NASA Mars program: books - spaceflight USA

NASA Voyager 1 & 2 Manual (1977 onwards) - An insight into the history, technology, mission planning and operation (Haynes Space Manual)

In 1977, NASA sent two probes - Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 - to study the planets in Earth's outer solar system including Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Each probe carried a range of scientific instruments, sending data back to Earth.

The programme's primary mission was completed in 1989, with a close fly-by of Neptune by Voyager 2. Humanity has recently reached an important milestone, as Voyager 1 officially crossed the border where our solar system ends, and is heading into the depths of outer space.
Voyager 2 will soon follow, and as the craft continue their epic journeys, their discoveries will be transmitted to Earth until their power reserves are exhausted, around 2025. The probes will then become ambassadors from Earth - carrying sites and sounds of human culture into the cosmos.

This manual provides a fascinating insight into the Voyager programme, illustrated with a wealth of photographs and technical illustrations, and presents a guide to the golden discs attached to each probe - explaining how these time capsules of human culture were created, and how an alien race might one day decode them, to read their secrets from Earth.

NASA's Voyager Missions : Exploring the Outer Solar System and Beyond

Tells the amazing story of the hugely successful Voyager missions launched by NASA in 1977 to unlock the secrets of the outer Solar System. Initially designed to explore Jupiter and Saturn, the Voyager spacecraft provided more information about these giant planets than could have been gathered from one thousand years of ground-based observation.

But the story did not end there. Voyager 2 reached Neptune and Uranus, two worlds which are not only on the fringes of the Solar System but also of human knowledge. Now both Voyagers are drifting 10 billion km from Earth but who can tell what - or who - they will encounter in deep outer space?

This book describes not only the missions from their conception, but the men and women who have devoted their working lives to them. Each of the four planets are discussed, with the Voyagers' discoveries and observations enriched by more recent studies from other spacecraft, including Galileo, the Hubble Space Telescope and the forthcoming Cassini mission at Saturn.

Expanded and updated, with dramatic new findings from the Voyagers' passage out of the Solar System.