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This book collects papers presented at a workshop taking an interdisciplinary look at methods designed to detect life on other planets. It serves as a reference to scientists and instrument developers working in the field of in-situ and remote life detection.
Now in its third edition the Encyclopedia of Astrobiology serves as the key to a common understanding in the extremely interdisciplinary community of astrobiologists. Each new or experienced researcher and graduate student in adjacent fields of astrobiology will appreciate this reference work in the quest to understand the big picture. The carefully selected group of active researchers contributing to this work are aiming to give a comprehensive international perspective on and to accelerate the interdisciplinary advance of astrobiology. The interdisciplinary field of astrobiology constitutes a joint arena where provocative discoveries are coalescing concerning, e.g. the prevalence of exopla...
Stars are born and die in clouds of gas and dust, opaque to most types of radiation, but transparent in the infrared. Requiring complex detectors, space missions and cooled telescopes, infrared astronomy is the last branch of this discipline to come of age. After a very successful sky survey performed in the eighties by the IRAS satellite, the Infrared Space Observatory, in the nineties, brought spectacular advances in the understanding of the processes giving rise to powerful infrared emission by a great variety of celestial sources. Outstanding results have been obtained on the bright comet Hale-Bopp, and in particular of its water spectrum, as well as on the formation, chemistry and dynamics of planetary objects in the solar system. Ideas on the early stages of stellar formation and on the stellar initial mass function have been clarified.
Mars is about one-eighth the mass of the Earth and it may provide an analogue of what the Earth was like when it was at such an early stage of accretion. The fur ther growth of the Earth was sustained by major collisions with planetesimals and planets such as that which resulted in the formation ofthe Earth's moon (Hartmann and Davis, 1975; Cameron and Ward, 1976; Wetherill, 1986; Cameron and Benz, 1991). This late accretionary history, which lasted more than 50 Myr in the case of the Earth (Halliday, 2000a, b), appears to have been shorter and less catastrophic in the case of Mars (Harper et ai. , 1995; Lee and Halliday, 1997). In this article we review the basic differences between the bul...
In this third corrected and revised edition students and lecturers in astronomy and planetary science as well as planet observers will find a mine of up-to-date information on the solar system and its interaction with the interplanetary medium, its various objects, comparative planetology, discussion of questions for further research and future space exploration.
Since the first edition of this book appeared in 1990, planetology has seen a number of fascinating discoveries that have increased our knowledge of the Solar System. These have come from both ground- and space-based observa tional programmes. Although some space probe missions have ended in fail ure, even they have added to our store of information about the planetary environment. The Galileo probe, despite being crippled by its incompletely deployed main antenna, has already achieved some spectacular results. For the first time we have obtained pictures of asteriods, with the images that Galileo returned of Gaspra, Ida, and the latter's satellite, Dactyl. The main objective, the drop ping ...
What is a planet? The answer seems obvious, but nonetheless the definition of a planet has continuously evolved over the centuries, and their number has changed following successive discoveries. The decision endorsed by the International Astronomical Union to remove Pluto from the list of planets in 2006 well illustrates the difficulty associated with their definition. The recent discovery of hundreds of exoplanets around nearby stars of our Galaxy opens a new and spectacular dimension to astrophysics. We presently know very little about the physical nature of exoplanets. In contrast, our knowledge of Solar System planets has made huge progress over the past decades, thanks, especially, to s...
More than ever, planetology is a science in full development. The year 1989 has seen two important achievements: the exploration of Mars by the Phobos spacecraft, and the encounter of Neptune and its satellite Triton by the Voyager 2 probe. The first event marked the beginning of a new Mars exploration program, which will hopefully lead to a Martian return sample mission within the next fifteen years. The exploration of Venus will continue with Magellan, just launched by NASA. The second event ends the first stage of the space exploration of the giant planets. It has demonstrated the amazing variety of the objects encountered - planets, rings and satellites - which reflect the variety and th...