Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration

Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration

Chris Impey, Holly Henry

Language: English

Pages: 464

ISBN: 0691147531

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Dreams of Other Worlds describes the unmanned space missions that have opened new windows on distant worlds. Spanning four decades of dramatic advances in astronomy and planetary science, this book tells the story of eleven iconic exploratory missions and how they have fundamentally transformed our scientific and cultural perspectives on the universe and our place in it.

The journey begins with the Viking and Mars Exploration Rover missions to Mars, which paint a startling picture of a planet at the cusp of habitability. It then moves into the realm of the gas giants with the Voyager probes and Cassini's ongoing exploration of the moons of Saturn. The Stardust probe's dramatic round-trip encounter with a comet is brought vividly to life, as are the SOHO and Hipparcos missions to study the Sun and Milky Way. This stunningly illustrated book also explores how our view of the universe has been brought into sharp focus by NASA's great observatories--Spitzer, Chandra, and Hubble--and how the WMAP mission has provided rare glimpses of the dawn of creation.

Dreams of Other Worlds reveals how these unmanned exploratory missions have redefined what it means to be the temporary tenants of a small planet in a vast cosmos.

Fallen Astronauts: Heroes Who Died Reaching for the Moon

To See the Unseen: A History of Planetary Radar Astronomy (NASA History Series)

What's It Like in Space?: Stories from Astronauts Who've Been There

Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology: An Introduction

Pushing Ice

How Apollo Flew to the Moon (2nd Edition)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Billings, posted May 19, 2009 on the Seed Magazine website at http://seedmagazine.com/content/print/the_long_shot/. 5. Cassini—Bright Rings and Icy Worlds 1. “Captain’s Log,” by Carolyn Porco (September 21, 2009), the leader of the Imaging Team on the Cassini Mission, online at http://www.ciclops.org/index/5830/Le_Sacre_du_Printemps?js=1. This is an entry from Porco’s eloquent commentary regarding Cassini’s ongoing mission. Archived entries are available at the CICLOPS (Cassini Imaging Central

comic, his eyes emit X-rays, which he uses for more piercing vision. But of course the X-rays that can traverse solid matter had to be registered in some medium, so it’s not an analogous situation to light, which reflects off objects and is detected by our eyes. 14. Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century, by B. Holztmann Kevles (1998), New York: Perseus Publishing, p. 31. 15. “X Rays and the Quest for Invisible Reality in the Art of Kupka, Duch-amp, and the Cubists,” by L.

using much faster processors. His analysis has shrunk the errors by a factor of three from the initial goal of 0.002 arc seconds, and a factor of ten for the brightest stars.38 This minuscule angle would be formed by drawing lines from the top and bottom of Lincoln’s eye on a penny in New York and having them come to an apex in Paris. The trick of Hipparcos is to measure positions across the entire sky rather than picking off stars one by one. Thus it gains from the power of large numbers.

own light, and that the stars were fiery stones. He offered physical explanations for eclipses, for the solstices and the motions of the stars, and for the formation of comets. He thought the Milky Way represented the combined light of countless stars.2 We imagine him standing on the rocky Ionian shore at night, with starlight glittering on dark water, gazing up into the sky and sensing the vastness of the celestial vault. The dreams of such a powerful and original thinker were probably suffused

exploring Mars for at least two years, starting with its landing in August 2012. The rover is the size of an SUV, compared to the Mars Exploration Rovers, which are the size of a golf cart, and the earlier Pathfinder, which is the size of a go-kart. Curiosity will study the past and present habitability of Mars by a detailed geochemical analysis of its rocks and atmosphere (NASA/JPL-Caltech). Plate 24. This montage of 1,235 exoplanet candidates from Kepler shows the planets projected against

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