid-19 and ulti ...
07-07-2021
BBC 2
Horizon
2009-2010 - Is Everything We Know About The Universe Wrong?
Investigating the discovery of what is ominously being called 'dark flow', a phenomenon which could mean scientists might have to find a new way of understanding the universe.
13-10-2014
BBC 2
Horizon
2013-2014 - What's Wrong With Our Weather?
Physicist Dr Helen Czerski and meteorologist John Hammond make sense of Britain's extreme weather and discover that recent extreme winters are connected by the jet stream.
11-02-2024
BBC 2
Horizon
2018: 3. How To Build A Time Machine
Time travel is not forbidden by the laws of nature, but to build a time machine, we would need to understand more about those laws and how to subvert them than we do now. And ev ...
07-08-2019
BBC 2
