On May 18-21, 2004, the Max-Planck-Society's Harnack-Haus in Dahlem, Berlin hosted the international symposium "Exploring the Cosmic Frontier: Astrophysical Instruments for the 21st Century." The symposium was dedicated to exploring the complementarity and synergies between different branches of astrophysical research, by presenting and discussing the fundamental scientific problems that will be addressed in the next few decades.

A noted space expert explains the current revolution in spaceflight, where it leads, and why we need it.A new space race has begun. But the rivals in this case are not superpowers but competing entrepreneurs. These daring pioneers are creating a revolution in spaceflight that promises to transform the near future. Astronautical engineer Robert Zubrin spells out the potential of these new developments in an engrossing narrative that is visionary yet grounded by a deep understanding of the practical challenges.Fueled by the combined expertise of the old aerospace industry and the talents of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, spaceflight is becoming cheaper. The new generation of space explorers has already achieved a major breakthrough by creating reusable rockets. Zubrin foresees more rapid innovation, including global travel from any point on Earth to another in an hour or less; orbital hotels; moon bases with incredible space observatories; human settlements on Mars, the asteroids, and the moons of the outer planets; and then, breaking all limits, pushing onward to the stars.Zubrin shows how projects that sound like science fiction can actually become reality. But beyond the how, he makes an even more compelling case for why we need to do this--to increase our knowledge of the universe, to make unforeseen discoveries on new frontiers, to harness the natural resources of other planets, to safeguard Earth from stray asteroids, to ensure the future of humanity by expanding beyond its home base, and to protect us from being catastrophically set against each other by the false belief that there isn't enough for all.

Insightful, good-humored essays on the possibilities of alien life and the uses of space exploration, based on an astrobiologist's everyday conversations with his fellow humans-taxi drivers, to be precise. If you've ever sat in the back seat of a taxi, you know that cabbies like to talk. Sports or politics, your job or theirs, taxi drivers are fine conversationalists on just about any topic. And when the passenger is astrobiologist Charles Cockell, that topic is usually space and what, if anything, lives out there. Inspired by conversations with drivers all over the world, Taxi from Another Planet tackles the questions that everyday people have about the cosmos and our place in it. Will we understand aliens? What if there isn't life out in the universe? Is Mars our Plan B? And why is the government spending tax dollars on space programs anyway? Each essay in this genial collection takes questions like these as a starting point on the way to a range of insightful, even poignant, observations. Cockell delves into debates over the inevitability of life and looks to both human history and scientific knowledge to consider what first contact will be like and what we can expect from spacefaring societies. He also offers a forceful argument for the sympathies between space exploration and environmentalism. A shrewd and entertaining foray into the most fundamental mysteries, Taxi from Another Planet brings together the wisdom of scientific experts and their fellow citizens of Earth, the better to understand how life might unfold elsewhere.

Electromagnetic Meson Production at Low Energies; B.H. Schoch. Parity Violation in Electron Scattering; R.D. McKeown. Polarization in Leptoninduced Reactions; T.W. Donnelly. Quark Structure of the Nucleon and Nucleon Resonances; B. Metsch. Leptonic Production of Baryon Resonances; V.D. Burkert. Structure Functions of the Nucleon; T.J. Ketel. Nuclear Filtering and Quantum Color Transparency: An Introductory Review; J.P. Ralston. Photon and Meson Production in Ultrarelativistic Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions; H. Loehner. Near Threshold Particle Production: A Probe of Resonancematter Formation in Heavy-ion Collisions; V. Metag. Quark Matter and Nuclear Collisions; H. Satz. The String Model of Nuclear Scattering: Theoretical Concepts; K. Werner. Introduction to the Dual Parton Model; A. Capella. Nucleon-Nucleon Bremsstrahlung; K. Nakayama. Index.

