Lifting Titan's Veil is a revealing account of the second largest moon in our solar system. This world in orbit around Saturn is the only body in the solar system with an atmosphere strikingly similar to Earth's. Titan is like a giant frozen laboratory that may help scientists understand the first chemical steps towards the origin of life. Beginning with its discovery in 1655, the authors describe our current knowledge of Titan, including observations made before the space age, results from the Voyager missions of the 1980s, and recent revelations from the world's most advanced telescopes. Ralph Lorenz includes his personal experiences in preparing for the Cassini mission, which will reach Saturn in 2004 and release the Huygens probe into Titan's atmosphere in 2005. This book is a splendid introduction to Titan, and will appeal to anyone interested in astronomical discovery and space exploration.
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
An illustrated volume reveals the startling new discoveries that have been made since the arrival of the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan and takes readers behind the scenes of this mission
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 successfull
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
