Book Description
In Journey Beyond Selene, Jeffrey Kluger brings
to life an unheralded band of cutting-edge space explorers
with their own stunning brand of the right stuff. He has
written an adventure story that is full of drama, danger, and
triumph -- the story of the men and women who have taken us
to the ends of the solar system.
The spaceships are flying. The most ambitious, most
thrilling expeditions in history are under way, exploring
worlds billions of miles from Earth. In Journey Beyond
Selene, bestselling author Jeffrey Kluger tells for the
first time the fascinating story of the people who are making
these voyages of discovery happen -- the daring, determined,
and brilliant men and women of NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
JPL's scientists and engineers have been on the cutting
edge of exploration for more than forty years, hammering
together unmanned spaceships, mounting them atop rockets, and
flinging them not just to our own moon -- the nearby world
the Greeks called Selene -- but to the ends of the solar
system. In the course of their journeys, these robot
spacecraft have visited seven of the eight other planets and
-- more important -- the sparkling swarms of multicolored
moons that circle them. What they've found is astonishing.
In addition to discovering many more moons than
astronomers thought existed, JPL scientists have found these
worlds to be stranger than anyone imagined. Their fanciful
names -- Ophelia, Europa, Despina, Titania, Pandora, Pan,
Puck -- only hint at their fantastic nature. They are worlds
where volcanoes spew glittering snow, rivers run with
scalding ammonia, geysers spout carbonated water, fires burn
on one moon and dust the cliffs of another with ash, where
whole globes shatter to shrapnel and then eerily reassemble
themselves. And they are places where life might be taking
hold even now.
The story of the solar system's sixty-three moons is
extraordinary, but the story of how JPL scientists have
explored them is even more so. It took furious bureaucratic
battles to get these spacecraft built, and it meant
overcoming enormous technical obstacles to get them flying.
There have been, inevitably, near disasters along the way.
The story is still unfolding, as future missions are poised
to go back to many of those distant moons. One will attempt
to land on Jupiter's ice-covered Europa and sample its salty
sea for signs of life.
A perfect blend of science and adventure, Journey
Beyond Selene is a riveting account of the men and women
who build and fly the incredible unmanned spaceships that are
unlocking the secrets of the solar system -- and perhaps of
life itself.