The subject of this workshop (held May-June 1989) plays the central role in high energy heavy ion collisions; contains the possibilities of various phase transitions (gas vapor, meson condensation, quark gluon plasma); and plays an important role in the static and dynamical behavior of stars, especi"

Two specialized new instruments for ESO's VLT, VISIR and CRIRES, spawned the idea for this workshop. CRIRES is a dedicated very high resolution infrared spectrograph; VISIR features a high resolution spectroscopic mode. Together, the instruments combine the sensitivity of an 8m-telescope with the now well-established reliability of VLT-facility instruments. High resolution here means that lines in cool stellar atmospheres and HII-regions can be resolved. The astrophysical topics discussed in this rather specialized workshop range from the inner solar system to active galactic nuclei. There are many possibilities for new discoveries with these instruments, but the unique capability, which becomes available through high-resolution infrared spectroscopy, is the observation of molecular rotational-vibrational transitions in many astrophysical environments. Particularly interesting and surprising in this context, many papers on modeling and laboratory spectroscopy at the workshop appear to indicate that astronomical observations are lagging a bit behind in this field. The papers are an interesting mix of reports from existing high resolution facilities, reports on modeling efforts of synthetic spectra and reports on laboratory spectra. In this sense, a fruitful exchange between molecular physics and astronomy was again accomplished and is documented in this volume.

Introduction (H. Kikuchi). Cosmic Dusty Plasmas: Plasma Tail and Dust Tail of Comets (T. Saito et al.). Laboratory Dusty Plasmas: Theory and Experiment: Coherent Structures in Lowtemperature Dusty Plasmas (P.K. Shukla, N.N. Rao). Meteorologicoelectric Environment and EHD: The Mechanism of Electrohydrodynamic Wind Generation in a Lower Atmosphere (A. Watson, J.S. Chang). Selforganization and Turbulence: Selforganization Processes in Turbulent Atmosphere and Methods for Their Study (A.A. Lazarev, S.S. Moiseev). Lightning Discharges and Laboratory Simulation: A New Model Lightning (J.W. Warwick). Atmospheric Electricity and Noise: Jet Stream Electrodynamics (T. Ogawa). Magnetospheric Noise and Pulsations: Local Time Dependence of Wave Characteristics of Pi2 Pulsations Observed at Synchronous Orbit (H. Takeuchi et al.). Planetary and Solar Noise and Plasmas: Nonauroral Lights on Jupiter's Dark Side (J.W. Warwick). Galactic Noise and Plasmas: A Systematic Study of Dense Cloud Cores and Star Formation (A. Mizuno, Y. Fukui). Fluctuations, Chaos, Reconnection, and Acceleration. Ball Lightning and Microwave Discharges. 40 additional articles. Index.

This book is the sixth volume under the title Organizations and Strategies in Astronomy (OSA). The OSA series is intended to cover a large range of fields and themes. In practice, one could say that all aspects of astronomy-related life and environment are considered in the spirit of sharing specific expertise and lessons learned.

The chapters of this book are dealing with socio-dynamical aspects of the astronomy (and related space sciences) community: characteristics of organizations, strategies for development, legal issues, operational techniques, observing practicalities, educational policies, journal and magazine profiles, public outreach, publication studies, relationships with the media, research communication, evaluation and selection procedures, research indicators, national specificities, contemporary history, and so on.

The experts contributing to this volume have done their best to write in a way understandable to readers not necessarily hyperspecialized in astronomy while providing specific detailed information and sometimes enlightening lessons learned' sections. The book concludes with an updated bibliography of publications related to socio-astronomy and to the interactions of the astronomy community with the society at large.

This volume will be most usefully read by researchers, teachers, editors, publishers, librarians, sociologists of science, research planners and strategists, project managers, public-relations officers, plus those in charge of astronomy-related organizations, as well as by students aiming at a career in astronomy or related space science.

