we've long fantasised about the possibility of life on other planets. but it was only in 1995 that we found the first planet outside our solar system. these exoplanets are hard to find. of course they are, they're relatively tiny. and so far they've mainly been detected indirectly, either by the incredibly slight dimming of a star's light as a planet moves in front of it, or by the wobble of the star caused by something orbiting it. in the last 20 years we've detected about 2000 exoplanets, but we haven't actually seen many at all. this is why. well, the planets are very, very faint compared to a star and they're very close to a star. the kind of planets where we might find life, an earth—like planet orbiting a star would be 10 billion times fainter than a star. but if you can see the planets, you can start to look for evidence of life on their surfaces. what you need is something to block out the light of a star. what you need is a star shade. due to go into space in the middle of the next decade, it is a crazy—sounding thing that can be flown in between a space telescope and the star to precisely block out the star's light and reveal any planets. it'll be a few tens of metres in diameter, and in order to block outjust the light from that distant star, it'll need to be about 40,000 kilometres away from the telescope. so you managed to block out the starlight, you see this tiny dot which is a planet, what actually will we get from that image? what resolution will it be? will it be a few pixels or will we see it in great detail? what we'll see is a dot of light completely unresolved. essentially a single pixel. so that doesn't sound so interesting, but we'll be able first of all to see how far it is from the star, and by revisiting it, we'll be able to see what its orbit is, so we'll know if it might be a planet that can support life, due to its separation from the star. but more importantly, we'll be able to take that light and put a spectrometer on it, disperse it, and look for signatures of chemicals on the planet. we'll be able to see water, oxygen and carbon dioxide, perhaps methane, so signs of life. indications that this might be a planet that supports life. and this is not even the maddest part of the scheme. see, there's a problem. the star shade won't fit in a rocket. and that's why a big part of the work being done here at nasa'sjet propulsion laboratory in pasadena, and the beautiful solution that they've come up with, is all about fitting the thing into a tight space and then unfurling it once in space. and the inspiration comes from origami. wow! it's really quite impressive. at the end you can see how large an area you can fill with such a small volume of material. but this is only the half of it because you have petals which come out here as well? yes, exactly. oh, my goodness. this cardboard model is the latest test to make sure the shade can unfurl perfectly when it is all alone up there in the black. the flower shape blocks out the light better than a circle, and those outer petals need to be made to an accuracy of 50 to 100 microns. you're going to point a telescope at a star and then you're going to fly this into position to block the light from the star? correct. what if you then want to look at another star? the telescope moves by a little bit but this thing has got to go across the galaxy? that's right. there are two ways we can do it. we could move the entire shade so the star is over there and we have the star shade, and we have the telescope and we can move the star shade to the next target, or you can move the telescope to reposition. and how long would it take to move? it could take from several days to a week or more, depending on the next target. if i may say, this sounds crazy! this sounds like we want to spot some planets, what are we going to do? we'll put a shade in space and we're going to fly it 40,000 kms from the telescope. that sounds insane. well, what's really cool about that is there is this insane concept of how you're going to fly this massive shade so far away, 40,000 kilometres away from the telescope, but once you start breaking it down into little problems, you start testing and build a petal, you build the truss, you build the shield, you realise piece by piece what engineering needs to go in to that problem to solve it. so we just break it down into little problems that we can solve in a piecewise fashion. and isn't that a great motto for life? take an impossible problem and break it down into more possible chunks. i love the fact that atjpl you can just wander into a random room and it is called something like the extreme terrain mobility lab. that's what they're doing here. they're making robots to cope with extreme terrain. this is axel which is a robot with a pair of wheels that can be lowered down cliffs. and this is fido and athena. these are the prototypes for the mars rovers spirit and opportunity. of course the point about robots is they can do things that humans might want to do but in places that humans can't go. all of these have fairly familiar designs, wheels here, some robots have legs. but kate russell has found one that looks like nothing i have ever seen before. in 2012 the world watched with bated breath as nasa deployed a rover on the surface of mars using a sky crane. this kind of science is incredibly expensive. the rover weighed 900 kilograms, as much as a full grown giraffe. with the equipment required to land it gently, it had to be able to take the weight of 32 giraffes. total cost, $2.5 billion. it would have been much cheaper if curiosity was lightweight, came flat—packed and was sturdy enough just to be dropped on the red planet's surface. meet super ball, a tensgrity robot in development in nasa ames. this lightweight sphere—like matrix can be packed down flat, taking up minimal space in a rocket and vastly reducing launch costs. because of the unique structure of this robot and the fact that it can deform and reform itself and take massive impacts, eventually nasa will be able to literally throw it at the surface of a planet and its scientific payload in the middle will be protected. it's bouncy. 