Discovery and exploration of the Solar System Discovery and exploration of the Solar System Discovery and exploration of the Solar System is observation, visitation, and increase in knowledge and understanding of Earth's "cosmic neighborhood". This includes the Sun, Earth and the Moon, the major planets including Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, their satellites, as well as smaller bodies including comets, asteroids, and dust. For many thousands of years, astronomers maintained a geocentric world view and did not recognize the existence of a Solar System. Most believed Earth was stationary at the center of the Universe and categorically different from the divine or ethereal objects
Wonders of the Solar System 31 March 2011, the series won the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in documentary film-making. The first episode illustrates how the formation and behaviour of the Sun affects each planet in the Solar System. During this episode, Cox visits India to view and explain the workings of a total solar eclipse and the partial eclipses that occur on other planets. He travels to the Iguazu Falls to relate the causality between river levels, and sunspot fluctuations. An explanation of the Earth's exposure to the power of the Sun occurs in Death Valley, California, US, with an experiment inspired