Titan Unveiled

Download or read book Titan Unveiled written by Ralph Lorenz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For twenty-five years following the Voyager mission, scientists speculated about Saturn's largest moon, a mysterious orb clouded in orange haze. Finally, in 2005, the Cassini-Huygens probe successfully parachuted down through Titan's atmosphere, all the while transmitting images and data. In the early 1980s, when the two Voyager spacecraft skimmed past Titan, Saturn's largest moon, they transmitted back enticing images of a mysterious world concealed in a seemingly impenetrable orange haze. Titan Unveiled is one of the first general interest books to reveal the startling new discoveries that have been made since the arrival of the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan. Ralph Lorenz and Jacqueline Mitton take readers behind the scenes of this mission. Launched in 1997, Cassini entered orbit around Saturn in summer 2004. Its formidable payload included the Huygens probe, which successfully parachuted down through Titan's atmosphere in early 2005, all the while transmitting images and data--and scientists were startled by what they saw. One of those researchers was Lorenz, who gives an insider's account of the scientific community's first close encounter with an alien landscape of liquid methane seas and turbulent orange skies. Amid the challenges and frayed nerves, new discoveries are made, including methane monsoons, equatorial sand seas, and Titan's polar hood. Lorenz and Mitton describe Titan as a world strikingly like Earth and tell how Titan may hold clues to the origins of life on our own planet and possibly to its presence on others. Generously illustrated with many stunning images, Titan Unveiled is essential reading for anyone interested in space exploration, planetary science, or astronomy. A new afterword brings readers up to date on Cassini's ongoing exploration of Titan, describing the many new discoveries made since 2006.

Download or read book Robotic Exploration of the Solar System written by Paolo Ulivi and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-08-14 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paolo Ulivi and David Harland provide in Robotic Exploration of the Solar System a detailed history of unmanned missions of exploration of our Solar System. The subject is treated from an engineering and scientific standpoint. Technical descriptions of the spacecraft, of their mission designs and of instrumentations are provided. Scientific results are discussed in considerable depth, together with details of mission management. The project will deliver four volumes totaling over 2,000 pages that will provide comprehensive coverage of the topic with thousands of references to the professional literature that should make it the 'first port of call' for people seeking information on the topic. The books will cover missions from the 1950s until the present day, and some of the latest missions and their results will appear in a popular science book for the first time.

Download or read book The Cassini-Huygens Visit to Saturn written by Michael Meltzer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-01-02 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cassini-Huygens was the most ambitious and successful space journey ever launched to the outer Solar System. This book examines all aspects of the journey: its conception and planning; the lengthy political processes needed to make it a reality; the engineering and development required to build the spacecraft; its 2.2-billion mile journey from Earth to the Ringed Planet and the amazing discoveries from the mission. The author traces how the visions of a few brilliant scientists matured, gained popularity and eventually became a reality. Innovative technical leaps were necessary to assemble such a multifaceted spacecraft and reliably operate it while it orbited a planet so far from our own. The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft design evolved from other deep space efforts, most notably the Galileo mission to Jupiter, enabling the voluminous, paradigm-shifting scientific data collected by the spacecraft. Some of these discoveries are absolute gems. A small satellite that scientists once thought of as a dead piece of rock turned out to contain a warm underground sea that could conceivably harbor life. And we now know that hiding under the mist of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is a world with lakes, fluvial channels, and dunes hauntingly reminiscent of those on our own planet, except that on Titan, it’s not water that fills those lakes but hydrocarbons. These and other breakthroughs illustrate why the Cassini-Huygens mission will be remembered as one of greatest voyages of discovery ever made.

Download or read book Encyclopedia of Astrobiology written by Muriel Gargaud and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 1890 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Astrobiology is a remarkably interdisciplinary field. This reference serves as a key to understanding technical terms from the different subfields of astrobiology, including astronomy, biology, chemistry, the geosciences and the space sciences.

Download or read book Life on Earth and other Planetary Bodies written by Arnold Hanslmeier and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-10-29 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A trio of editors [Professors from Austria, Germany and Israel] present Life on Earth and other Planetary Bodies. The contributors are from twenty various countries and present their research on life here as well as the possibility for extraterrestrial life. This volume covers concepts such as life’s origin, hypothesis of Panspermia and of life possibility in the Cosmos. The topic of extraterrestrial life is currently ‘hot’ and the object of several congresses and conferences. While the diversity of “normal” biota is well known, life on the edge of the extremophiles is more limited and less distributed. Other subjects discussed are Astrobiology with the frozen worlds of Mars, Europa and Titan where extant or extinct microbial life may exist in subsurface oceans; conditions on icy Mars with its saline, alkaline, and liquid water which has been recently discovered; chances of habitable Earth-like [or the terrestrial analogues] exoplanets; and SETI’s search for extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Download or read book The Noughties Brought to Book written by Michael Gross and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2010-05-25 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why music doesn't add up, what The Simpsons can teach us about science, whether Juana la Loca wasn't crazy after all, and what's behind the gaseous veil of Saturn's moon Titan ' these are just some of the questions addressed in the more than 70 reviews and essay reviews from the years 2000 to 2009 collected in this volume. They cover books about science, ranging from the academic to the popularized kind, but there are also books about cultural topics and even a few novels scattered in for good measure. Most of these books reviewed haven't found a massive amount of attention, although some of them should have, at least in the reviewer's opinion. And even if the book under review wasn't all that good, the format of an essay review allows the author to have a go at presenting the subject matter his own way. All in all, a reflection of what happened during the noughties in the worlds of science and culture, and off the beaten track.

Download or read book Energy Resources for Human Settlement in the Solar System and Earth's Future in Space written by William A. Ambrose and published by AAPG. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book's purpose is to provide the quantitative foundation for beginning to think about developing energy and minerals outside of Earth's atmosphere that are necessary to support scientific missions, space and extra-terrestrial scientific stations and permanent colonies, and ultimately expand Earth's economy beyond the near-earth environment to include space resources. We cannot envision a situation where all resources required for future space activities are exported from Earth, therefore, this book clearly illustrates that an effective economy is possible beyond Earth's surface when we consider the resources available in near-Earth space. Our first audience is members of AAPG, American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers (AIME) and other professionals engaged in energy and resource development. As energy professionals, we are concerned on a daily basis with providing the necessary energy and minerals required for our growing world population and the increasing standard of living that comes with ample energy availability. And more than anything else, AAPG members are explorers. We are the professionals who have pushed back the boundaries of our resource base, from capturing petroleum resources from surface seeps, to drilling onshore wells to extract oil and gas, and to venturing offshore into increasingly difficult and hostile environments to supply the cheap and abundant energy made available by our advances in technology. There are more similarities than differences between deepwater exploration and development, and space exploration. Beyond our own members, however, our audience is every rational human being who understands human health and well-being, quality of life, education and freedom are dependent on the energy and minerals that support our advanced civilization. Space is the next frontier, and as the world civilization expands beyond Earth's surface we hope this publication serves to illustrate there are abundant opportunities to support and maintain - and in fact, allow to prosper - civilization's expansion into space -- Publisher's website.