Ice, Rock, and Beauty

The wonders of our moons and planets within the Solar System have captivated people across the world for generations. but is that all there is to the relatively small cosmic address we call home? The richness of images – from dwarf planets, moons, smaller asteroids, comets, and planetary rings, all the way out to the Kuiper Belt and the icy fragments of the Oort Cloud – have only become richer since the onset of space exploration and since the first edition of this book! The evolution of images of Pluto, for one, from the faintest dot through to the fantastic surface detail revealed by NASA’s New Horizons mission is just one of the breakthrough stories from this decade featured in this book. NASA's updated maps of the moons of Saturn, such as Enceladus with its fountains of ice bursting from inner oceans, and of oily lakes seen through Titan’s hazy atmosphere are also analyzed in this book. Additionally, this updated edition features new three-dimensional models of the pathwaysof huge numbers of asteroids, intimate close-ups of comets, and colorful representations of the subtle gravitational variations across the surface of our own companion, the Moon. There is indeed a vast diversity of ice and rock, and certainly a whole lot of newly discovered beauty waiting to be explored, by you, in every chapter.