Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration [Hardcover]

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

"Winner of the 2013 Eugene E. Emme Award for Astronautical Literature, American Astronautical Society"Chris Impeyis University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. His books includeThe Living Cosmos,How It Ends, andHow It Began.Holly Henryis professor of English at California State University, San Bernardino. She is the author ofVirginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy. Dreams of Other Worldssynthesizes that knowledge as it has been derived from unmanned spacecraft in the half-century since NASA was founded in 1958. . . . One of the strengths ofDreams of Other Worldsis its discuslc