From the October 2007 Scientific American Magazine | 1 comments

5 Essential Things To Do In Space ( Preview )

Planetary scientists have articulated goals for exploring the solar system

By George Musser

More to Explore

More from the Magazine

October
2007 Issue
Skeptic The Really Hard Science
Sustainable Developments Ending Malaria Deaths in Africa
Recommended Rapturous Sociability--Armageddon Avoided--The Allure of Venus
Buy the Digital Edition

To a child of the Space Age, books about the solar system from before 1957 are vaguely horrifying. How little people knew. They had no idea of the great volcanoes and canyons of Mars, which make Mount Everest look like a worn hillock and the Grand Canyon like a roadside ditch. They speculated that Venus beneath its clouds was a lush, misty jungle, or maybe a dry, barren desert, or a seltzer water ocean, or a giant tar pit—almost everything, it seems, but what it really is: an epic volcanic wasteland, the scene of a Noah’s flood in molten rock. Pictures of Saturn were just sad: two fuzzy rings where today we see hundreds of thousands of fine ringlets. The giant planet’s moons were gnats, rather than gnarled landscapes of methane lakes and dusty geysers.

Already a Digital subscriber? Sign-in Now
If your institution has site license access, enter here.

Read Comments (1) | Post a comment

You Might Also Like

Discuss This Article

Click here to submit your comment.

VIEW:



	Email:
	Name:
	Address:
	Address 2:
	City:
	State:

Subscription Center

World Changing Ideas

Video ContestInnovation is the key to a better future. Enter your own World Changing Ideas videos in our contest.

Editor's Pick

Time to Ban Production of Nuclear Weapons MaterialA new global treaty that cuts off production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons could jump-start nuclear disarmament and help prevent proliferation