NOVA: "Solar System: Icy Worlds" (BBC Studios, GBH, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (October 23) I watched a couple of programs on KPBS on their usual “science night,” Wednesdays, a NOVA episode called “Solar System: Icy Worlds” and a Secrets of the Dead show chronicling one of the nastiest and most terrifying episodes of the U.S. Civil War. “Icy Worlds” chronicled the results of NASA’s space probes of the outer reaches of the solar system, including the “gas giants” Jupiter and Saturn and the “ice giants” Uranus (pronounced “YOUR-uh-nus,” as has become the modern tendency, instead of “Yur-A-nus,” as it was pronounced in my childhood before people got squeamish that the name contained the word “anus”), Neptune and Pluto – and thank goodness this show acknowledged Pluto’s status as a full-fledged planet instead of downgrading it to asteroid status (curse you, Neil DeGrasse Tyson!). “Icy Worlds” was full of various talking heads and also showed footage of exploration teams in Alaska, one of the closest places on Earth to the climate of the ice giants. Among the fascinating aspects of the show were the tale of a little-known moon of Saturn, Iapetus, which has a light side and a dark side – though unlike our moon, which has a “dark side” only because that part is always facing away from Earth and therefore invisible unless you’re in a spacecraft orbiting the moon, Iapetus really is divided into a white side and a black side. The theory is that it’s been bombarded by space dust kicked up from another moon of Saturn, Phoebe, which is embedded in one of the rings and actually orbits Saturn in the opposite direction from all its other moons and rings. The show also mentioned various alternative ways water can freeze, including the conventional hexagonal crystals we’re familiar with from Earth’s ice as well as something called “superionic ice,” in which the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that make up water molecules separate (which means the stuff isn’t literally water at all anymore). In 2018 Earth scientists actually figured out how to make superionic ice in the lab, which gave them a way to study its bizarre properties in controlled conditions. This is apparently one of a planned run of NOVA episodes on the weirder aspects of the solar system, and while it has a certain degree of the gee-whiz aspects to the narration that make a lot of TV science shows boring, it also reinforces the bon mot, “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” Also, one of the talking heads, Michael Wong, was really hot-looking and set off my Lust-O-Meter even though I’m usually not all that turned on by Asian guys.