Exploring the planets ebook pdf free
The planets fascinate us and naturally we care about our own Earth and things like how well we can forecast the weather and whether climate is really changing Exploring the Planets offers a personal account on how the space programme evolved It begins in the era of the first blurry views of our Earth as seen from space and ends with current plans for sophisticated robots on places as near as our neighbours Venus and Mars and as far away as the rainy lakelands of Saturn s planet sized moon Titan Examining the scientific goals of these complex voyages of discovery and the joys and hardships of working to achieve them The Space Age is now about 50 years old and for those lucky enough to be part of it at its inception it s filled a worklong lifetime Today several satellites around the Earth have studied the atmosphere and the climate using instruments on board that the author helped design and build Deep space missions were embarked upon to visit the planets all of the major bodies six planets the Moon and minor bodies asteroids and comets of the classical Solar System have been scrutinised close up by experiments built in various laboratories worldwide Most of the narrative is based on the author s experiences at the world s space agencies research labs and conferences and at other places as diverse as Cape Canaveral and No 10 Downing Street Exploring the Planets A Memoir
Back in the day it seems that every senior officer in the armed forces felt the urge to write a memoir and publishers churned them out either out of patriotic duty or because they felt that these people were involved in something very significant true so their stories must be interesting not always true There s an echo of this practice that creeps into scientists memoirs such as Exploring the Planets by Oxford professor Fred Taylor There are without doubt some really interesting space experiments described in these 360 fairly small print pages but there s also an awful lot of material that is unrewarding for the reader. Exploring the planets kindle edition What s good Taylor gives us an excellent picture of the processes and procedures and bureaucracy needed to get an experiment onto a satellite and all too often that would fail to get a place or get funding after a huge amount of work had been put into it We get the feeling for the sheer expanse of time involved in these space based projects For example the With Galileo to Jupiter chapter starts with events in 1976 but doesn t strictly end until 2003 when the Galileo orbiter plunges into Jupiter s atmosphere For me the three most interesting experiments were Taylor s very first involving equipment suspended from a balloon that ended up in an unhappy farmer s field near Newbury the failed Mars Climate Orbiter and the second mission to Venus that involved Taylor. Pdf exploring the planets in order However there is also a lot that could be better Much of the mundane everyday life material lacks any great interest to the outside observer except to note that I shall from now on raise an eyebrow when scientists claim to be underpaid as Taylor had already bought his first Aston Martin a DB5 when he was in his twenties It s hard to plough through pages packed with acronyms concentrating far on the politics and the engineering aspects of the job than the underlying science In fact Taylor does not seem to be a very good science communicator He delights in telling us how when being interviewed by Connie Chung for the CBS evening news she looked puzzled as his explanations were too technical saying This pleased me no end That s a failure than something to celebrate And he rarely makes an attempt to explain the science behind text like Some elementary theory imported from terrestrial atmospheric physics can explain the behaviour as a consequence of the equator to pole overturning Hadley cell combining with the super rotating zonal winds and a wavenumber two instability near the poles It s hard to see the point of putting this in at all without explanation. Exploring the planets epub ebook free download Another irritating tendency is to get to a point where the text might truly become interesting then skip over the bits we want to hear about So for instance he tells us that failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter was due to confusion between imperial and metric units but doesn t give any details to explain how such a mind boggling error could have occurred Worse on a number of occasions Taylor just tells us that he or someone else has described something in another book so he isn t going to tell us about it here This tends to happen at the most engaging parts and is hugely frustrating. Book on the planets for children There is no doubt that the reader will get some impressively in depth insights into what goes on in scientific academia though in many cases it may result in a suspicion that scientists could do with a serious injection of management skills But it s such a shame that as a scientific memoir it is not engaging or effective at exploring the science Fred Taylor
| Exploring the Planets: A Memoir By Fred Taylor |
| 0199671591 |
| 9780199671595 |
| English |
| 382 |
| Hardcover |
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