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Journey Beyond Selene: Remarkable Expeditions Past Our Moon and to the Ends of the Solar System
Journey Beyond Selene Remarkable Expeditions Past Our Moon and to the Ends of the Solar System Author:Jeffrey Kluger 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, Jeffrey Kluger tells for the first time the story of the people who are making these voyages of discovery happen -- the daring, determined, and brilliant men and wom... more »en 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. 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. The story is still unfolding, as future missions are poised to go back to many of those distant moons.« less