0nce deployed, super ball can handle much rougher terrains then a rover, rolling over obstacles and up and down hills. tendon wires connecting the struts spool in and out creating momentum, in much the same way as flexing your muscles moves your limbs. if it bumps into anything solid, it willjust bounce back. it should even be able to survive falling off a cliff. the next step for super ball is to redesign the robot such that it can actually survive at least a one—storey drop. you can expect to see a system like this on an actual nasa mission probably in 15 or 20 years‘ time. 0ver atjpl, they are working on limbed robots. its research spawned from the darpa robotics challenge where teams competed to create highly mobile and dextrous robots that can move, explore and build things without human intervention. one of the great things about the simian body plan is that all of our limbs can be used for either mobility or manipulation. and so, if we are putting things together, you could certainly imagine hanging on with a couple of them and doing the manipulation to assemble things together with others, and that makes for a very robust way of putting things together in an environment like zero g where you don't want to float off. the plan for king louis is to be sent into space to build stuff with visual codes a bit like qr codes to guide it. we have a structured environment. we know what we are putting together so we put signposts onto all the bits and pieces of the structure we are putting together that tell the robot a few things. most importantly, it tells the robot where those things it is manipulating are in space, literally and figuratively, so it can align itself better. the codes will also include construction information like which bits go together and how much torque to apply to a bolt. this will allow robots to work autonomously in teams, building space stations or planetary habitats faster and more economically than previously possible. but nasa hasn't completely given up on our four—wheeled space helpers. here we've tried to develop new kinds of robots for future space exploration. this robot, for example, is called k—rex. it's one of our main research robots that we develop and test here in the roverscape at nasa ames. this is a large play area for robots, a proving ground that we use to really try to develop things like navigation or do the mission simulations. one of the biggest problems with space travel is getting stuff off our planet. it requires an incredible amount of fuel to break through the atmosphere. so k—rex's currentjob is to look at ways to collect useful resources once we are already out in space. can we go to the moon, find water and use it for oxygen and hydrogen to make fuel and go other places beyond the moon? for you, what is the most exciting sort of new development that is on the horizon? for a long time now we had robots do exploration. we have rovers on mars, they are still functioning today. we have humans in space on the international space station, and in the future i think what we're going to see more of is really human—robot teams. robots might be working ahead of humans, they might be working following up after humans, they might be side—by—side or perhaps just in support of humans. in any case, what we're going to have is a future of robots and humans working together. so, the biggest question perhaps of the day for me, can i drive k—rex? definitely. let's have you do that. yes! now lots of you think we click reporters have the bestjobs in the world, but after spending a day at the roverscape testing ground, i think there is another contender for that title. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that in the us, after much speculation, facebook head honcho mark zuckerberg denied he wants to run for president of the united states. not everyone wants to run the world, it seems, just the bits related to social media. plus, help could be at hand for forgetful apple airpod owners. apple has created a find airpods feature for its wireless earbuds. it works in the same way as the find my phone feature. no word yet though on how much rummaging down the back of the sofa it will lead to. plus, authorities in dubai showed off a new way of fighting fires. all with the help of a jet—ski for traffic—avoiding rapid response and a jet pack for some elevated extinguishing. water pressure keeps the firefighter airborne allowing them to target difficult to reach fires near waterways and then hose them down. next, never get off the boat. legendary movie director francis ford coppola has thrown his support behind a video game version of his vietnam war epic apocalypse now. it is going to be survival horror and it is going to be financed via crowdfunding. and finally, fashion conscious astronauts have had to make do with any colour space suit they like as long as it is in white. not any more. nasa and boeing have revealed details of the new upgraded blue space suit. these are lighter and easier to move in. personally, i'd prefer pinstripe. up on the international space station, resources are pretty tight. but while food and water do need to be delivered as take—out, you might think that power at least might be plentiful. but over their lifetime, the international space station's solar arrays degrade and produce