Christopher T. Russell – författare

The NASA Dawn mission, launched in 2007, aimed to visit two of the most massive protoplanets of the main asteroid belt: Vesta and Ceres. The aim was to further our understanding of the earliest days of the Solar System, and compare the two bodies to better understand their formation and evolution. This book summarises state-of-the-art results from the mission, and discusses the implications for our understanding not only of the asteroid belt but the entire Solar System. It comprises of three parts: Part 1 provides an overview of the main belt asteroids and provides an introduction to the Dawn mission; Part 2 presents key findings from the mission; and Part 3 discusses how these findings provide insights into the formation and evolution of the Solar System. This is a definitive reference for academic researchers and professionals of planetary science, asteroid science and space exploration.

The joint NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn is the most ambitious planetary mission since the VEGA mission to Venus and Halley in 1985/86 and the Viking arbiters and landers to Mars in 1976. Perhaps Cassini is even more ambitious than these earlier missions, or at least more daring, as it is being attempted as a single launch unlike early missions such as VEGA, Viking and Voyager that benefited from the security of a redundant spacecraft. This volume describes the mission, the orbiter spacecraft, the Titan atmospheric probe and the mission design in articles written by its project scientists and engineering team. These are followed by five articles from each of the discipline working groups discussing the existing knowledge of the Saturnian system and their goals for the mission. Finally, each of the Huygens entry probe instrument teams describes their instruments and measurement objectives. These instruments include an atmospheric structure instrument, an aerosol pyrolyser, an imager/radiometer, a gas chromatograph, a surface science package and a radio science investigation.

NASA's Genesis mission, launched on August 8, 2001 is the fifth mission in the Discovery series. Genesis addresses questions about the materials and processes involved in the origin of the solar system by providing precise knowledge of solar isotopic and elemental compositions for comparison with the compositions of meteoritic and planetary materials. This book describes the Genesis mission, the solar wind collector materials, the solar wind concentrator and simulations of its performance, the plasma ion and electron instruments, and the way these two instruments are used to determine the solar wind flow regime on board the spacecraft. The book should be of interest to all potential users of the data returned by the Genesis mission, to those studying the isotopic and chemical composition of the early solar system whose work will be influenced by the measurements made by Genesis and by all those interested in the design and implementation of space instruments to study space plasmas.

Atthiswriting the Cassini spacecraft has ?redits engine and successfully inserted itself andits precious cargoof scienti?c instruments into orbit, the ?rst step of its exploration of the Saturnian system. The suspense is not over, however. While excitingimages of therings have been captured,anexotic composition of Phoebe sensedby themapping spectrometer and unexpectedpanoply of magneticwaves andplasma dynamics encountered on the incoming trajectory andinitial orbit, the Huygensprobeisstillonboardandthe?rstclose?ybyofTitanhasnottakenplace. Not until Christmas Day will the probe bereleased.Navigators are still checking theircalculations,worryingaboutknownunknownslikethemassofSaturn'smoons that could cause ever so small a deviation from the planned trajectory of the probe. Theorbiter investigators are also anxious but theyget their taste of Titan earlier, on October 26.Howwell will theydetect the surface? How thickisthe atmosphere? Does Titan haveamagnetic?eld?Isthere lightninginthe atmosphere of Titan?While terrestrial and HubbleSpace Telescope pictures have improvedgreatly over the years, they cannot match the resolution obtainable from orbitabout theplanet, and much of the data issimply unobtainablewithout direct insitu sensing. Volume 1 of this three volume set described the Cassini/Huygens mission, its scienti?c objectives and the Huygens probethat will soon enter theTitan at- sphere. Volume 2 described the insitu investigations on theorbiter. In this, the third and ?nal volume of the compendium, we describethe remote sensing inv- tigations: radioscience, radar, visibleandinfrared spectroscopy, thermalinfrared studies, ultraviolet spectroscopy and visible imagery.

This volume contains five articles describing the mission and its instruments.  The first paper, by the project scientist Richard C. Elphic and his colleagues, describes the mission objectives, the launch vehicle, spacecraft and the mission itself.  This is followed by a description of LADEE’s Neutral Mass Spectrometer by Paul Mahaffy and company.  This paper describes the investigation that directly targets the lunar exosphere, which can also be explored optically in the ultraviolet.  In the following article Anthony Colaprete describes LADEE’s Ultraviolet and Visible Spectrometer that operated from 230 nm to 810 nm scanning the atmosphere just above the surface.  Not only is there atmosphere but there is also dust that putatively can be levitated above the surface, possibly by electric fields on the Moon’s surface.  Mihaly Horanyi leads this investigation, called the Lunar Dust Experiment, aimed at understanding the purported observations of levitated dust.  This experiment was also very successful, but in this case their discovery was not the electrostatic levitation of dust, but that the dust was raised by meteoroid impacts.  This is not what had been expected but clearly is the explanation that best fits the data.  Originally published in Space Science Reviews, Volume 185, Issue 1-4, 2014.

This volume contains five articles describing the mission and its instruments. Mihaly Horanyi leads this investigation, called the Lunar Dust Experiment, aimed at understanding the purported observations of levitated dust.

In December 2014, Hayabusa2 started its journey to 162173 Ryugu, a C-type asteroid likely to be primordial, thereby making this a voyage in both space and time.