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Exploring the Planets: A Memoir
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.
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.
382 pages, Hardcover
Published April 25, 2016
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March 31, 2016
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.
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.There's certainly plenty here for the (unmanned) space exploration fan to get his or her teeth into.
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 more 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 more 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.
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.
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 more engaging or effective at exploring the science.
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.There's certainly plenty here for the (unmanned) space exploration fan to get his or her teeth into.
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 more 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 more 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.
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.
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 more engaging or effective at exploring the science.
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