Dreams of other worlds: the amazing story of unmanned space exploration PDF
Preview Dreams of other worlds: the amazing story of unmanned space exploration
Dreams of Other Worlds IIIII Dreams of Other Worlds The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII Chris Impey and Holly Henry Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford Copyright © 2013 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket Illustrations: Planet with sunrise on the background of stars. © Molodec. Courtesy of Shutterstock. Artist’s rendering of the planet Kepler-22b, located in the “habitable zone” of the Kepler-22 star system. Courtesy of NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech. All Rights Reserved ISBN 978- 0- 691- 14753- 6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2013939381 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon and Helvetica Neue Printed on acid- free paper ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents IIIII 1 ■ Introduction 1 2 ■ Viking: Discovering the Red Planet 13 3 ■ MER: The Little Rovers That Could 40 4 ■ Voyager: Grand Tour of the Solar System 74 5 ■ Cassini: Bright Rings and Icy Worlds 111 6 ■ Stardust: Catching a Comet by the Tail 137 7 ■ SOHO: Living with a Restless Star 161 8 ■ Hipparcos: Mapping the Milky Way 186 9 ■ Spitzer: Unveiling the Cool Cosmos 211 10 ■ Chandra: Exploring the Violent Cosmos 242 11 ■ HST: The Universe in Sharp Focus 270 12 ■ WMAP: Mapping the Infant Universe 302 13 ■ Conclusion: New Horizons, New Worlds 327 Notes 343 Selected Bibliography 405 Index 417 Dreams of Other Worlds IIIII 1 IIIIII Introduction Someone who “miSSed” the late part of the twentieth century, perhaps by being in a coma or a deep sleep, or by being marooned on a desert island, would have many adjustments to make upon re- joining civilization. The largest would probably be the galloping progress in computers and telecommunications and information technology. But if their attention turned to astronomy, they would also be amazed by what had been learned in the interim. In the last third of the century, Mars turned from a pale red disk as seen through a telescope to a planet with ancient lake beds and subter- ranean glaciers. The outer Solar System went from being frigid and uninteresting real estate to being a place with as many as a dozen potentially habitable worlds. They would be greeted by a caval- cade of exoplanets, projecting to billions across the Milky Way galaxy. Their familiar view of the sky would now be augmented by images spanning the entire electromagnetic spectrum, revealing brown dwarfs and black holes and other exotic worlds. Finally, they would encounter a cosmic horizon, or limit to their vision, that had been pushed back to within an iota of the big bang, and they would be faced with the prospect that the visible universe might be one among many universes. This book is a story of those discoveries, made by planetary probes and space missions over the past forty years. The word “world” means “age of man” in the old Germanic languages, and that proximate perspective took centuries to expand into a uni- verse filled with galaxies and stars and their attendant planets. The
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