Space Telescopes

By: Neil English

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Synopsis: Space telescopes are among humankind's greatest scientific achievements of the last fifty years. This book describes the instruments themselves and what they were designed to discover about the Solar System and distant stars. Exactly how these telescopes were built and launched and the data they provided analyzed is explored. Only certain kinds of radiation can penetrate our planet's atmosphere, which limits what we can observe. But with space telescopes all this changed. We now have the means to "see" ultraviolet, microwave, and infrared rays, X-rays and gamma rays beyond Earth. In this book we meet the pioneers and the telescopes that were built around their ideas. This book looks at space telescopes not simply chronologically but also in order of the electromagnetic spectrum. This makes it possible to understand better why they were made, and just what it was that justified the huge investments in the technology.