Decades ago, we sent astronauts to the moon as a symbol of confidence in the face of the great cold war struggle. Landing on the moon was a giant leap for mankind. But it’s what the astronauts picked up from the lunar surface that may turn out to be Apollo’s greatest legacy.

Back then, we got ready for it… by shutting down satellites that were vulnerable to high levels of radiation. But no one expected this. In what should have been a low point in solar activity, the sun erupted in a series of massive explosions, called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs.

Why some tropical storms erupt into monster hurricanes capable of wrecking coastlines. Can they be predicted? September 12th, 2008. A hurricane named Ike is headed toward the beaches of Galveston Island in Texas. The eye of the storm, where the most intense winds are, is still hundreds of miles away… Yet the rising water has already spread over much of the island. Eight days back, researchers had flown into Ike and measured its winds… at 145 miles per hour. That made it a category 4 out of 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

Almost seven years later, on the first of July 2004, the Cassini probe entered the orbit of Saturn. It then began to compile what has become one of the greatest photographic collections of all time, of a giant gas planet, surrounded by colorful rings, guarded by a diverse collection of moons, and millions of tiny moonlets.

Our Milky Way may harbor millions of black holes… the ultra dense remnants of dead stars. But now, in the universe far beyond our galaxy, there’s evidence of something far more ominous. A breed of black holes that has reached incomprehensible size and destructive power. Just how large, and violent, and strange can they get?

The universe has long captivated us with its immense scales of distance and time. How far does it stretch? Where does it end, and what lies beyond its star fields and streams of galaxies extending as far as telescopes can see? These questions are beginning to yield to a series of extraordinary new lines of investigation and technologies that are letting us to peer into the most distant realms of the cosmos.

How long will the Universe as we know it survive? The answer depends on whether Stephen Hawking's theory about how black holes decay is right.

Earth. November 14, 1969. Three astronauts, with spacesuits, food, water, and a battery of scientific and communications equipment, prepared to fly to the moon. Thousands gathered at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, including President and Mrs. Richard Nixon, to witness the historic launch. It was raining that day, but that was no cause for delay. The ship that would carry them into space was designed to launch in any weather.

From a distance, our galaxy would look like a flat spiral, some 100,000 light years across, with pockets of gas, clouds of dust, and about 400 billion stars rotating around the galaxys center. Thick dust and blinding starlight have long obscured our vision into the mysterious inner regions of the galactic center. And yet, the clues have been piling up, that something important, something strange is going on in there. Astronomers tracking stars in the center of the galaxy have found the best proof to date that black holes exist. Now, they are shooting for the first direct image of a black hole.

Just about every two years, the planet Mars makes its closest approach to Earth around 36 million miles. Thats when we pack our robotic emissaries off to the Red Planet, timing their launches to spend the least effort to get there.

The search for Earth-like planets is reaching a fever-pitch. Does the evidence so far help shed light on the ancient question: Is the galaxy filled with life, or is Earth just a beautiful, lonely aberration? If things dont work out on this planet Or if our itch to explore becomes unbearable at some point in the future Astronomers have recently found out what kind of galactic real estate might be available to us. Well have to develop advanced transport to land there, 20 light years away. The question right now: is it worth the trip?

Pandora is the idyllic blue world featured in the movie Avatar. Its location is a real place: Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to our Sun and the most likely destination for our first journey beyond the solar system.

Why did Earth thrive and our sister planet, Venus, died? From the fires of a sun’s birth… twin planets emerged. Then their paths diverged. Nature draped one world in the greens and blues of life. While enveloping the other in acid clouds… high heat… and volcanic flows. Why did Venus take such a disastrous turn?

How does energy stitch the cosmos together, and how do we fit within it? We now climb the power scales of the universe, from atoms, nearly frozen to stillness, to Earth’s largest explosions. From stars, colliding, exploding, to distant realms so strange and violent they challenge our imaginations. Where will we find the most powerful objects in the universe?

From intensive computer modeling, and myriad close observations, they’ve uncovered important clues to its ongoing evolution. Many now conclude that what we can see, the stars and galaxies that stretch out to the limits of our vision, represent only a small fraction of all there is.

Instead, astronomers have glimpsed a diverse planetary zoo, with giant planets in wide orbits around their parent stars, others that swing in so close they leave a comet-like tail, or molten rocky worlds emblazoned with oceans of lava. These finds have added new complexity to theories of how solar systems emerge in the birth of a star.

Scientists are now focusing their most powerful technologies on an effort to figure out exactly what happened. Our understanding of cosmic history hangs on the question: how did matter as we know it survive? And what happened to its birth twin, its opposite, a mysterious substance known as antimatter?

