The Sky at Night S2023E01 - The Search for Alien Life

The Sky at Night team investigate the latest science in the hunt for extraterrestrial life. Scientists have never been more obsessed with finding aliens than they are right now. And they're using the most advanced engineering and technology to look in some pretty weird and wonderful places across the universe.

Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock visits Professor Mark Sephton at Imperial College London – one of the scientists leading on the Perseverance Rover mission to Mars. This is the first mission to bring samples of rock from another planet back to earth, and Mark shows how they use images sent from the rover to decide the best places to take the precious samples. He reveals the latest technology used to analyse the samples of Martian rock for signs of life.

April 2023 sees the launch of a major European Space Agency mission to explore habitability on Jupiter's icy moons, with the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer aka Juice. Professor Chris Lintott meets leading scientist Professor Michele Dougherty. She reveals why frozen worlds such as Europa, Ganymede and Callisto are the next hot targets for alien life, and what this has to do with a game of squash.

Our in-house stargazing expert Pete Lawrence tells us how this month we can see Venus in a dramatic scene alongside the Hyades and Pleiades clusters. And George Dransfield is in Chile, searching for earth-like planets outside our solar system. We learn how these potentially habitable exoplanets are identified, as she carries out essential telescope maintenance in the Atacama Desert. Back in the UK, she meets Dr Sean McMahon – an astrobiologist at Edinburgh University investigating how reflected light could be used to search for life on exoplanets in the future.