The Sky at Night Season 2024

The Sky at Night is back for a brand new series, and this month it is delving into Nasa’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which last year brought back a sample from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. The team are finding out what it takes to analyse the tiny pieces of space rock, what they can tell us about how Earth became the planet it is today and may even tell us about the origins of life!

Total solar eclipses, like the one seen last month in North America, allow us to see details of the sun that can’t be seen at any other time. So, this month, The Sky at Night team looks at how scientists are creating eclipses on demand and discovering the secrets that can be revealed hidden in that starlight, including habitable planets like our own.

This month, The Sky at Night has a spooky twist. Across the universe, there are hidden objects that we can’t see, but astronomers and scientists still believe they’re out there. To find out how we know that these mysterious objects exist, the team are going ghost-hunting. Cosmic ghost-hunting.

In July 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope released its first images. They were visually stunning, and it was clear they provided more detail of stars, galaxies and planets than ever before. But for the scientists waiting on the data, this was just the beginning of their journey to discover what the new telescope would reveal. Since then, they have been working hard and publishing papers on all the data JWST has been sending back.

In this Sky at Night special, the team talk to Dr Nicola Fox, NASA’s head of science, whose life began in the UK. Presenter Chris Lintott chats to Nicky about her early years growing up in Hitchin in Hertfordshire and discovers how she fell in love with the stars.

The Sky at Night is embarking on a journey into the future as we explore how space will revolutionise life on Earth over the next 50 years. As humanity's reach extends into the cosmos, we face unprecedented challenges, from redefining what it means to be an astronaut to confronting our own space junk and dealing with the impact of life in space on our Earth-adapted bodies. With privileged early access to a groundbreaking new report from the Royal Society on humanity’s future in space, the Sky at Night team are on a mission to find our destiny among the stars – our place in space.