Exploring the planets: a memoir

This book is an informal, semi-autobiographical history, from the particular viewpoint of someone who was involved, of the exploration of the Solar System using spacecraft. The author is a Northumbrian, a Liverpudlian, a Californian, and an Oxford Don with half a century of experience of devising and deploying experiments to study the Earth and the planets, moons, and small bodies of the Solar System. Along with memories and anecdotes about his experiences as a participant in the space programme from its earliest days to the present, he describes in non-technical terms the science goals that drove the projects as well as the politics, pressures, and problems that had to be addressed and overcome on the way. The theme is the scientific intent of these ambitious voyages of discovery, and the joys and hardships of working to see them achieved. The narrative gives a first-hand account of things like how Earth satellites came to revolutionize weather forecasting, starting in the 1960s; how observations from space helped politicians like Margaret Thatcher to resolve the ozone layer crisis in the 1980s; and how the threat of climate change is being addressed by scientists today. The narrative extends to deep space missions to explore other worlds, to see how conditions on places as near as our neighbours Venus and Mars, and as far away as the rainy lakelands of Saturn’s planet-sized moon Titan or the surface of a comet, relate to the origins of the Solar System and of life on Earth.