Canada

United States

Northern Mariana Islands

Puerto Rico

American Samoa

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U.S. Virgin Islands

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US, US Territories, Canada

US & Territories

(This program is no longer available for streaming.) Jupiter is not just the oldest planet orbiting the sun—it’s also the largest. So when the young gas giant went on a rampage through the inner solar system, it shaped the fate of everything in its path. Speeding towards the Sun, Jupiter’s massive gravitational force hurled debris into interstellar space, stunting the growth of would-be planets. Earth might have been doomed had Saturn not pulled Jupiter back. Today, Jupiter resides in the outer solar system, where its gravity bends the paths of asteroids and stokes volcanic activity on its moon Io. But it could one day wreak havoc again. (Premiered July 31, 2019).

Jupiter's massive gravitational force has made it both a wrecking ball and a protector of Earth.

The Planets: Jupiter

Rockets are becoming cheaper and more powerful than ever before thanks to stunning new technologies. As companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic make space more accessible, and NASA returns to crewed spaceflight, a new era of space exploration seems to be on the horizon. But will this seeming rocket Renaissance become more than just hype? NOVA explores the latest rocket technologies and the growing role private citizens may have in space. (Premiered February 13, 2019)

With new technologies, NASA and private companies are promising a new renaissance in space travel.

Rise of the Rockets

Black holes are the most enigmatic and exotic objects in the universe. They’re also the most powerful, with gravity so strong it can trap light. And they’re destructive, swallowing entire planets, even giant stars. Anything that falls into them vanishes…gone forever. Now, astrophysicists are realizing that black holes may be essential to how our universe evolved—their influence possibly leading to life on Earth and, ultimately, us. In this two-hour special, astrophysicist and author Janna Levin takes viewers on a journey to the frontiers of black hole science. Along the way, we meet leading astronomers and physicists on the verge of finding new answers to provocative questions about these shadowy monsters: Where do they come from? What’s inside? What happens if you fall into one? And what can they tell us about the nature of space, time, and gravity? (Premiered January 10, 2018)

Take a mind-blowing voyage to the most powerful and mysterious objects in the universe.

