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In Journey Beyond Selene, Jeffrey Kluger brings to life
an unheralded band of cutting-edge space explorers with their own stunning brand
of the right stuff. He has written an adventure story that is full of drama, danger,
and triumph -- the story of the men and women who have taken us to the ends of
the solar system. 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, bestselling author
Jeffrey Kluger tells for the first time the fascinating story of the people who
are making these voyages of discovery happen -- the daring, determined, and brilliant
men and women 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 multicoloured moons that circle them. What
they've found is astonishing. In addition to discovering
many more moons than astronomers thought existed, JPL scientists have found thses
worlds to be stranger than anyone imagined. Their fanciful names -- Ophelia, Europa,
Despina, Titania, Pandora, Pan, Puck -- only hint at their fantastic nature. 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. There have been, inevitably, near disasters along
the way. The story is still unfolding, as future missions are poised to go back
to many of those distant moons. One will attempt to land on Jupiter's ice-covered
Europa and sample its salty sea for signs of life. A
perfect blend of science and adventure, Journey Beyond Selene is a riveting
account of the men and women who build and fly the incredible unmanned spaceships
that are unlocking the secrets of the solar system -- and perhaps of life itself. Jeffrey
Kluger is a senior writer at Time magazine, where he covers science in
general and the space program in particular. The coauthor (with Jim Lovell) of
the bestseller Apollo 13 and a frequent commentator on CNN, he lives in
New York with his wife, Alejandra. |
