When the mighty Rocketdyne F-1 engine was conceived in the late 1950s for the U.S. Air Force, it had no defined mission and there was no launch vehicle it could power. It was a bold concept to push the technological envelope of rocket propulsion in order to put massive payloads into Earth orbit. Few realized at the time that the F-1 would one day propel American astronauts to the Moon. In The Saturn V F-1 Engine, Anthony Young tells the amazing story of unbridled vision, bold engineering, explosive failures during testing, unrelenting persistence to find solutions, and ultimate success in launching the Saturn V with a 100 percent success rate. The book contains personal interviews with many Rocketdyne and NASA personnel involved in the engine's design, development, testing and production; is lavishly illustrated with black-and-white and color photographs, many never previously published is the first complete history of the most powerful rocket engine ever built. The F-1 engine remains the high point in U.S. liquid rocket propulsion - it represents a period in American history when nothing was impossible.

Il volume A] un'introduzione alla Fisica Solare che si propone lo scopo di illustrare alla persona che intende avvicinarsi a questa disciplina (studenti, dottori di ricerca, ricercatori) i meccanismi fisici che stanno alla base della complessa fenomenologia osservata sulla stella a noi piA vicina. Il volume non ha la pretesa di essere esauruente (basta pensare che la fisica solare spazia su un gran numero di discipline, quali la Fisica Nucleare, la Termodinamica, L'Elettrodinamica, la Fisica Atomica e Molecolare, la Spettoscopia in tutte le bande dello spettro elettromagnetico, la Magnetoidrodinamica, la Fisica del Plasma, lo sviluppo di nuova strumentazione, l'Ottica, ecc.). Piuttosto, sono stati scelti un numero di argomenti di rilevanza fondamentale nello studio presente del Sole (soprattutto nei riguardi delle osservazioni da terra con grandi telescopi) e su tali argomenti si A] cercato di dare una panoramica generale, inclusiva dell'evoluzione storica, senza scendere in soverchi dettagli. Siccome la Fisica Solare puA a buon diritto essere considerata la "Stele di Rosetta" di tutta l'Astrofisica, il volume puA anche essere considerato una valida introduzione a questa materia.

Eclipses have captured attention and sparked curiosity about the cosmos since the first appearance of humankind. Having been blamed for everything from natural disasters to the fall of kings, they are now invaluable tools for understanding many celestial as well as terrestrial phenomena. This clear, easy-to-understand guide explains what causes total eclipses and how they can be used in experiments to examine everything from the dust between the planets to general relativity. A new chapter has been added on the eclipse of July 11, 1991 (the great Hawaiian eclipse).

Originally published in 1995.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The investigation of minor solar system bodies, such as comets and asteroids, using spacecraft requires an understanding of orbital motion in strongly perturbed environments. The solutions to a wide range of complex and challenging problems in this field are reviewed in this comprehensive and authoritative work.

The breakup of the Space Shuttle Columbia as it reentered Earth's atmosphere on February 1, 2003, reminded the public--and NASA--of the grave risks posed to spacecraft by everything from insulating foam to space debris. Here, Alan Tribble presents a singular, up-to-date account of a wide range of less conspicuous but no less consequential environmental effects that can damage or cause poor performance of orbiting spacecraft. Conveying a wealth of insight into the nature of the space environment and how spacecraft interact with it, he covers design modifications aimed at eliminating or reducing such environmental effects as solar absorptance increases caused by self-contamination, materials erosion by atomic oxygen, electrical discharges due to spacecraft charging, degradation of electrical circuits by radiation, and bombardment by micrometeorites. This book is unique in that it bridges the gap between studies of the space environment as performed by space physicists and spacecraft design engineering as practiced by aerospace engineers.

"Inside NASA" explores how an agency praised for its planetary probes and expeditions to the moon became notorious for the explosion of the space shuttle "Challenger" and a series of other malfunctions. Using archival evidence as well as in-depth interviews with space agency officials, Howard McCurdy investigates the relationship between the performance of the American space program and NASA's organizational culture. He begins by identifying the beliefs, norms, and practices that guided NASA's early successes. Originally, the agency was dominated by the strong technical culture rooted in the research-and-development organizations from which NASA was formed. To launch the expeditions to the moon, McCurdy explains, this technical culture was linked to an organizational structure borrowed from the Air Force ballistic-missile program. Changes imposed to accomplish the lunar landing--along with the normal aging process and increased bureaucracy in the government as a whole--gradually eroded NASA's original culture and reduced its technical strength.