Black Hole Apocalypse

This Giant Telescope Will Reveal The Universe in Unbelievable Detail

Go behind the scenes as NOVA visits the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, where scientists fire up the world&#x27;s largest digital camera for the first time.
Equipped with an 8.4-meter mirror and a 3.2-billion-pixel camera—the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy—the Rubin Observatory is poised to revolutionize how we see the cosmos. In just 10 hours of test observations, the telescope detected over 2,100 new asteroids.
This Giant Telescope Will Reveal The Universe in Unbelievable Detail Published: July 7, 2025NARRATOR: These are some of the first images released by the new Vera Rubin Observatory, revealing a slice of the cosmos in more detail than ever before. Nova was at the observatory in Chile as scientists fired up the entire system for the first time. We&#x27;ll show you the very first photo the telescope took in a moment. But first, what is this thing and why does it have astronomers so excited?AARON ROODMAN: We call it dark energy, but we really don&#x27;t know what it is.WILLIAM O&#x27;MULLANE: Some people have spent 20 years waiting for this moment. It&#x27;s fantastic.NARRATOR: The Vera Rubin telescope is massive. It&#x27;s equipped with an 8.4 meter mirror and Earth&#x27;s largest digital camera.AARON ROODMAN: The camera has 3.2 billion pixels. That is by far the largest digital camera ever built. The camera has three lenses. It&#x27;s the largest lens ever built for astronomy, over five feet across.NARRATOR: And it&#x27;s collecting a ton of data quickly. It is already discovered over 2,100 new asteroids in just 10 hours of test observations. The telescope will gather more astronomical data in its first year than all the other optical telescopes in history combined. It will image the entire southern night sky every three to four nights.AARON ROODMAN: The Rubin Observatory is unique in its capabilities. We can do things that no other telescope can really do. Compared to the space telescopes, Hubble or Webb, we see a huge part of the sky in every image, and we are designed to take images fast. The camera can collect the image in a little over two seconds. The telescope can move from one place to another in five seconds.NARRATOR: Over time, researchers will be able to detect new distant objects and see how they change. By observing them repeatedly and over the course of 10 years, they will put together a movie of the cosmos. By then, they will have gathered about 60 million billion bytes of imagery.ZELJKO IVEZIC: And we anticipate we will have about 40 billion objects, not million, billion with B, in our images. That will be the first time that astronomers cataloged more objects than there are living people on Earth.AARON ROODMAN: We&#x27;ll see every part of the sky almost a thousand times. That gives us an extra dimension too. We&#x27;ll see what changes. So we&#x27;ll discover tens of thousands, if not a hundred thousand, exploding stars, supernova. We&#x27;ll see millions of variable stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. We&#x27;ll see millions of asteroids, moving objects in the solar system, and I think we&#x27;ll also be able to discover objects that change that we don&#x27;t quite expect.NARRATOR: These sorts of observations will help astronomers understand some of the biggest mysteries in the cosmos, like dark energy and dark matter, the mysterious stuff that make up most of the universe.Here&#x27;s the galaxy.NARRATOR: In fact, the telescope is named after famed astronomer, Vera Rubin, who first forced astronomers to confront the idea of dark matter. Nova was there for the test in spring of 2025 when the team attempted to focus the camera and take the very first images. But in the first test of the telescope, everything looked like... Cereal?SANDRINE THOMAS: And after that first image, which looks like a bowl of Cheerios that you eat in the morning, we adjusted the optics in our telescope.NARRATOR: The image appeared to show a series of rings because the telescope optics were not in proper focus. To fix this, the team had to adjust the distance between the telescope&#x27;s camera and its massive mirror, shifting the camera ever so slightly.ROBERT LUPTON: The question is, do we move it towards the mirror or do we move it away from the mirror? And theoretically, we know, or else you can just guess and see if it gets better or worse.VICTOR KRABBENDAM: Fifty-fifty.ROBERT LUPTON: I always go in a positive direction. Think positively if you don&#x27;t know any better.NARRATOR: As the team fine-tuned the telescope systems...Almost.NARRATOR: The image became more and more clear.ZELJKO IVEZIC: We just acquired the greatest image in the history of astronomy. Congratulations.SANDRINE THOMAS: It&#x27;s the first time this camera sees anything coming from the sky. That was our first image, and it means a lot to me. It might not be the prettiest image when you think about astronomy. But to me, it was extremely rewarding and very beautiful.NARRATOR: In June, 2025, the Rubin Telescope team released the first official images, revealing the Virgo Cluster, the closest collection of galaxies to us, and the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae. It&#x27;s just the start of what promises to be a spectacular decade of discovery.

Go behind the scenes as NOVA visits the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, where scientists fire up the world&#x27;s largest digital camera for the first time.

An image of an active volcano spewing smoke.

Hot Spot Volcanoes on Earth and Mars

Explore how plate tectonics affects hot spot volcanoes with this video from NOVA Solar System: Volcano Worlds.

Why Are Planets and Moons Spherical?

Explore how gravity and rotation influence the shapes of objects in space with this video from NOVA Solar System: Strange Worlds.

Giant Water Jets from Enceladus

Learn how the motion of water molecules, thermal energy, and diffusion explain the giant jets of water that erupt from Saturn’s moon Enceladus with these videos from NOVA Solar System: Volcano Worlds.

Energy, Clouds, and Lightning on Earth and Jupiter

Learn how the water cycle is responsible for clouds and lightning on both Earth and Jupiter with this video from NOVA Solar System: Storm Worlds.

Why Is Water Ice on Earth Important?

Explore ice in the solar system and learn how ice on Earth is important to living things with this video from NOVA Solar System: Icy Worlds.