less power. and as our space aspirations grow, we could do with more and more power anyway from bigger and bigger panels. that's a bit of a problem. to give you an idea of how much power the iss needs, it has eight solar arrays. each one is as long and as tall... as this room. to fit something this huge into a rocket‘s payload, as we discovered with the star shade, you have to fold it up. the problem here is each part of the solar array is mounted on a thick protective aluminium backing. the more you fold it to reduce the length, the more you increase the thickness. bit here at lockheed martin in palo alto, wahid azizpor is working on a solution. i am constantly surprised by anything that goes into space, about how light it is. it looks quite thick but it's so light. it has to be. it costs a lot of money to launch one of these in space so it has to be light. why did you need that? to make sure the cells did not crack when you're launching in space. it's really violent when it goes in space and on a rocket itself. so it's not when it's in space, it's actually the launching and i guess the unfurling that can damage these things? that can damage the cells. but this is not good enough for you! this is the thickness of a normal solar array and you are now making them that thick. it's a substance called kapton and it will replace that thick aluminium support. it feels like a bit of plastic. so what does this mean for stuff that goes into space now, whether it is space travel or satellites? what does this mean? you can put a lot more power, a lot more cells in space in a small area itself, so you don't need all these things. all you can put is the kapton so if you want double the power, all you need to do is double the amount of that material, kapton, which adds another inch to it and it doubles the amount of power you need. only a few of us will, of course, ever get into space, but for the next best thing, why not try it in vr? here's lara lewington. i've had some really engaging virtual reality experiences. one of them simply set in an office, but it seems if you are entering a vr world, you might as well go somewhere really exciting, like space. that's where home: a vr spacewalk takes you. inspired by nasa's training programme, it aims to bring a mission in space to the masses. after getting used to your new surroundings, you undertake an emergency mission. whilst enjoying views of earth from afar, a friendly hand from a fellow astronaut helps to get you on your way. ah, i can hold a hand. i feel a strange sense of safety there is another astronaut here. the bbc commissioned the experience last year, as its first steps into the world of virtual reality content. we've taken all the storytelling power of the bbc and applied that behind it, so there's a great script, a great narrative and then we've looked at all the cutting edge explorations people are doing around vr, in terms of bio—monitoring, haptic feedback etc etc and trying to bring that into it as a massive piece of learning really. my preview here on the htc vive saw it set up with a chair providing haptic feedback and a heart rate monitor which resulted in my being sent back to base if readings went too high. but apparently i'm very calm in space. in march it will be released for vive on steam as well as 0culus. wow, this is incredible. i'm now looking at vancouver apparently. some artistic license was of course needed like making tasks shorter so they wouldn't get boring, but aside from creating the pictures and story telling a project as bold as this needs, there were the usual challenges faced by those producing vr content. in 360 video and virtual reality, locomotion is one of the biggest problems. if you move someone without them having made a conscious decision to be moved, it can be very disorientating. to get around those problems in this particular environment of zero gravity on the outside of the space station, we built a system where you move yourself by grabbing handles, so every single movement of yourself in the environment is always user initiated and as granular, slow or as fast as you are comfortable with. 0h, goodness! i feel most disorientated! wow, the depth of it i think was the thing that was most surprising. you really got a sense of being up high, seeing things really, really far away. it took awhile to get grips with what i was meant to be doing, but just the fact that i was moving around within space was quite incredible. whilst it wasn't possible to create a sense of weightlessness, the pictures were amazing, but obviously, i can't vouch for how true to life they are. it is essential to life on earth, but the sun is a fearsome beast and cares not one jot for the way that we've chosen to live. seen up close, this seemingly uniform sphere of light reveals itself as a churning, raging ball of fire. every so often, the surface erupts, flinging huge amounts of particles into space, in a phenomenon known as a coronal mass ejection. so this is a coronal mass ejection in close—up? this is what astrophysics does. this is how we figure out what gases are in there, how fast they move, how hot they are, how dense they are. have we ever been hit by one of those? the earth has been hit by one of those, yes, many times. many times? that's not game over when we are hit by something because it looks quite final to me! it is huge. the earth is about this size. no, we get hit fairly regularly, every 11 years the sun goes through a cycle where the sun's domestic field gets very active and then we get a lot of these. this is what we call space winter. which i guess makes bart de pontieu a space weatherman. he is in charge of iris, a satellite launched three years ago which looks at small parts of