This book presents fundmentals of orbit determination--from weighted least squares approaches (Gauss) to today's high-speed computer algorithms that provide accuracy within a few centimeters. Numerous examples and problems are provided to enhance readers' understanding of the material.
*Covers such topics as coordinate and time systems, square root filters, process noise techniques, and the use of fictitious parameters for absorbing un-modeled and incorrectly modeled forces acting on a satellite.
*Examples and exercises serve to illustrate the principles throughout each chapter.
*Detailed solutions to end-of-chapter exercises available to instructors.

This book tells the human story of one of man's greatest intellectual adventures - how it came to be understood that light travels at a finite speed, so that when we look up at the stars, we are looking back in time. And how the search for a God-given absolute frame of reference in the universe led most improbably to Einstein's most famous equation E=mc2, which represents the energy that powers the stars and nuclear weapons. From the ancient Greeks measuring the solar system, to the theory of relativity and satellite navigation, the book takes the reader on a gripping historical journey. We learn how Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter and used their eclipses as a global clock, allowing travellers to find their Longitude. And how Ole Roemer, noticing that the eclipses were a little late, used this to obtain the first measurement of the speed of light, which takes eight minutes to get to us from the sun. We move from the international collaborations to observe the Transits of Venus, including Cook's voyage to Australia, to the achievements of Young and Fresnel, whose discoveries eventually taught us that light travels as a wave but arrives as a particle, and all the quantum weirdness which follows. In the nineteenth century, we find Faraday and Maxwell, struggling to understand how light can propagate through the vacuum of space unless it is filled with a ghostly vortex Aether foam. We follow the brilliantly gifted experimentalists Hertz, discoverer of radio, Michelson with his search for the Aether wind, and Foucault and Fizeau with their spinning mirrors and lightbeams across the rooftops of Paris. Messaging faster than light using quantum entanglement, and the reality of the quantum world, conclude this saga.

Foreword by Dr. Roger D. Launius, Former NASA Chief Historian For the past 75 years, the U.S. government has invested significant time and money into advanced aerospace research, as evidenced by its many experimental X-plane aircraft and rockets. NASA's X-Planes asks a simple question: What have we gained from it all? To answer this question, the authors provide a comprehensive overview of the X-plane's long history, from the 1946 X-1 to the modern X-60. The chapters describe not just the technological evolution of these models, but also the wider story of politics, federal budgets, and inter-agency rivalries surrounding them. The book is organized into two sections, with the first covering the operational X-planes that symbolized the Cold War struggle between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R, and the second section surveying post-Cold War aircraft and spacecraft. Featuring dozens of original illustrations of X-plane cross-sections, in-flight profiles, close-ups, and more, this book will educate general readers and specialists alike.

As Apollo 11's Lunar Module descended toward the moon under automatic control, a program alarm in the guidance computer's software nearly caused a mission abort. Neil Armstrong responded by switching off the automatic mode and taking direct control. He stopped monitoring the computer and began flying the spacecraft, relying on skill to land it and earning praise for a triumph of human over machine. In Digital Apollo, engineer-historian David Mindell takes this famous moment as a starting point for an exploration of the relationship between humans and computers in the Apollo program. In each of the six Apollo landings, the astronaut in command seized control from the computer and landed with his hand on the stick. Mindell recounts the story of astronauts' desire to control their spacecraft in parallel with the history of the Apollo Guidance Computer. From the early days of aviation through the birth of spaceflight, test pilots and astronauts sought to be more than "spam in a can" despite the automatic controls, digital computers, and software developed by engineers. Digital Apollo examines the design and execution of each of the six Apollo moon landings, drawing on transcripts and data telemetry from the flights, astronaut interviews, and NASA's extensive archives. Mindell's exploration of how human pilots and automated systems worked together to achieve the ultimate in flight--a lunar landing--traces and reframes the debate over the future of humans and automation in space. The results have implications for any venture in which human roles seem threatened by automated systems, whether it is the work at our desktops or the future of exploration.David A. Mindell is Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing, Professor of Engineering Systems, and Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. He is the author of Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics and War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor.