This, then, was the final culmination of a succession of dreams that had emerged progressively in 11 steps or stages that had begun in antiquity. In logical order, the several steps were from: (1) the birth of ancient Greek and other myths of flight, to (2) proposals for machines that would make flight possible by mimicking the flapping wings of birds, to (3) actual attempts at human flight, to (4) successful human flight through the air by means of balloons, to (5) powered, controlled, sustained human flight through the atmosphere by winged vehicles, to (6) fictional accounts of flying to the Moon, to (7) the invention of rockets leading to an understanding of the principles of space flight, to (8) the Apollo Project Moon landings, to (9) fictional accounts of traveling to Mars, to (10) actual landings on Mars by rockets and robotic rovers, to (11) the idea of leaving Earth and colonizing the universe.

An overview of General Relativity is provided to a basic level. Its different nature with respect to the Newtonian Universal Gravitation is outlined. A cursory resume of the post-Newtonian approximation and its importance in testing Einstein’s theory is offered. A brief overview on the modified models of gravity that appeared in the last decades is outlined. A plan of the book is provided.

The first part of this chapter introduces and defines key concepts that are commonly encountered in this subject: astrobiology, habitability, and life; in doing so, it also clarifies the ambiguities inherent in these terms. The second part briefly chronicles the lengthy and rich history of speculations about the plurality of worlds and extraterrestrial life in myriad societies across different epochs. It concludes with a summary of developments in astrobiology in the early- and mid-twentieth century, and describes how the future of this field looks optimistic.

Chapter 1 introduces the historical background of the RTT approach with random media modeling for the study of the medium heterogenetity of the solid Earth. It also presents a summary of recent measurements of the random inhomogeneity spectra and scattering characteristics of seismic waves in the solid Earth.

The chapter provides a brief overview of the first three major eras, out of four, in the development of cosmology. The first era started with “prehistory” of cosmology in antiquity, continued with the major contributions of Newton and the nineteenth-century debates on thermodynamics conditions at the cosmic scale, and ended with a “quantum leap” in relevant observational capacities at the beginning of the twentieth century. The second era saw cosmology develop as a mathematical game of sorts, rather than a physical theory predicated on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. It was marked by Einstein’s static model of the universe and a static model by De Sitter. A cosmological revolution began in the third era (from 1929 to 1948), with the development of expanding models of the universe that captured its physical dynamics.

We begin by illustrating the interplay between questions of scientific interest and the use of data in seeking answers. Graphs provide a window through which meaning can often be extracted from data. Numeric summary statistics and probability distributions provide a form of quantitative scaffolding for models of random as well as nonrandom variation. Simple regression models foreshadow the issues that arise in the more complex models considered later in the book. Frequentist and Bayesian approaches to statistical inference are contrasted, the latter primarily using the Bayes Factor to complement the limited perspective that p-values offer. Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and related "information" statistics provide a further perspective. Resampling methods, where the one available dataset is used to provide an empirical substitute for a theoretical distribution, are introduced. Remaining topics are of a more general nature. RStudio is one of several tools that can help in organizing and managing work. The checks provided by independent replication at another time and place are an indispensable complement to statistical analysis. Questions of data quality, of relevance to the questions asked, of the processes that generated the data, and of generalization, remain just as important for machine learning and other new analysis approaches as for more classical methods.

Messier’s catalog of 110 star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies is the most popular list of deep sky gems. The first edition of this stunning reference atlas was hailed as the most comprehensive, detailed, and beautiful account of the Messier objects then available and the second edition continues this trend. Each object is presented with:

• Updated historical information, including from new sources, featuring accounts and anecdotes from Messier and other prominent visual observers who followed him.

• Thoroughly researched astrophysical information, the results of an investigation of more than 500 recent scientific papers including, for the first time, fully consistent distance data from the Gaia space observatory.

• Extensive information on visual observing using the naked eye, binoculars, and amateur telescopes from modest sizes up to 20 inches aperture.

• New large-scale color photos from some of the world’s best amateurs displaying the objects’ splendor, as well as close-up images from the Hubble Space Telescope, for most objects, showing the fine details.

The introductory section includes an extensive biographical portrait of the life of Charles Messier, his observations and his telescopes, and his contemporaries, and a complete translation of Messier’s original catalog. There is also detailed information on how to observe the Messier objects and advice on how to conduct a Messier Marathon. For those seeking even more, the author provides the Herschel 100 list. In addition, many objects feature historical sketches from classical observers from the nineteenth century alongside the author’s modern deep-sky drawings.

Astronomers of all abilities will delight in the Atlas’s return as your guide to the sky’s finest objects.

How do you write a book about things, life and language on planets outside our own Solar System, when you do not even know if they exist or not? The only sensible answer is by looking at how life developed on Earth1 and then considering how this could manifest itself on exoplanets, those beyond the planets which orbit our star, the Sun. This is because when considering possible Earth-like planets (see Section 8.8 for 10 criteria) we have, at our present state of knowledge, a set consisting of only one member, our Earth; this is the ‘set of one’ issue (Figure 1.1).

