Space: Hitch-Hike the Galaxy ; Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets BBC1, 9pm, Tuesday

IMAGINE crashing through the acid storms of Venus, taking a space walk in the rings of Saturn, or collecting samples on the disintegrating surface of an unstable comet.

Viewers can take the ultimate space flight to see what that would really be like with this magical new series, narrated by David Suchet and brought to us by the same people who made Walking With Dinosaurs. It uses spectacular photography and special effects to follow five astronauts on a six-year trip through the solar system.

It’s a drama but one based in scientific fact. Wehaven’tgotthetechnology yet to send a manned flight to Pluto, but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility in the future.

For example, the spacecraft Pegasushas a magnetic shield to protect the crew from the intense radiation around the sun and Jupiter. Magnetic fields like this are being researched at the University of Washington in Seattle and are already being used in experiments on a smaller scale.

The actors playing the astronauts underwent a crash course in space fight, tutored by people like David Scott, commander of the Apollo 15 mission. They were put through team-building exercises at the British National Space Centre in Leicester and spent a week at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut training facilities in Star City, Moscow.

Here they joined a crew bound for the International Space Station. They practised space walks in a massive neutralbuoyancy tank, floated around a fullscale space station mock-up and rode the extreme G-force of the largest covered centrifuge in the world.

Then came the ultimate ride. They were filmed going up in a colossal cargo plane which flew a series of stomach-churning parabolic curves – climbing hard then heading into a steep dive – to mimic zero gravity. The contents of the plane were effectively in free-fall, and the actors were actually weightless for three times longer than the first American in space – Alan Shepard enjoyed only five minutes of zero gravity in 1961.

In the astronauts’ fictional mission, they are carried through the solar system on the authentically-designed Pegasus spacecraft.

It would be 1.3km long, weigh 400 tonnes and travel 8.3 billion miles during the 2,246 days of the mission. It would withstand temperatures of 5,000 degrees centigrade and be powered by a mighty nuclear fusion reactor, with a core temperature of 100 million degrees which vaporises the chilled liquid hydrogen propellant. It would carry 57 tonnes of food and 80 tonnes of oxygen, and have a top speed of 288,000kmph.