Dreams of Other Worlds

Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration
Authors Chris Impey and Holly Henry
Subject Astronomy
Genre Non-fiction
Publisher Princeton University Press
Publication date
 September 2013 (hardcover)
Media type Print (hardcover) and electronic (e-book)
Pages 480
ISBN 978-0393343861
Preceded by How It Ends
Followed by Shadow World

Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration is a non-fiction book by Astronomy professor Chris Impey and English professor Holly Henry that explores the scientific and cultural impact of eleven iconic space science and astronomy missions over the past forty years. They range in application from the study of Mars and the Sun to the study of the most distant galaxies and the entire universe. The book was published as a hardcover by Princeton University Press in 2013.

Summary

Dreams of Other Worlds explores how our concepts of distant worlds have been shaped and informed by space science and astronomy over the past forty years. The arc of the book is chronological and progresses from the proximate toward the remote. From comets to cosmology, and from the Mars rovers to the multiverse, the book spans eleven NASA missions that have given us a sense of our cosmic environment.

The book starts in the Solar System with Mars and the Viking landers.[1] The Vikings dashed hopes that Mars might be habitable but they opened up the modern age of exploration of the red planet. Nearly three decades later, the Mars Exploration Rovers were embraced by the public as they traversed Mars and gathered evidence for a warmer and wetter planet in the distant past.[2] Next come two spacecraft that made a Grand Tour of the outer Solar System during the 1970s. The Voyagers painted detailed portraits of the four gas giant planets and their moons.[3] More recently, Cassini has explored Saturn and its fascinating moon system.[4] Together, these missions have recast our understanding of the frigid realm beyond the asteroid belt.

The book continues with Stardust, the mission that caught not just one but two comets by the tail and in doing so told us how the Solar System was likely to have formed.[5] The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, by contrast, focused on the Sun itself and taught us what it means to live with a star.[6] Belying its apparently steady light, the Sun has activity that manifests in invisible forms of radiation. Looking more broadly at the situation of the Solar System, the Hipparcos satellite refined the work of William Herschel by placing us accurately within the city of stars we call the Milky Way.[7]

The two missions that follow illustrate the revolution in astronomy when astronomer’s blinders were removed after centuries of learning about the universe only through light. Spitzer and Chandra are two of NASA’s Great Observatories, straddling the electromagnetic spectrum and looking at regions of space that are hidden from view. Spitzer penetrates the gas and dust that permeates interstellar space and reveals new worlds being formed.[8] Chandra, by contrast, has revealed the violence of dark objects like neutron stars and black holes, where tiny worlds distort space-time and accelerate particles beyond any capability of the largest accelerators.[9]

Closing the book are two missions that explore the edges of space and time. The Hubble Space Telescope has embedded itself deeply into the consciousness of the general public and has contributed to every area of astrophysics. In particular it has quantified the limits of our vision, a region 46 billion light years in any direction, which contains roughly 100 billion galaxies.[10] The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe was a specialist mission to map the microwave sky and pin down physical conditions in the infant universe.[11] By confirming the big bang model in great detail, this microwave satellite has shown that there are likely innumerable distant worlds out there whose light has not yet reached us in the time since the big bang.

References

  1. ↑ NASA (2013). "NASA - Viking". Retrieved September 20, 2013.
  2. ↑ NASA (2013). "Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Home". Retrieved September 20, 2013.
  3. ↑ NASA (2013). "Voyager - The Interstellar Mission - NASA". Retrieved September 20, 2013.
  4. ↑ NASA (2013). "Cassini Solstice Mission". Retrieved September 20, 2013.
  5. ↑ NASA (2013). "Stardust - NASA's Comet Sample Return Mission". Retrieved September 20, 2013.
  6. ↑ NASA (2013). "Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Homepage". Retrieved September 20, 2013.
  7. ↑ ESA (2013). "ESA Science & Technology: Hipparcos". Retrieved September 20, 2013.
  8. ↑ NASA, JPL (2013). "NASA Spitzer Space Telescope". Retrieved October 8, 2013.
  9. ↑ NASA, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (2013). "Chandra X-ray Observatory - NASA's flagship X-ray telescope". Retrieved October 8, 2013.
  10. ↑ NASA (2013). "Hubble Space Telescope - NASA". Retrieved September 20, 2013.
  11. ↑ NASA (2013). "Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) - NASA". Retrieved September 20, 2013.

External links

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