At the opening of the "Third Meeting on Celestial Mechanics - CELMEC III", strong sensations hit our minds. The conference (18-22 June 2001) was being held in Villa Mondragone, a beautiful complex of buildings and gardens located within the township of Monte Porzio Catone, on the hills surrounding Rome. A former papal residence, the building has been recently restored by the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" to host academic activities and events. The conference room is called "Salone degli Svizzeri": here, Gregory XIII, on February 24, 1582, gave its sanction to the reform of the Julian calendar and declared officially in use the calendar still adopted nowadays. The magnificent high walls and tall ceiling strongly resounded, giving to our voice a peculiar Vatican sound, which took us by surprise. May be - we thought - a distant echo of the very words of Gregory XIII proclaiming the modem calendar was still haunting the room. Around us, in the audience, many countries were represented, thus indicating that the idea of putting together the three "souls" of modem Celestial Mechanics - perturbation theories, solar and stellar system studies, spaceflight dynamic- had been successful. CELMEC III is in fact the latest of a series of meetings (the first two editions took place in 1993 and 1997 in L' Aquila, Italy) whose aim is to establish a common ground among people working in Celestial Mechanics, yet belonging to different institutions such as universities, astronomical observatories, research institutes, space agencies and industries.

This book presents the result of an innovative challenge, to create a systematic literature overview driven by machine-generated content. Questions and related keywords were prepared for the machine to query, discover, collate and structure by Artificial Intelligence (AI) clustering. The AI-based approach seemed especially suitable to provide an innovative perspective as the topics are indeed both complex, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, for example, climate, planetary and evolution sciences. Springer Nature has published much on these topics in its journals over the years, so the challenge was for the machine to identify the most relevant content and present it in a structured way that the reader would find useful. The automatically generated literature summaries in this book are intended as a springboard to further discoverability. They are particularly useful to readers with limited time, looking to learn more about the subject quickly and especially if they are new to the topics. Springer Nature seeks to support anyone who needs a fast and effective start in their content discovery journey, from the undergraduate student exploring interdisciplinary content, to Master- or PhD-thesis developing research questions, to the practitioner seeking support materials, this book can serve as an inspiration, to name a few examples. It is important to us as a publisher to make the advances in technology easily accessible to our authors and find new ways of AI-based author services that allow human-machine interaction to generate readable, usable, collated, research content.

The fundamentals of astrochemistry in the gas phase are relatively well established, in contrast to the special relevance attributed to processes involving interstellar dust grains - the solid component of matter diffused among the stars.
This book presents the state of the art in relation to the ways grains interact with gases, the catalytic role played by dust that allows key molecular species (H2 as well as many complex, possibly prebiotic species) to be formed on its surface - which cannot be obtained efficiently by any other mechanisms, and the interaction between solids (dust grains, icy mantles, cometary nuclei, satellites of the giant planets and minor bodies in the Solar system) in space and energetic agents such as UV photons and fast particles.
The presence and importance of PAH, which may represent the smallest component of the grains, is considered in relation to possible astrobiological pathways and the ever-present mystery of the ubiquitous presence of Diffuse Interstellar Bands and their carriers.

This volume contains the written versions of the lectures given at the 26th course of the renowned Saas-Fee series. The book represents a comprehensive and up-to-date review of the field of galaxy interaction. Nowadays, galaxies are no longer seen as immutable objects: they evolve, interact, merge, blaze, and reshape. Dynamic forces can induce powerful stellar activity able to transform the matter composition and morphology of galaxies. The lectures included in this book aim at a better understanding of these remarkable and fascinating phenomena. Though the book is intended for graduate students and young post-docs in astrophysics, it contains more advanced and original material, as well as historical perspectives, which will be of great interest to experts and astronomy teachers also.

This volume gives a comprehensive and integrated overview of current knowledge about cosmic rays in the heliosphere. It is the result of a workshop at ISSI, where experimental space physicists as well as theorists presented and discussed their views on the behaviour of cosmic rays during the currently prevalent solar minimum conditions, when the heliosphere has a well-ordered and relatively simple configuration. An unprecedented array of spacecraft - Ulysses, Pioneer, Voyager, IMP-8, Wind, to name a few - in conjunction with ever more sophisticated numerical models made this possible, gave us our first clear view of the three-dimensional heliosphere at solar minimum, and have significantly advanced our knowledge. The status of the field is first presented in a series of introductory papers; these are followed by four Working Group reports attempting to synthesise this knowledge, make progress in our understanding, and point out directions of future research. A summary of the parameters used in cosmic ray modulation and an epilogue on conditions and consequences expected at the upcoming solar maximum conclude the volume. The book is intended to provide active researchers in space physics with an up-to-date status report and also to introduce the advanced graduate student to the field.

