Full Description
Space telescopes are among humankind's greatest scientific achievements of the last fifty years. This book describes the instruments themselves and what they were designed to discover about the Solar System and distant stars. Exactly how these telescopes were built and launched and the data they provided is explored.
Only certain kinds of radiation can penetrate our planet's atmosphere, which limits what we can observe. But with space telescopes all this changed. We now have the means to "see" beyond Earth using ultraviolet, microwave, and infrared rays, X-rays and gamma rays.
In this book we meet the pioneers and the telescopes that were built around their ideas. This book looks at space telescopes not simply chronologically but also in order of the electromagnetic spectrum, making it possible to understand better why they were made.
Contents
Acknowledgements.- Preface.- Chapter 1: Light: Nature's Great Information Superhighway.- Chapter 2: The Hubble Space Telescope - Tragedy and Triumph.- Chapter 3: Hubble - The People's Telescope.- Chapter 4: The Infrared Universe.- Chapter 5: The Gamma Ray Universe.- Chapter 6: The Universe Through Ultraviolet Eyes.- Chapter 7: The X-Ray Universe.- Chapter 8: Probing the Microwave Sky.- Chapter 9: Empire of the Sun.- Chapter 10: Measuring the Heavens.- Chapter 11: Looking to the Future: The James Webb Space Telescope.- Useful Websites on Space Telescopes.- Glossary.- Bibliography.- Index.
