Earth at Night

Maggie Aderin-Pocock interviews astronaut Jessica Meir, who returned from 205 days on the International Space Station to a world she barely recognised. They also discuss Jessica's experiments in micro-gravity, growing lettuce in space and the first all-female spacewalk. Chris Lintott meets the astronomer who recently announced the discovery of the closest black hole to Earth. Pete Lawrence photographs the dark side of Venus and Lucie Green investigates whether Elon Musk's constellation of Starlink satellites are ruining the night sky.

The Sky at Night team explores the threat of an asteroid impact on earth. Around 2,300 asteroids have been identified as ‘potentially hazardous', and it's thought that a million ‘near-earth objects' are yet to be accounted for.

In a month when the tally of confirmed exoplanets passed 5,000, it's astonishing to remember that just 30 years ago, the notion of planets outside our own solar system was, well – just a notion. Since the first extrasolar planet was discovered in 1992, a staggering array of other worlds have been identified, including many in solar systems quite unlike our own.

The team travel to the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands where they take control of some of the world's largest telescopes to view the most spectacular sights in the night sky.

This month we delve 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!

All good travel guides need a map, and the team unveil the most detailed 3D map of the Milky Way ever produced. A map that reveals that there may be 50 per cent more stars in the galaxy than we previously thought. American astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson gives us a guided tour of the strangest stars we have ever observed, and we discover that the Milky Way may already be colliding with our neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda.

In this special episode to mark the end of another season of The Sky at Night, we team up with Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage to talk all things amateur astronomy. Join Maggie, Chris and Pete, alongside Professor Brian Cox and comedians Robin Ince and Dara ? Briain, in front of a live audience at the BBC’s Radio Theatre. Together they discuss their love of stargazing and share their top tips and favourite kit for looking up at the night sky.

The Sky at Night team investigates the controversial world of alien communication. The search for life on other planets is one of the most fascinating subjects in science. But what is less reported is the work being done around the world to determine what happens next. If we discover aliens, how would we contact them, what should we say and should we communicate with them at all?

A look at two missions attempting one of the most difficult feats of space exploration - to collect a rock from another world. This episode checks in on the US and Japanese attempts to bring a piece of an asteroid back to Earth. The missions have taken decades of planning, but the results will be worth it. We find out how studying these space rocks can teach us about the origins of our solar system and may one day help save Earth from a catastrophic collision.

The Very Large Telescope - or VLT - has been responsible for some of the greatest astronomical breakthroughs of all time, discoveries that have resulted in Nobel Prizes and transformed our understanding of the cosmos. The Sky at Night team travels to the heart of Chile's Atacama Desert to explore one of the most advanced observatories in the world - a site at the forefront of ground-based optical astronomy.