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| View Larger Image | Cassini at Saturn: Huygens Results (Springer Praxis Books / Space Exploration)
by David M. Harland
| | List Price: | $39.95 | | Price: | $29.16 | | You Save: | $10.79 (27%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 809029 | | Studio: | Praxis | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 400 | | Publication Date: | February 01, 2007 | | Publisher: | Praxis |
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Product Description
Cassini At Saturn – Huygens Results brings the story of the Cassini-Huygens mission and their joint exploration of the Saturnian system right up to date. Cassini entered orbit around Saturn June 2004 so this update includes 8 months of scientific data available for review, including the most spectacular images of Saturn, its rings and satellites ever obtained by a space mission. As the Cassini spacecraft approached its destination in spring 2004, the quality of the images already being returned by the spacecraft clearly demonstrated the spectacular nature of the close-range views that will be obtained. The book contains a 16-page colour section, comprising a carefully chosen selection of the most stunning images to be released during the spacecraft’s initial period of operation. The Huygens craft, released by Cassini, parachuted through the clouds of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, in January 2005. David Harland tells the exciting story of the this craft’s journey to the surface of one of the most enigmatic bodies on the Solar System, the only moon to have a dense atmosphere and possibly lakes of liquid gas at -190ºC on its surface. Titan is considered to be an early Earth in deep freeze, possibly with the building blocks of life in its atmosphere. There will undoubtedly be enormous interest in the first results and images of Titan’s surface, and this book is the first incisive summary of this groundbreaking material. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 2 reviews)
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Not for the average reader 
It may be true that this book contains a lot of information about Saturn and its moons and all the other findings in the outer solar system, however, the writing style is quite complicated for someone that isn't thoroughly experienced in the field of astronomy.
The writing style is extremely technical and overly detailed. For example, there are several sections in the book where the author describes each specific part on the space probe that NASA has built using highly technical terms that only a veteran astronomer or NASA scientist would be familiar with. The average reader will get lost quite fast in all the technical explanations and get quite frustrated. Here is a typical example of the style of writing that the author uses:
"The Ultraviolet Spectrometer (UVS) did not have a lens, it had a series of linear apertures set in line which served as a collimator to produce a field of view 2 by 15 milliradians, then a diffraction grating illuminated a linear array of 128 detectors, each of which measured the brightness on a 1024 point scale to measure the range of 50-170 nanometers in a spectral resolution of 1 nanometre. It was to investigate ultraviolet glows in interplanetary space and in ionospheres, and use limb sounding measurements of the extent to which insolation was absorbed during solar occultations to profile the chemical composition of the upper regions of planetary atmospheres...."
If you can figure out such details then this book is for you. He uses this kind of writing throughout the majority of the book and it gets quite frustrating to try to decipher all the technical jargon.
Furthermore, the author fails to focus on perhaps the most important part of the subject matter, the planets and the moons themselves. He spends so much time going into every little detail of how NASA actually sends its probes to their locations that you get lost trying to figure out what he was trying to explain to begin with. He constantly uses terms only familiar to physics and chemistry majors.
If you are looking for a more amateur-friendly book about astronomy then I recommend checking out David Grinspoon. His writing is a lot less technical and he focuses on the important big picture instead of letting his readers get lost in all the insignificant details that are only important to a scientist, not an amateur astronomy enthusiast.
August 13, 2007 | |
Excellent Update 
This is a new edition of Harland's fine 'Mission to Saturn', adding
100 new pages of Cassini findings through summer 2006, including of
course the results of the Huygens encounter at Titan. As usual, a
handy, comprehensive volume, nicely written and illustrated. (There is no point in buying Mission to Saturn now, since its contents
are included in CaS:HR)
June 05, 2007 | |
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