This volume contains the papers presented at the Third Alexander von Humboldt Colloquium on Celestial Mechanics. The papers cover a large range of questions, from the behaviour of dust particles to the stability of the solar system as a whole. The motions of asteroids and their classification into families are also discussed. Specific topics addressed are KAM theory, chaotic motions, resonances, Lyapunov characteristic exponents, perturbation theory and numerical integration.

Gamma-ray astronomy has undergone an enormous progress in the last 15 years. The success of satellite experiments like NASA's Comp ton Gamma-Ray Observatory and ESA's INTEGRAL mission, as well as of ground-based instruments have open new views into the high-energy Universe. Different classes of cosmic gamma-ray sources have been now detected at different energies, in addition to young radio pulsars and gamma-ray bursts, the classical ones. The new sources include radio quiet pulsars, microquasars, supernova remnants, starburst galaxies, ra dio galaxies, flat-spectrum radio quasars, and BL Lacertae objects. A large number of unidentified sources strongly suggests that this brief enumeration is far from complete. Gamma-ray bursts are now estab lished as extragalactic sources with tremendous energy output. There is accumulating evidence supporting the idea that massive stars and star forming regions can accelerate charged particles up to relativistic ener gies making them gamma-ray sources. Gamma-ray astronomy has also proved to be a powerful tool for cosmology imposing constraints to the background photon fields that can absorb the gamma-ray flux from dis tant sources. All this has profound implications for our current ideas about how particles are accelerated and transported in both the local and distant U niverse. The evolution of our knowledge on the gamma-ray sky has been so fast that is not easy for the non-specialist scientist and the graduate student to be aware of the full potential of this field or to grasp the fundamentals of a given topic in order to attempt some original contribution.

This book describes prominent technological achievements within a very successful space science mission: the Herschel space observatory. Focusing on the various processes of innovation it offers an analysis and discussion of the social, technological and scientific context of the mission that paved the way to its development. It addresses the key question raised by these processes in our modern society, i.e.: how knowledge management of innovation set the conditions for inventing the future? In that respect the book is based on a transdisciplinary analysis of the programmatic complexity of Herschel, with inputs from space scientists, managers, philosophers, and engineers. This book is addressed to decision makers, not only in space science, but also in other industries and sciences using or building large machines. It is also addressed to space engineers and scientists as well as students in science and management.

This book on astronomical measurement takes a fresh approach to teaching the subject. After discussing some general principles, it follows the chain of measurement through atmosphere, imaging, detection, spectroscopy, timing, and hypothesis testing. The various wavelength regimes are covered in each section, emphasising what is the same, and what is different. The author concentrates on the physics of detection and the principles of measurement, aiming to make this logically coherent.
The book is based on a short self contained lecture course for advanced undergraduate students developed and taught by the author over several years.

This FULL COLOR handbook consists of six core chapters: (1) systems engineering fundamentals discussion, (2) the NASA program/project life cycles, (3) systems engineering processes to get from a concept to a design, (4) systems engineering processes to get from a design to a final product, (5) crosscutting management processes in systems engineering, and (6) special topics relative to systems engineering. These core chapters are supplemented by appendices that provide outlines, examples, and further information to illustrate topics in the core chapters. The handbook makes extensive use of boxes and figures to define, refine, illustrate, and extend concepts in the core chapters without diverting the reader from the main information. The handbook provides top-level guidelines for good systems engineering practices; it is not intended in any way to be a directive. NASA/SP-2007-6105 Rev1 supersedes SP-6105, dated June 199

Relativistic jets are a powerful, spectacular, yet poorly-understood phenomenon associated with accreting black holes and neutron stars. The question of the internal structure - matter content and magnetic field - of relativistic jets is of prime importance for our understanding of the underlying physics. The study of circular polarisation is both challenging and potentially very rewarding, and when applied to relativistic jets has the potential to probe the structure of the jets in unique ways.
This book compiles the contributions, both theoretical and observational, from a three-day workshop held in Amsterdam in July 2002, concerning the study of circular polarisation from relativistic jet sources.

