Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

In 2014, the International Space Station had to move three times to avoid lethal chunks of space debris and there is an increasing problem of satellites mysteriously breaking down. With first-hand accounts from astronauts and experts, know the scale of the problem of space junk. Our planet is surrounded by hundreds of millions of pieces of junk moving at 17,000 miles per hour. Now the US government is investing a billion dollars to track them, and companies around the world are developing ways to clear up their mess - from robot arms to nets and harpoons. Learn the science behind the hit film Gravity and discovers the reality is far more worrying than the Hollywood fiction.

A group of brave individuals risk their lives to save the last of the world's mountain gorillas; in the midst of renewed civil war and a scramble for Congo's natural resources." Virunga National Park in the Congo is a place of unique natural beauty. It is the home to a plethora of wonderful animals and vegetation but as is so often the way, it has several serious problems that threaten it. It's the location of human violence, corruption and exploitation. The disasters that specifically loom are two different groups, the M23 and SOCO International. The former are a violent rebel force who engages in an ongoing civil war with the Congolese government and the latter are a British energy company who specialise in oil exploration. Both M23 and SOCO invade the park in their own ways and neither seems very interested in the laws that have been set up to protect the flora and fauna that exist there, far less the people who live there. It seems hardly surprising in the case of M23, as they are a paramilitary organisation who can hardly be expected to be concerned with such things but it is the more legitimate big business SOCO who seem more worrying if anything. We discover in fact that they have been involved in a bribery campaign, utilising M23 as enforcers. It's a very murky situation where big money walks all over an impoverished nation and disregards a natural space that they can see no value in in their pursuit of financial profit.

Dark energy - the mysterious force that is unexpectedly causing the universe's expansion to speed up. The effects of dark energy were discovered in 1998 but physicists still don't know what it is. Worse, its very existence calls into question Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity - the cornerstone of modern physics. The hunt for the identity of dark energy is on". Experiments on earth and in space generate data that might provide a clue, but there are also hopes that another Einstein might emerge - someone who can write a new theory explaining the mystery of the dark energy.

For centuries, the precise workings of gravity have confounded the greatest scientific minds - from Newton to Faraday and Einstein - and the idea of controlling gravity has been seen as little more than a fanciful dream. Yet in the mid 1990s, UK defence manufacturer BAE Systems began a ground-breaking project code-named Greenglow. Nasa was simultaneously running its own Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project". It was concerned with potential space applications of new physics, including concepts like 'faster-than-light travel' and 'warp drives'. Looking into the past and projecting into the future, Horizon explores science's long-standing obsession with the idea of gravity control. It looks at recent breakthroughs in the search for loopholes in conventional physics and examines how the groundwork carried out by Project Greenglow has helped change our understanding of the universe. Gravity control may sound like science fiction, but the research that began with Project Greenglow is very much ongoing, and the dream of flying cars and journeys to the stars no longer seems quite so distant.

Follow astronaut Scott Kelly’s record-breaking 12-month mission on the International Space Station, from launch to landing, as NASA charts the effects of long-duration spaceflight. A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carried Scott Kelly of NASA and Mikhail Kornienko of Roscosmos to the space station for the longest space mission ever assigned to a NASA astronaut". The expedition provided important insights into operational and scientific areas in human research in space and on Earth. Integrated scientific investigations between NASA and Roscosmos will combine resources to improve data sharing among space medical and human research communities, as well as help inform current assessments of crew performance and health and better determine and validate countermeasures to reduce the risks associated with future exploration as NASA plans for missions around the moon, to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

A dynamic journey behind the scenes of the next step in the evolution of telescopes: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. A new generation has been inspired to design and build this massive instrument, which is 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope and will be a veritable time machine, capable of looking back on the origins of our universe and identifying signatures of potential life on planets far outside our solar system". With unprecedented access to the people and technologies that power its creation, including astrophysicists, engineers at Northrop Grumman, and personnel from NASA'S Goddard Space Flight Center and the Space Telescope Science Institute, the operations center for Hubble and Webb, Telescope spotlights the high-stakes mission of building this massive new scientific instrument. The film is a comprehensive look at the dynamic history of 400 years of telescopes starting with Galileo in 1609. The Webb is the next great telescope in society's ongoing mission to see farther into the universe and answer fundamental questions that have haunted mankind from the beginning of time. Directed by Oscar nominated filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn