Rise of the Planet Killer

Are you a space buff? Join host Joanna Hausmann and test your skills and knowledge with this quiz about Apollo 13, long distance probe communication, and laser beacons. Plus a little bit of fun!

Getting out of Earth's atmosphere is no easy feat, but neither is answering these questions. Quiz yourself on Goddard's first flight, Atlas V's propulsion systems, and the journey to Mars. Ready to liftoff?

Space travel is all well and good, but returning home to Earth provides another set of problems. Get ready to be quizzed about Yuri Gagarin's crash landing, cutting-edge shuttlecraft, and orbital space flight. Your quiz starts now...

Did our universe come into being by chance or was it created by a God? The latest science shows that the four forces governing our universe are finely tuned, leading many to believe that something must have calibrated them.

They are the most powerful objects in the universe. Astronomers now think there are billions of them, swallowing planets and stars in violent feeding frenzies, and that reality may take place on a two-dimensional hologram at the edge of the universe.

Einstein's Theory of Relativity says time travel is possible if you're going forward in time. But finding a way to travel backwards requires breaking the speed of light. Now strange-but-true phenomena like quantum nonlocality may make this a reality.

Cosmologists agree: our universe is 13.7 billion years old. Using cutting-edge technology, scientists can take a snapshot of the universe a mere heartbeat after its birth. But if the universe was born, where did it come from?

Everywhere we look on Earth, in the most hospitable environments and in the most extreme, we find life. Yet we have only ever found life on our planet. How did the stuff of stars come together to create life as we know it? What do we mean by 'life'?

Aliens almost certainly do exist. So why haven't we yet met E.T.? We're only just developing instruments powerful enough to scan for them. One astronomer believes she may have heard a hint of their first efforts to communicate.

Our understanding of the universe has drastically changed over the last 100 years. It's on the verge of another seismic shift from LHC findings. What we find could validate theories about how the world works and what we're made of.

What is the universe made of? Not just stars, planets, gas, and dust! Scientists think there must be five times as much dark matter as regular matter, but they have no idea what it is; only that it's not made of atoms we know of.

What would happen if we got a message from space? How would we react? Scientists and sci-fi writers, with cooperation from SETI and Carl Sagan's son, Nick, unravel the impact of this world changing event, forming an intriguing hypothetical scenario

How will humans react when an alien spacecraft is on its way to Earth? Will humans learn from aliens, or become colonial subjects? Scientists and sci-fi writers, with cooperation from SETI and Carl Sagan's son, Nick, unravel the impact.

The Arrival has ended. A swarm of small spacecraft depart their huge mothership, and hover in our atmosphere. The ships open their hatches, and deposit thousands of mysterious pods on the earth’s surface. Are they a message, a gift or a weapon?

A mothership the size of Texas is hovering over Earth and we're tired of waiting. We send a rover to explore, and what we find makes us question the definition of life. On Earth, the pods multiply, making contact with them unavoidable.