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Halo Orbits, Comets, Asteroids, and More
Outskirts Press
June 2011
On Sale: June 1, 2011
460 pages ISBN: 1432776061 EAN: 9781432776060 Paperback
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Non-Fiction Memoir
An autobiographical account of one man's 50-year career in
creating, selling, designing, and implementing deep-space
missions. The book tells the story of how the author was
able to achieve several important space "firsts" despite
difficult technical, management, and programmatic hurdles.
These firsts include the following:
-First
libration-point mission, ISEE-3 (1978) -First
exploration of Earth's distant magnetotail, ISEE-3 (1983)
-First comet encounter, ICE (1985) -First asteroid
orbiter, NEAR Shoemaker (2000) -First landing on an
asteroid, NEAR Shoemaker (2001) -First orbiter of
Mercury, MESSENGER (2011) -First flyby of Pluto/Charon,
New Horizons (2015)
At the beginning of his career,
the author was motivated by a driving ambition to design and
implement the first mission to a libration point. This
aspiration resulted in the placement of the ISEE-3
spacecraft into a "halo orbit" around the Sun-Earth L1
libration point. By successfully demonstrating the utility
and practicality of libration-point orbits, ISEE-3 prepared
the way for a number of follow-on missions including SOHO,
ACE, MAP, Genesis, Herschel/Planck, and JWST. The author's
advocacy of libration-point staging for human missions to
the Moon and beyond is also discussed.
The author
also had a special interest in comets and asteroids. This
interest led to several proposals for missions to these
small bodies----some flown, others not. The NEAR Shoemaker
mission to the asteroid Eros is described in some detail.
Others mentioned include missions to Halley's comet, the ICE
flyby of comet Giacobini-Zinner, a U.S.- Japanese proposal
for a comet sample-return, the CONTOUR multi-comet flyby
mission, and the Stardust-NExT flyby of comet Tempel-1.
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