2D Gravity and Non-Perturbative Effects: Diffusion Equation, Continuum Limit and Universality in 2D Quantum Gravity; O. Alvarez, et al. On Triangles and Squares; C. Bachas. Non-Perturbative Effects in 2D Gravity and Matrix Modles; F. David. Integrable Models of 2D Quantum Gravity; P. Di Francesco, et al. Topological Strings and Loop Equations; R. Dijkgraaf, et al. The Two Matrix Model; M.R. Douglas. Action Principle and Large Order Behavior of Non-Perturbative Gravity; P. Ginsparg, et al. D = 1 Strings and String Field Theory: Matrix Models, String Field Theory and Topology; T. Banks. Multipoint Correlation Functions in One-Dimensional String Theory; D. Boulativ. The Penner Model and D = 1 String Theory J. Distler, et al. Non-Perturbative String Theory; D.J. Gross. Bosonic Strings and String Field Theories in One-Dimensional Target Space; V. Kazakov. Liouville Theory andD 1: Random Surfaces in Dimensions Larger than One; J. Ambjorn. On Gauge Invariances in Stochastic Quantization; L. Baulieu. The Quantum Group Structure of Quantum Gravity in Two Dimensions; J.L. Gervais. Notes on Quantum Liouville Theory and Quantum Gravity; N. Seiberg. 8 additional articles. Index.

Ptolemy's Almagest shares with Euclid's Elements the glory of being the scientific text longest in use. From its conception in the second century up to the late Renaissance, this work determined astronomy as a science. During this time the Almagest was not only a work on astronomy; the subject was defined as what is described in the Almagest. The cautious emancipation of the late middle ages and the revolutionary creation of the new science in the 16th century are not conceivable without reference to the Almagest. This text lifted European astronomy to the high standard of knowledge on which the new science flourished. Before, the Ptolemaic models of the orbits of the sun, the moon, and the planets had been refined by Arabic astronomers. They provided the structural elements with which Copernicus and Kepler ushered in the era of modern astronomy. The Almagest survived the destruction of its epicyclic representation of the planetary orbits in the conceptual traces left behind in the theories of its successors. The clear separation of the sidereal from the tropical year, the celestial coordinate systems, the concepts of time, the forms of the constellations, and brightness classifications of celestial objects are, among many other things, still part of the astronomical canon even today.

While the number and range of international peace programmes continues to proliferate, there is a marked absence of interdisciplinary and comparative research to guide academic development and inform practice in this challenging arena. It is these deficits that the present volume aims to address. This collection of peace education efforts in conflict and post-conflict societies brings together an international group of scholars to offer the very latest theoretical and pedagogical developments for long term solutions.

The following topics are addressed: space astrometric missions, ground based optical techniques, very long baseline interferometric (VLBI) techniques, impact of these techniques on astrophysics and on geodynamics, and issues related to celestial and terrestrial reference frames. In the area of space optical astrometry, the reduction of one year of data from the Hipparcos mission shows excellent results for more than 40,000 stars. Recent developments in ground-based optical astrometry are concentrated on CCB meridian circles and transit instruments. The VLBI technique is the most powerful method to determine the earth rotation parameters, nutation series, and baseline lengths. More accurate celestial and terrestrial reference frames are needed and recent achievements in this field are presented, for example FK5 catalogues and a comparison of VLA and Hipparcos positions.

The Fundamentals of Modern Astrophysics provides an overview of the modern science of astrophysics. It covers the Sun, Solar System bodies, exoplanets, stars, and star life cycle, planetary systems origin and evolution, basics of astrobiology, our galaxy the Milky Way, other galaxies and galactic clusters, a general view of the Universe, its structure, evolution and fate, modern views and advanced models of cosmology as well as the synergy of micro- and macro physics, standard model, superstring theory, multiversity and worm holes. The main concepts of modern astrophysics and prospects for future studies are accompanied by numerous illustrations and a summary of the advanced projects at various astronomical facilities and space missions. Dr. Marov guides readers through a maze of complicated topics to demystify the field and open its wonders to all.