Behind new horizons. The first flight to Pluto

Alan Stern and David Greenspun invite the reader on a historical journey to Pluto, from the very beginning to the end. Dzhams Laul, Apollo 13 commander, amazing story about human curiosity, ingenuity and perseverance, which shows us how the world that is in billions in reality looks like kilometers from us. The study of the cosmos in the best form. Mario Livio Astrophysicist each of the co-authors knows his own business: Stern is a scientific leader who headed the team of “new horizons” to Pluto, and his pressure in the community of planetologists is compared with the real power of nature. GreenSpun - perhaps the most talented popularizer of science, except perhaps his friend and mentor of the late Karl Sagan ... From the first to the last page, Stern and GreenSpun do a great job, telling about the devotion of people to science - not for the sake of benefit or power, but in the Blagow humanity. Andrew Daily Kos
What: July 14, 2015, an amazing event occurred. More than 4.8 billion km from the Earth, the small spacecraft of NASA, entitled New Horizons rushed past Pluto at a speed of more than 50,000 km/h, directing all its devices to mysterious ice worlds, and then continued the journey to the distant limits of the solar system .
Nothing of the kind happened on the memory of a whole generation - there have been no studies of new worlds since the flights of the Voyagers to Uranus and Neptune - and nothing similar to this was planned in the future. More than 2 billion people visited the NASA website dedicated to the expedition before the span and after it. And now all the details of this historical project can be found out of the story of its direct participants - the head of Alan Stern and other team members.
This book is an exciting report on scientific discovery, about decades of selfless and persistent work, about political battles inside NASA and around it, about high skill, which was required in order to design and build a spacecraft, and then send it to flight. And about the further fate of the program and what awaits us for new horizons.
Quote: the variety of various phenomena was the last that someone-even members of the team of new horizons-expected to see on such a small and cold planet, located at a great distance from the sun. Low fogs, haze at high altitude, possible clouds, canyons, rise mountains, faults, polar hats, observed fields of dunes, alleged ice volcanoes, glaciers, evidence of the presence of current (and even motionless) fluid in the past and so on. In this small red planet, lost 4.8 billion km from the ground in the Kuiper belt, there are more “raisins” than in any other famous small world and, moreover, even than in many big worlds. The variety of reliefs, the complex interaction of the surface and atmosphere and the wide range of territories with different age, even gave the “new horizons” team to assign the slogan “Pluto is the new Mars”.
Why read: the authors describe in detail the background of Pluto’s research, the preparation of the mission and the flight of 9.5 years to this most distant planet of the solar system. The book captures the reader in a whirlwind of exciting events, where at times it seems that the flight will not be able to carry out, forces the team to empathize with the “new horizons” to the very end of the narrative.
For whom: space research lovers, students, schoolchildren