Fifty Years on the Space Frontier: Halo Orbits, Comets, Asteroids, and More

By Robert W. Farquhar

Book Overview

Foreword by Roger-Maurice BonnetAn autobiographical account of one man%u2019s 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 %u201Cfirsts%u201D despite difficult technical, management, and programmatic hurdles. These firsts include the following:%u2022 First libration-point mission, ISEE-3 (1978)%u2022 First exploration of Earth%u2019s distant magnetotail, ISEE-3 (1983)%u2022 First comet encounter, ICE (1985)%u2022 First asteroid orbiter, NEAR Shoemaker (2000)%u2022 First landing on an asteroid, NEAR Shoemaker (2001)%u2022 First orbiter of Mercury, MESSENGER (2011)%u2022 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 %u201Chalo orbit%u201D 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%u2019s 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%u2019s 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1432776061
• ISBN13: 9781432776060
• Release Date: June 2011
• Publisher: Outskirts Press
• Length: 460 Pages
• Weight: 2.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 8.3" x 11.0"