Sir Patrick Stewart, 1940–2026.

This is a personal tribute.

I am a Trekkie, and Star Trek: The Next Generation was always my favourite Star Trek. Jean-Luc Picard was my captain.

So rather than make a conventional obituary, I wanted to go back to some of the stories that made me wonder — and to the questions Patrick Stewart made feel important.

The Measure of a Man asked whether an artificial intelligence could ever become a person.

Darmok asked whether translating words is the same thing as understanding another culture.

The Inner Light asked whether a remembered life can be as real and meaningful as a physical one.

Relics introduced millions of viewers to the idea of a Dyson sphere.

The Best of Both Worlds imagined human identity being absorbed into a technological network.

Chain of Command showed how power can try to make someone distrust reality itself.

And All Good Things… played with a universe in which time is far stranger than our instincts suggest.

I also look back at the four Next Generation films — Generations, First Contact, Insurrection and Nemesis — and at Patrick Stewart's final return to the character in Star Trek: Picard.

Some of the technology has dated.

The questions have not.

Artificial intelligence. Language. Memory. Brain-computer interfaces. Genetics. First contact. Time. Identity.

Patrick Stewart made intelligence charismatic, curiosity look strong, and restraint look courageous.

For some of us, Captain Jean-Luc Picard was never simply a television character.

He made us wonder.

A special edition of Time Across the Solar System, narrated by Luigi Pascal Rondanini.

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This week on Time Across the Solar System, we go to the edges — the places where one thing becomes another, and where some of the most interesting science happens.

SpaceX fires all 33 engines of a Super Heavy booster ahead of Starship Flight 15. NASA reshapes Artemis III into a major rehearsal for future Moon landings. A new ultraviolet space telescope will map a universe our eyes cannot see.

And Voyager 1 is approaching an extraordinary milestone: a distance where light itself takes an entire day to travel between Earth and the spacecraft.

We also look down from orbit at Super Typhoon Champi, investigate energetic electrons appearing inside a region of Earth's radiation belts once thought almost impossible to penetrate, and examine Teghaza 001 — a Martian meteorite more than four billion years old.

Then Hubble and Webb show us two very different views of the same nebula, ESA's Hera gets close enough to see Didymos and Dimorphos as two separate worlds, and an experiment aboard the International Space Station asks an unexpectedly important question for future Mars explorers:

What happens when your space-grown plants get sick?

Ten stories. One theme.

Boundaries are where the interesting science happens.

Presented by Tess.

Time Across the Solar System
Science, space, time and scale for curious families.

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A stellar explosion from more than 12.5 billion years ago. A comet discovered accidentally by a telescope built to study dark matter. And a white dwarf whose unusual chemistry makes it appear green.

This week on Time Across the Solar System, Tess explores ten remarkable stories connected by one idea: the universe is full of clues — we just have to learn how to read them.

We investigate JWST’s extremely distant transient AT 2026abck, a record-precision measurement of helium created during the universe’s first five minutes, Euclid’s accidental discovery of comet C/2026 S1, and Webb’s surprising detection of heavy elements around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

Closer to home, two University of Hawaiʻi students use traditional Hawaiian ideas to rethink food production for future Mars crews, JAXA’s MMX mission begins its five-year journey to collect samples from Phobos, and ESA challenges researchers to help a lost lunar rover navigate using only a ground panorama and an orbital map.

We also follow the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into final science commissioning, visit the new Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope high in Chile’s Atacama Desert, and discover why WD J1330+6435 may be the first documented green star.

Ten stories. One big idea:

The universe is full of clues.

Family-friendly astronomy, planetary science and space news with Tess.

More episodes, calculators and educational resources at tatssp.com