John V. Higginbotham 
Have you ever wondered how advanced is your knowledge about the planets in our solar system?
“Nova” is a tv series that can help you determine just that with its five-part presentation “The Planets”, airing Wednesday at 9 p.m. The show is narrated by Zachary Quinto and will be on the little screens for more than four weeks. The episode “Inner Worlds” marks the beginning of the co-production of PBS with England’s BBC, presenting details about our solar system.
One of the participants in “The Planets”, NASA scientist and member of the Cassini project, Dr Linda Spilker says: “When I was in school, we hadn’t launched Voyager yet, and those outer planets were really just seen in a telescope from Earth”. There’s a lot to learn, like the fact that the rings of Saturn might be as old as dinosaurs and that they are slowly getting eroded.
Dr Ashwin Vasavada, member of the Curiosity Mars rover project declares: “We are passionate about the science that we’ve been learning, and we love to communicate that, so I hope people really get to know Saturn and get to know Mars. Being more on the Mars side, what I really hope people see is that Mars really is another world … and, in its early days, was a world so much like Earth. I’m not sure people have that appreciation.”
One of the highlights of the Mars episode is the mind-blowing fact that the red planet used to be blue.
Producer Gideon Bradshaw says that the focus of “The Planets” is aimed towards the past of the planets in our solar system.