the sun in great detail. his job is to use what he sees to create solar super computer simulations, which may unlock its mysteries, and may help us to understand where the particular coronal mass ejections will affect us here on earth. you can see in this movie when that eruption happens. you see all that snow on the image. those are the energetic particles of the sun that hit our detectors, our ccds and they leave charges in there. these energetic particles impact, notjust the ccds, but they can also impact the computers on—board satellites, and that means the satellites can flip a bit essentially and screw up the whole operation of the satellite. satellites have gotten lost as a result. and so when these things happen, you can go in safe mode. if you can predict them properly, you can go in safe mode. many of these storms can be geo—affective and changing the environment around earth, they can lead to power grids getting overloaded and transformers blowing up. and so you could actually cycle down usage on your power grid if you knew that something like this was happening, or you could tell your troops that your satellite communications might be disturbed because the atmosphere is disturbed that day. iris isn't the only space telescope to come out of lockheed martin here in california. a new one was launched in 2016, and before the launch we got a sneak welcome to the heliostat. the point of this thing is to bring what's up there down to the labs below, so if i lean down this tube, you can see me. hello, there. of course, you don't really want to see me orjust the blue sky. what you actually want to see is... down here, the sun's image is bounced around and fired into the clean room containing the new satellites, which are so small, they can fit four of them into a relatively tiny space. the next generation of solar monitoring telescope is happening there. the solar ultraviolet imager, suvi, will watch the sun in extreme ultraviolet. it should be able to provide early warnings of heavy space weather caused by solar flares and coronal mass injections, and will ultimately help us to unlock the secrets of our nearest star. something that is no longerjust for scientific interest, but will protect a society that is increasingly dependent on technology as well. this is the example of one of the simulations from the university of oslo in norway. isn't that sexy?! we really need these models to understand what we're seeing and how we could possibly predict things like this. tell me you've got that as your desktop wallpaper because i want a copy of that. i do. laughter rather than continental europe it is the atlantic where we are getting the atlantic where we are getting the weather and if you look at the last 24 hours you can see plenty of cloud, whether systems piling up to head alloway. it will be much more windy than it has been of late —— weather systems —— our way. early risers for devon and cornwall will get soaked but things turning dry around eight o'clock. 0utbreaks get soaked but things turning dry around eight o'clock. outbreaks of rainfor around eight o'clock. outbreaks of rain for wales, south—west england, the midlands. 0ne rain for wales, south—west england, the midlands. one or two showers and some dry weather across eastern england. south, south—easterly wind, so england. south, south—easterly wind, so it would be called to start. temperatures start the day in double figures. 0utbreaks temperatures start the day in double figures. outbreaks of rain in north—west england. again start in southern scotland. the driest and brightest northern scotland. the wind will be a feature across western and southern coasts. it will touch gale force at times. the rain pushing east through the day. a cloudy afternoon. brighter skies in the west and more showers late in the west and more showers late in the day into south—west england and south—west wales with temperatures foremost in double figures. it will be windy thursday night into friday. we lose one batch of rain from the east. showers coming from the west. most persistent into friday northern scotland. a little on the cool side during the dry moments but for most temperatures well clear of frost. this low pressure system is developing into friday. more uncertainty about where it will go. it will swing from western france into south—east england and the worst would be late in the day. it will be a day starting with light wind and brighter skies. not bad through scotland and northern ireland. wet and windy weather spreading into south—west england and wales with gales in places. it is around the english channel through the afternoon that we see the wind ramping up. the channel islands could see winds of up to 70 mph. —— in excess of 70 mph. through the afternoon and evening, gales around 50 mph down the east coast. we will keep you updated. a very warm welcome to bbc news, broadcasting to our viewers in north america and around the globe. my name's mike embley. our top stories: the biggest demonstrations since the fall of communism. romanians take to the streets against a government decree that could see dozens of corrupt politicians freed from jail. in california, activists try to block a speech by an editor of the far—right website breitbart. the most serious fighting in a long time in eastern ukraine. the head of nato urges moscow to use its influence to control pro—russian rebels. it's 12 months since zika was declared a global health emergency — now scientists think many more babies could be affected. and, giving thanks for donald trump, we visit the american city called the buckle on the bible belt — where they love what their new president is doing.

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