PROFESSOR BRIAN COX

The biggest space missions yet are making their way to new parts of the Universe. In his new BBC Two series Solar System, Prof Brian Cox reveals what these explorations are discovering about life in our galactic neighbourhood. Noa Leach sat down with him to talk about the most exciting new missions, life in the Universe and his top behind-the-scenes moments of filming

As you read this, five of the eight planets in the Solar System have spacecraft orbiting them or landers on their surfaces - and more are on the way. In his new series Solar System, Prof Brian Cox reveals the freshest insights coming from these spacecraft and landers, and which of the planets they're studying holds the most promise for finding signs of life.

So, naturally, we had to ask him all about it: from filming in the most alien-like places on Earth to his hope that aliens might explore the vast expanses of the Universe after we humans (possibly) extinguish ourselves.

As a show, Solar System sounds familiar, but this series is very current and looks behind the scenes of the biggest space missions right now. What were your hopes for the show?

That was one of the central ones: to show that there are over 40 spacecraft currently active in the Solar System, so the amount of knowledge that we have of our neighbourhood is increasing all the time. With that increase - that huge amount of data that's raining down on us every second from these probes - we find that there are more questions than answers quite a lot of the time.

So, as with a lot of science, one of the things I hope that the audience takes away is that in no sense do we know everything about our neighbourhood in space.

In particular, [in the show] we talk about life - and life is a central part of any exploration of the Solar System. We say that the Solar System is a giant chemistry set and life is chemistry complex carbon chemistry.

I think it's fair to say that we're finding more potential habitats than we ever would have guessed, in stranger places than we ever would have guessed. Ceres, the minor planet, is a good example. The fact that it appears, because of data from a spacecraft called Dawn, to have liquid water below its surface is a tremendous surprise.