Discovery of the significance of fluvial megafans came about in the mid to late twentieth century. We suggest reasons why appreciation of their existence came late in the history of Earth science, even after the advent of space-based observation of planetary landscapes. The reasons are partly cultural: megafans are uncommon in the historic cradles of modern geology (Europe, North America). Reasons are also partly theoretical: rivers have been conceptualised chiefly as sediment bypass systems terminating in deltas, rather than as aggradational systems in their own right. Reasons are also perceptual: just as the megaflood origin of channeled scablands was held in disbelief, the inordinate size of megafans has stood in the way of accepting (i) the sheer magnitude of their unit-size and also (ii) their existence as active systems in modern landscapes, rather than just as stratigraphic features in the rock record. Post-1990, scientific activity around megafans accelerated and involved global mapping, classification, and regional investigations into patterns and processes. An overview of this take-off period is provided as a partial introduction to the remaining 17 chapters of this book, which are briefly outlined.

Space tourism began in 2001 when an American investment manager paid the Russian space agency US$20 million to travel to the International Space Station on a Soyuz rocket. In 2021, three US-based companies began launching tourists on their own rockets: Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and SpaceX. The emergence of Space tourism raises difficult issues. One such issue is the environmental effects of launches on the atmosphere and the corresponding implications for climate change. Space tourism also raises difficult questions of international law, including, where does space begin? Who gets to call themselves an ‘astronaut’? Do states have a duty to rescue tourists stranded in space?

Over the last century since the first successful demonstration of the Sagnac effect, there have been several attempts to develop an ultra-high-sensitivity device for continuous high resolution rotation sensing, such as the Michelson–Pearson–Gale interferometer in Clearing, Illinois. Apart from the application of a passive optical cavity,active ring laser gyroscopes with the gain medium inside the traveling wave ring cavity have also been used. This chapter briefly introduces the most important activities over the last century and puts them into context with our own large ring laser project.

In October of 2018, a group of scientists gathered at the Broad Branch Road campus of the Carnegie Institution for Science to celebrate 50 years of high-pressure research by Ho-Kwang “Dave” Mao at the Geophysical Laboratory. The celebration highlighted the growth of high-pressure mineral physics over the last half century, which has matured into a vibrant discipline in the physical sciences because of its intimate connections to Earth and planetary sciences, solid-state physics, and materials science. Dave’s impact in high-pressure research for over a half a century has been immense, with a history of innovation and discovery spanning from the Earth and planetary sciences to fundamental materials physics. Dave has always been an intrepid pioneer in high-pressure science, and together with his numerous colleagues and collaborators across the world he has driven the field to ever higher pressures and temperatures, guided the community in adopting and adapting a spectrum of new technologies for in situ interrogation of samples at extreme conditions, and relentlessly explored the materials that make up the deep interiors of planets. In this volume, we assemble 15 chapters from authors who have worked with, been inspired by, or mentored by Dave over his amazing career, spanning a range of subjects that covers the entire field of high-pressure mineral physics.

For many millennia, humans have gazed up in wonder at the night-time sky. The full panoply of the Milky Way is an awesome sight. The scale of space is immense. Is there life out there somewhere? If so, where, and what form does it take? In the space of a couple of sentences, we’ve already gone from generalized wonder to specific questions. The next step is from questions to hypotheses, or, in other words, proposed answers. Here are two such hypotheses that I’ll flesh out as the book progresses: first, life exists on trillions of planets in the universe; second, it usually follows evolutionary pathways that are broadly similar to – though different in detail from – those taken on Earth.

The study of the largest (D ≳100 km) Main Belt asteroids is not only important because of the clues it delivers regarding the formation and evolution of the Main Belt itself but also because many of these bodies are likely “primordial” remnants of the early Solar System, that is their internal structures have likely remained intact since their formation. Thus, many of these bodies offer, similarly to Ceres and Vesta detailed in the present book, invaluable constraints regarding the processes of planet formation over a wide range of heliocentric distances. Here, we review the current knowledge regarding these objects derived from Earth-based spectroscopic and imaging observations, with an emphasis on D >200 km bodies including Ceres and Vesta. Our motivation is to provide a meaningful context for the two largest main belt asteroids visited by the Dawn mission and to guide future in-situ investigations to the largest asteroids.

Relationship between cosmochemistry and geochemistry, historical beginnings of cosmochemistry, tools of cosmochemistry

Chapter 1 is an introduction, reviewing the current state of instructional texts on atmospheric lidar. We point to the lack of a treatment of light scattering as employed by lidar from fundamental physics, the motivation for writing this book. We then summarize the scattering processes, Rayleigh, Raman, Mie, and fluorescence, that enable us to probe the state of the atmosphere with lidar. We include a description of the structure and content of the chapters that follow.

The chapter indicates our reasons for publishing, the framework of a communication, how to introduce the topic and put forward a hypotheses before considering each of the conventional sections of a paper. It also emphasizes that the sequence in how a paper is compiled section by section will not be the order given here.