Alien Planet
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"Alien Planet" is a two-hour special on Discovery Channel about two NASA robot probes investigating for alien life on the fictional planet Darwin IV. It was based on the book Expedition, by sci-fi/fantasy artist and writer Wayne Douglas Barlowe, who was also executive producer on the special.
Alien Planet starts out with an interstellar spacecraft named VonBraun, leaving Earth orbit. Traveling at 20% the speed of light, it reaches Darwin IV in 42 years. Upon reaching orbit, it deploys the Darwin Reconnaissance Orbiter, which looks for potential landing sites for the probes.The first probe, Balboa, explodes along with its lifting body transport during entry. Two other probes, Leonardo DaVinci (AKA Leo) and Isaac Newton (Ike), successfully land on the planet, and learn much about its bizarre indigenous lifeforms, including an apparently sentient species. The show has very sophisticated computer-generated imagery, which is interspersed with interviews from such notables as Stephen Hawking, George Lucas, Michio Kaku, and Jack Horner.
The robotic probes sent out to research on Darwin IV are called Horus Probes. Each Horus probe consisted of an 8 foot high, 40 foot long inflatable, hydrogen-filled balloon, which was covered with solar receptors, a computer 'brain', a 'head' covered with sensors, and several smaller robots that could be sent to places more dangerous for the probes themselves. The probes had a limited degree of artificial intelligence, very similar to the 'processing power' of a 4-year-old. All the real thinking was done by a supercomputer in the orbiting VonBraun. The probes were programmed with different personalities; Ike was more cowardly and skittish, while Leo was the risk-taker. Leo gets destroyed by a mysterious and evasive unknown creature, and Ike, ordered by the VonBraun to search for Leo's attacker, hopes to find a new sentient species. Ike manages to make contact, but the newly discovered Eosapien turns out to be only semi-sentient.External links
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