CN FORUMS ARCHIVE Telescope Reviews: Space Invaders

Space Invaders--How Robotic Spacecraft Explore the Solar System
By Michel van Pelt

I saw this book mentioned on universetoday.com and I thought it sounded interesting. I passively mentioned it to my wife that I was looking at getting it at some point. Well the next day the book showed up! I got the best wife!

This book weaves the history of unmanned spaceflight with how a spacecraft is built. One area I think this book really excels at is describing the missions that have been done that were not NASA mentions. I really enjoyed learning more about missions that the ESA has done. This book uses MESSENGER (the current mission to Mercury) and HUYGENS (at Saturn) to explain how some systems work on a spacecraft.

I can honestly say I learned a lot about how a spacecraft is built and I learned some new history tidbits that I did not know before. I found this book to be an easy read and much more interesting as a whole then a book that is devoted to one mission such as Roving Mars (devoted to the development and early operations of the MER rovers, written by Steve Squires). I think this book really appeals to someone who wants to learn more about robotic spacecraft but does not want to try to read a book like the one Squires wrote since those tend to be more technical and not as easy on a general reader.

Lastly Space Invaders is well illustrated, though most images are black and white.

In conclusion I would give this book a solid A-. At times I wish it would have gotten a little deeper on engineering, but for a casual reader this book will probably inspire them to learn more, and that’s a good thing!

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Preston
Meade 10in LX200R GPS UHTC
blog (updated 02/15/2013)