Discovery and exploration of the Solar System Earth to be orbited by an artificial satellite ("Luna 10"), followed by Mars in 1971 ("Mariner 9"), Venus in 1975 ("Venera 9"), Jupiter in 1995 ("Galileo"), the asteroid 433 Eros in 2000 ("NEAR Shoemaker"), Saturn in 2004 ("Cassini–Huygens"), and Mercury and Vesta in 2011 ("MESSENGER" and "Dawn" respectively). "Dawn" is orbiting the asteroid–dwarf planet Ceres as of 2015. The first probe to land on another Solar System body was the Soviet "Luna 2" probe, which impacted the Moon in 1959. Since then, increasingly distant planets have been reached, with probes landing on or impacting the surfaces of Venus in 1966
Wonders of the Solar System on the matter that composite the rings - a phenomenon called orbital resonance. The third episode looks at the atmosphere of the planets and moons of the Solar System, with Earth, Mars, and Venus being the main focus. The episode starts with Cox travelling to South Africa and taking a journey in an English Electric Lightning up to an altitude of 18 kilometres where the "thinness and fragility" of the atmosphere could be observed in the middle of the day. This is then contrasted with the planet-wide consequences of Mercury's depleted, and Venus' broiling greenhouse atmospheres. Later, the dunal morphology