Plot

This is an exciting film about boldly reaching out for the most impossible and inaccessible goals.

Out in the darkest reaches of the solar system, beyond the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, lies a realm where the sun is merely a brightish star.

In 1930 astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, after months of painstaking work, discovered a lonely world inhabiting this cold, desolate place.

The ninth planet of the solar system had been discovered and it was named Pluto.

But we knew almost nothing of the planet or the region of space that it occupied.

The Voyager 2 spacecraft travelled to Uranus in 1986 and then and Neptune in 1989, but there were to be no more planetary encounters and no more missions were planned. Our gallery of the solar system was incomplete.

But a passionate group of scientists would not accept this. They were prepared to spend the rest of their careers fighting to add Pluto to the gallery of places visited.

This is the brilliant and emotionally charged story of how an underground group of scientists took on the establishment, to take humankind to Pluto and beyond. A voyage to the most distant worlds ever seen up-close. And it would be an astounding, yet life-affirming journey for all of us.

New Horizons was born.

But during the decades that this mission would take to go from a dream shared by a small group of scientists, to an actual mission costing hundreds of millions of dollars, hurtling through space towards its distant prize, there would be many challenges to overcome. Not least, a remarkable separate discovery, that revealed an unknown region of the solar system, with hundreds of objects orbiting within it. A region that Pluto occupies.

The distant world wasn't alone and no longer was it deemed completely unique.

Pluto was soon stripped of its designation as a planet.

The setbacks and dramas on this rollercoaster of a journey, and the jaw-dropping beauty of the world that is eventually revealed, will leave nobody in any doubt that Pluto may be a dwarf planet, but it is as wondrous as any other planet.

The final episode in the Secrets of the Solar System series, is a breathtaking adventure into the depths of space, for all people.