UFO Sightings: How Scientists are Trying to Capture More Data

To better study the UFO phenomenon, science needs more eyes on the skies.
There have been reports of UFO and UAP sightings for decades, but these accounts are often difficult to verify. Now, scientists are in search of the elusive: hard data. From machine learning sites that analyze the sky 24/7, to a crowd-sourcing app that asks the public to submit their own UFO videos, discover the inventive methods at play to capture more data.
NARRATOR: When it comes to sightings of UFOs by military pilots and the public, how can science help separate fact from fiction?MARK MOUNTAIN: From the very days that Galileo first lifted his telescope to the sky and made measurements of the moons going around Jupiter, everybody else could then reproduce those measurements and go, oh yeah, he&#x27;s right. And that confirmation is what has made the scientific method so powerful over the last 400 years.SHELLEY WRIGHT: The thing we need is data, and we need real data, and we don&#x27;t have it.NARRATOR: Astronomer Avi Loeb is collecting more data in a novel way.AVI LOEB: We just constructed an observatory at Harvard University. We are monitoring objects that fly overhead and trying to make sense of them.NARRATOR: This collection of instruments is part of Harvard&#x27;s Galileo ProjectJACOB HAQQ-MISRA: The Galileo Project is developing several sites that are spread across a geographical region where each site has an array of sensors, optical cameras, infrared images. There&#x27;s audio from infrasound to ultrasound. There&#x27;s radar. It&#x27;s a wide array of instruments to basically look at the sky all the time to see if you find any anomalies.NARRATOR: Some instruments have other worldly names like this one called Dalek...DALEK: Exterminate!NARRATOR: ...after the cyborg aliens featured in the Dr. Who series. Inside Dalek, there are eight infrared cameras.AVI LOEB: They get the full picture of the entire sky at all times in the infrared. When something of interest is identified by the main set of cameras, we zoom on it in the sky. And this is the camera that can move around and look at the object of interest, automatically based on the computer system that we developed.JACOB HAQQ-MISRA: You can imagine if you have a camera pointing overhead, you&#x27;re gonna see a lot of things that are identifiable. So they use machine learning, what people call artificial intelligence that can recognize the knowns, recognize the birds, the airplanes, the balloons, leaves, all the known things, and sort of reject those, filter them out. And then what you&#x27;re left with is the anomalies. You&#x27;re left with things that you cannot understand, the things you can&#x27;t identify.AVI LOEB: So far, we have been operating this observatory for several months, and we saw hundreds of thousands of objects in the sky. None of them appears to be anomalous, but even if one in a million came from outside of this Earth that would be big news to humanity and will change our future. And that&#x27;s what drives my science.NARRATOR: And there&#x27;s another way we can collect more data with a little help from the public.When they&#x27;re coming in, it will seem like they&#x27;re going sideways.In the lower east side of Manhattan at Enigma Labs, a staff of software designers and UFO enthusiasts are developing a first of its kind crowdsourcing app.LAUREN BUTLER: The goal is really to bring people together to share their UAP experiences and their sightings.ALEJANDRO ROJAS: We get a lot of Starlink and SpaceX rocket videos, but at the same time, people are submitting things that cannot be explained. This time, I&#x27;ve got one that I can&#x27;t figure out. Maybe you can help me out. This is really cool. Just this light comes floating in, and then it hovers. But wait.RESEARCHER: But what is this blob of light here?It came down slowly, right?ALEJANDRO ROJAS: Yeah.LAUREN BUTLER: Those are fireworks, Isaac, right?ALEJANDRO ROJAS: Those are probably fireworks.RESEARCHER: Probably smoke rising up though.ALEJANDRO ROJAS: And smoke rising up. But in just a second it will get weirder.Isn&#x27;t that weird?RESEARCHER: It gets brighter and brighter.Oh, it&#x27;s getting brighter.ALEJANDRO ROJAS: Yeah, it keeps getting brighter. And it&#x27;s a broad beam of light.RESEARCHER: So it&#x27;s not a star.ALEJANDRO ROJAS: So what do you think about maybe drone? But I mean, look how still it is. It doesn&#x27;t have blinking lights. I mean, it doesn&#x27;t look like a drone. This is a good one. I don&#x27;t know. I don&#x27;t know what that is.NARRATOR: Apps like this could one day be a source of data for scientists to study.MARK MOUNTAIN: We&#x27;re not relying just on, did you see something? We&#x27;re asking your cell phone to make a measurement. It&#x27;s going to record the position of the phone on the planet &#x27;cause we all have GPSs in it. And because it has a little compass in it, it will also tell us what direction we&#x27;re looking at, so we can actually do scientific experiments with actual data because our modern cell phones are so good now at recording numbers.SHELLEY WRIGHT: As scientists, we also wanna get to the bottom of this.HAKEEM OLUSEYI: The answer is get more data, and the way you&#x27;re gonna get more data is that you&#x27;re gonna have more eyes on the sky.

To better study the UFO phenomenon, science needs more eyes on the skies.

Topic: Space & Flight

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