Beyond Earth: A Chronicle Of Deep Space Exploration, 1958-2016
by Asif A. Siddiqi /
2020 / English / EPUB
18.3 MB Download
(Black & White print) Humans abandoned their nomadic habits and moved into settlements about 40 to 50 thousand years ago. We have been using tools even longer. But our ability to send one of our tools into the heavens is of much more recent origin, spanning only the past 60 years. Yet, in that time, we have created new tools—we call them robotic spacecraft—and sent them into the cosmos, far beyond Earth. Of course, many never got very far. That’s the cost of hubris and ambition. But most did. And many never came back to Earth and never will. In that sense, we as a species have already left a mark on the heavens these small objects that dot the cosmos are a permanent legacy of our species, existing for millions of years, even if we as a planet were to disappear. This book is a chronicle of all these tools, both failed and successful, that humans have flung into the heavens beyond Earth. The text in front of you is a completely updated and revised version of a monograph published in 2002 by the NASA History Office under the original title Deep Space Chronicle: A Chronology of Deep Space and Planetary Probes, 1958–2000. This new edition not only adds all events in robotic deep space exploration after 2000 and up to the end of 2016, but it also completely corrects and updates all accounts of missions from prior years. This contains brief descriptions of all robotic deep space missions attempted by humans since the opening of the space age in 1957. The missions are listed chronologically in order of their launch dates (i.e., not their target body encounters).
