NOVA: Season 1

NOVA goes behind the doors of Boeing’s Phantom Works and Lockheed’s legendary Skunk Works to record classified meetings, fly the most revolutionary planes, and examine the high-stakes battle to build the most capable and versatile fighter ever created—the Joint Strike Fighter. Battle of the X-Planes reveals the breakthrough designs, heartbreaking setbacks, adrenaline-fueled test flights, and one final nail-biting decision—the winner of the most lucrative contract in military history.

Rating: TV-G  Languages: English 

In seconds, a supertwister can leave immense swaths of death and destruction. But what if technology could help us tame nature’s most violent tornadoes? Join fearless storm chasers as they untwist mysteries that may explain how these killer storms spawn and where they are likely to strike. And venture into America’s “Tornado Alley” to witness some of the most shockingly intense tornado footage ever filmed.

Rating: TV-PG  Languages: English 

Mustang (moo-stahn), one of the last outposts of Tibetan culture, is so isolated and protected that no Westerner set foot inside its borders for centuries. But in the early 1990s, this untouched society set high in the Himalayas opened its borders for the first time, exposing an ancient world’s dazzling sacred relics long damaged by the elements and neglect. Art and restoration experts mix history, science and politics in a daunting mission to preserve these religious works of art.

Rating: TV-G  Languages: English 

Orville and Wilbur Wright were remarkable inventors, mechanics, risk-takers, and visionaries. They designed and built their own wings, steering devices, engines, and wind tunnel. But just how did they construct such an impressive flying machine? It takes a team of modern pilots, builders, aviation experts, and historians joined together to retrace, rebuild and re-fly planes built to the specifications developed by the Wright Brothers a century ago.

Rating: TV-G  Languages: English 

Treating patients with life-threatening injuries is always a challenge. Now imagine handling a medical emergency at the height of the Iraq War, beset by heat, sand, and frequent enemy attacks. NOVA heads into battle with the medics, nurses, doctors, and military staff of the 10th and 21st CaSH units, following them from their intense prewar preparations to their deployments in Kuwait and the desert north of Baghdad. Shortly after their doors open, the medical and ethical dramas begin.

Rating: TV-PG  Languages: English 

Go inside NASA’s risky field trip to the red planet in this tense and dramatic behind-the-scenes chronicle of the $820 million Mars Exploration Rover (MER) project. Beginning a year before launch, NOVA's cameras follow MER scientists and engineers through a gauntlet of potentially fatal problems. Then, seven months later, experience the final nail-biting minutes of the journey, as Spirit successfully lands on Mars and begins sending back its first spectacular images of the Martian landscape.

Rating: TV-G  Languages: English 

Take an astounding look at the red planet in this interplanetary adventure that picks up where the acclaimed film MARS Dead or Alive left off. Mission Control and its two robotic explorers face a daunting task–find proof that liquid water, the essential ingredient of life, once existed on Mars. Through unprecedented access, Welcome to Mars presents a compelling inside story of triumph, technical ingenuity, and emotional drama packed with stunning images from an alien world.

Rating: TV-G  Languages: English 

Twenty-three bizarre looking vehicles line up at the gate of the DARPA Grand Challenge with one thing in common: there’s nobody behind the wheel. With names like Terramax, Ghostrider, and Stanley, these vehicles are armed with cutting-edge technology, including artifical intelligence, laser-guided vision, GPS navigation, and 3-D mapping systems. Sponsored by the Pentagon’s research agency, this 130-mile robotics race through Nevada’s scorching desert has a $2 million prize, though its ultimate goal is to gather new ideas for the future of unmanned warfare. But can these advanced robots overcome the grueling terrain and technical challenges?

Rating: TV-PG  Languages: English 

In an ancient Mayan arena, enemies of notorious King Yax K’uk Mo square off in a ball game that appears much like modern soccer. But in this fateful contest, winners live—and losers lose their heads. From 200 to 900 A.D., Yax K’uk Mo’s dynasty of Blood Lords presided over the Maya city of Copan, conducting hallucinogenic vision quests, ritual warfare and human sacrifice. Join a team of archaeologists and historians who are piecing together the fascinating rise and fall of this ancient city.

Rating: TV-G  Languages: English 

Brawn or brains? How did the ancient Egyptians raise the massive spires created to glorify and honor the ancient Egyptian gods? Rising up to 100 feet and weighing up to 500 tons, these solid granite monuments reach heavenward, adorned with messages of praise, love and devotion. Discover how the ancient Egyptians’ nautical experience, ingenuity and unwavering faith enabled them to raise these incredibly heavy monoliths with little more than sand, rope, wood, brawn and brainpower.

Rating: TV-PG  Languages: English 

The mute sentinels of Easter Island are mysteries locked in stone. Nearly 1000 haunting human sculptures are the only remaining citizens of a vanished culture that existed a millennium ago, 1500 miles from the nearest inhabited island. Weighing up to 80 tons each, the moai say nothing; but, with some investigation, they speak volumes. Take a look behind the stone faces and discover how such a remote society achieved monolithic greatness—and then disappeared.

Rating: TV-PG  Languages: English 

The walls finally talk! While some Roman baths were palatial and luxurious, the bathhouses weren’t the exclusive haven of the privileged. Surrounded by sophisticated vaulted ceilings and revolutionary heating systems, men and women from all classes and backgrounds bathed, drank, shouted and sang in a daily ritual that defined what it meant to be Roman. But after the fall of the Roman Empire, this state-of-the-art community center became a mystery.

Rating: TV-PG  Languages: English 

The center of a famed 12th-century Song Dynasty scroll painting features woven wooden beams in the graceful arc of a rainbow—the Rainbow Bridge—an archaeological form as well-known in China as the Eiffel Tower is in the West. Ingeniously designed bridges typify China’s inventive past—a society that created paper money, gunpowder and the compass. While not a single Song Dynasty Rainbow bridge remains, the mystery of their construction endures.

Rating: TV-PG  Languages: English