Space: A History of Space Exploration in Photographs
“The photographs in this book capture a vision of the Heavens and our Earth with a crystal clarity which we are lucky enough to see with our own eyes.” – Tom Hanks
“The immensity… the beauty… the challenge… the triumph and the tragedies… are captured in Andy Chaikin’s elegant photo history.” – Neil Armstrong
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read moreDiscovering Space – our Solar System
Age: 4.6 billion years
The Solar System we live in contains the Sun, its eight orbiting planets and any other astronomical bodies that are under its gravitational pull such as comets and asteroids.
Comets originate from the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune, while most asteroids orbit in a region between Mars and Jupiter.
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Space: From Earth to the Edge of the Universe
Featuring a wealth of incredible astronomical photographs, Space is perfect for anyone interested in astronomy, space imagery, and the history of space exploration. Space takes us on an imaginary journey that starts on a launch pad, goes toward the center of our Solar System to see the inner planets and the Sun, and then flies outward past the outer planets and on to the fringes of the Solar System.
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read moreAsteroids: A History (Smithsonian History of Aviation & Spaceflight Series)
Asteroids suggest images of a catastrophic impact with Earth, triggering infernos, tidal waves, famine, and death—but these scenarios have obscured the larger story of how asteroids have been discovered and studied. During the past two centuries, the quest for knowledge about asteroids has involved eminent scientists and amateur astronomers, patient research and sudden intuition, advanced technology and the simplest of telescopes, newspaper headlines and Cold War secrets. Curtis Peebles describes how such phenomena as the Moon’s craters and dinosaur extinction were gradually, and by some scientists grudgingly, accepted as the results of asteroid impacts. ENDAsteroids are many things to many people. For some observers, those “mountains in the sky” point to the cataclysmic origins of the universe. Others see untold wealth in the planetary fragments, which harbor great stores of precious metals. Still others see in asteroids the likelihood of global destruction–after all, one of them, slamming into the earth millions of years ago, may very well have condemned the dinosaurs to extinction, and deep space harbors untold potential threats to the earth.
In this engaging volume, Curtis Peebles surveys the science of asteroids, offering a highly readable account of the many ways in which they form out of the flotsam and jetsam of larger celestial bodies, the dust and debris of space. He adds to this scientific overview an anecdotal history of asteroid discovery and detection, which, he writes, was often the work of gifted astronomers working with less than ideal equipment, and all too often dismissed by their professional counterparts. Peebles discusses in detail the rules by which asteroids are catalogued and named–some, for instance, bear the monikers of eminent scientists, others of their patrons, and still others of more unlikely honorees, such as the group of asteroids named for the various Beatles. He also touches on efforts to protect Earth from asteroid impacts–the father of that planetary defense being none other than the poet Lord Byron–which he calls “the only natural disaster that human society can prevent.”
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Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft (Outward Odyssey: A People’s History of Spaceflight)
Rewind to the 1950s and ponder: was America’s first satellite really built by a college student? How did a small band of underappreciated Russian engineers get pictures of the moon s far side using stolen American film? As the 1960s progressed, consider: how the heck did people learn to steer a spacecraft using nothing but gravity? And just how were humans able to goose a spaceship through a thirty-year journey to the literal edge of our solar system?
Ambassadors from Earth relates the story of the first unmanned space probes and planetary explorers from the Sputnik and Explorer satellites launched in the late 1950s to the thrilling interstellar Voyager missions of the ’70s that yielded some of the most celebrated successes and spectacular failures of the space age. Keep in mind that our first mad scrambles to reach orbit, the moon, and the planets were littered with enough histrionics and cliffhanging turmoil to rival the most far-out sci-fi film. Utilizing original interviews with key players, bolstered by never-before-seen photographs, journal excerpts, and primary source documents, Jay Gallentine delivers a quirky and unforgettable look at the lives and legacy of the Americans and Soviets who conceived, built, and guided those unmanned missions to the planets and beyond. Of special note is his in-depth interview with James Van Allen, the discoverer of the rings of planetary radiation that now bear his name.
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