Is the universe bursting at the seams? Or is nature somehow fooling us? The astronomers whose data revealed this accelerating universe have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. And yet, since 1998, when the discovery was first announced, scientists have struggled to come to grips with a mysterious presence that now appears to control the future of the cosmos: dark energy.

There was a time when only government agencies had the ability to blast rockets into space, or send missions to worlds beyond our own. These days, countries around the world are preparing to send missions to the Moon. They are joined by a rash of private ventures.

Far out in space, in the center of a seething cosmic maelstrom. Extreme heat. High velocities. Atoms tear, and space literally buckles. Photons fly out across the universe, energized to the limits found in nature. Billions of years later, they enter the detectors of spacecraft stationed above our atmosphere. Our ability to record them is part of a new age of high-energy astronomy, and a new age of insights into nature at its most extreme. What can we learn by witnessing the violent birth of a black hole?

Modern science has linked polar light shows, called auroras, to vast waves of electrified gas hurled in our direction by the sun. Today, researchers from a whole new generation see this dynamic substance, plasma, as an energy source that may one day fuel humanity’s expansion into space. What can we learn, and how far can we go, by tapping into the strange and elusive fourth state of matter?

Now tens of billions of kilometers from Earth, the two Voyager spacecraft are streaking out into the void. What will we learn about the Galaxy, the Universe, and ourselves from Voyager's epic Journey to the stars?

This edition of COSMIC JOURNEYS explores the still unfolding story of Earth's past and the light it sheds on the science of climate change today. While that story can tell us about the mechanisms that can shape our climate. it's still the unique conditions of our time that will determine sea levels, ice coverage, and temperatures

Follow Dr. Ben Longmier and his team into the rugged Alaskan wilderness on a quest to build a whole new type of rocket engine. Their goal is to test sensitive components by launching them into radiation-filled environments of space aboard helium balloons. Their goal is to revolutionize space travel and exploration by harnessing the energy contained in the dynamic fourth state of matter: plasma

They are eruptions so vast, so Earth-shattering, they have changed the history of our planet. Climate collapse. Toxic turmoil. Mass extinction. Worse than a killer asteroid, or nuclear war, they are Earth's most destructive Supervolcanoes. North America, the time was six hundred and forty thousand years ago, long before humans arrived on the continent. Amid one of nature's great mountain building projects, the Rockies, vast columns of smoke began to rise high into the atmosphere. And soon a smokey haze wrapped the globe.

The episode of Cosmic Journeys explores the intersection of paleoclimate and current climate science. Through its turbulent history, Antarctica has played an important role in the evolution of planet Earth. This role will likely continue as a warming global climate begins to eat away at the ice sheets that cover the continent. The fate of the world as we know it is linked to the fate of Antarctica.

Are the universe and its physical laws so fine-tuned that the rise of life is inevitable? Or is life a fluke, a lucky roll of cosmic dice? We look for the answer in the rise of two important components of life, dust and water. It turns out that the universe is laden with water, a byproduct of dust kicked out and spread around by supernovas and black holes.

Cosmic Journeys explores the challenges of interstellar flight and the technological possibilities that may one day send us on a long voyage out into the galaxy. What imperatives will define the mission when it launches and finally arrives: exploration and science, or a struggle for survival?

An army of high tech telescopes is capturing photons racing through space, measuring their energies and pinpointing their sources. Led by Hubble in space, they are reeling in enormous volumes of data that scientists are using within models to explain how galaxies took shape, how stars live and die, and how the universe set the stage for life.

Since its launch 25 Years ago, the Hubble Telescope has returned images of unprecedented beauty of a dynamic and changing universe. In this episode of COSMIC JOURNEYS, Hubble’s most iconic images are bought to life to answer some of the most important questions facing astronomers today. Colliding galaxies, the birth and death of stars, jets of gas thrown out by material crashing into distant suns: these incredible images tech us valuable lessons about how galaxies are formed, what dark matter is and even the fate of the earth itself.

May 22nd, 2011. A powerful tornado cut a mile-wide swath through Joplin, Missouri, the costliest and one of the deadliest tornado disasters ever. What did scientists learn when they peered into the realm of this SuperTornado?

Planet hunters have detected nearly 5000 confirmed and candidate planets beyond our solar system. Most sun-like stars, it seems, are ringed with giant planets that crowd their parent stars and leave no room for planets like ours. The old theories about planetary formation are giving way to a new one defined by fierce gravitational battles and titanic collisions. How did Earth manage to survive?