More frisbees are sold each year than baseballs, basketballs and footballs combined. Yet these familiar flying objects have subtle and clever aerodynamic and gyrodynamic properties which are only rece
This book chronicles the history of climate science and planetary exploration, focusing on our ever-expanding knowledge of Earth's climate, and the parallel research underway on some of our nearest neighbours: Mars, Venus and Titan. From early telescopic observation of clouds and ice caps on planetary bodies in the seventeenth century, to the dawn of the space age and the first robotic planetary explorers, the book presents a comprehensive chronological overview of planetary climate research, right up to the dramatic recent developments in detecting and characterising exoplanets. Meanwhile, the book also documents the discoveries about our own climate on Earth, not only about how it works today, but also how profoundly different it has been in the past. Highly topical and written in an accessible and engaging narrative style, this book provides invaluable historical context for students, researchers, professional scientists, and those with a general interest in planetary climate resear
This book describes how sand dunes work, why they are the way they are in different settings, and how they are being studied. Particular attention is paid to their formation and appearance elsewhere i
There have been many remarkable achievements, such as the Galileo probe which parachuted into Jupiter's atmosphere, to the joy of the engineers who built it. But there have also been many humiliating
