Beyond Earth: A CHRONICLE OF DEEP SPACE EXPLORATION, 1958–2016

* Hardcover Version - Printed in COLOR * 380+ Pages of Excellent NASA History! January 31, 1958 marked a significant beginning for space exploration. More than the historic and successful launch of Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite, it was the beginning of an unprecedented era of exploration and understanding of our own planet and the distant worlds beyond. The more we uncover about the mysteries and beauty of space, the more we are inspired to go farther. Yet, with all we have learned, we still cannot even imagine what future generations will find. Spacecraft from NASA and others have shown us the intricacies within clouds and terrain of distant planets that were only a dot in an astronomer’s telescope a few decades ago. We have seen the birth of stars, black holes, and found exoplanets orbiting stars in systems remarkably similar to ours. Future missions will take us forward in history, as we seek to uncover the very origins of our universe. We may not know precisely what—or who—we will find out there, but we can be sure that space exploration will continue to surprise and inspire us, as it did for those who came before and those who will follow. Along the way there will be missteps, some more devastating than others. That is the price of doing what’s never been done before—a price that sometimes is tragically paid at the high- est cost by the courageous. But like those early days of the space program, we are as motivated to succeed by the missions that do not make it as those that do. And we learn from them, coming back stronger and smarter. Introduction: Humans abandoned their nomadic habits and moved into settlements about 40 to 50 thousand years ago. We have been using tools even longer. But our ability to send one of our tools into the heavens is of much more recent origin, spanning only the past 60 years. Yet, in that time, we have created new tools—we call them robotic spacecraft—and sent them into the cosmos, far beyond Earth. Of course, many never got very far. That’s the cost of hubris and ambition. But most did. And many never came back to Earth and never will. In that sense, we as a species have already left a mark on the heavens; these small objects that dot the cosmos are a permanent legacy of our species, existing for millions of years, even if we as a planet were to disappear. This book that you hold in your hands (or are reading in digital form) is a chronicle of all these tools, both failed and successful, that humans have flung into the heavens beyond Earth. The text in front of you is a completely updated and revised version of a monograph published in 2002 by the NASA History Office under the original title Deep Space Chronicle: A Chronology of Deep Space and Planetary Probes, 1958–2000. This new edition not only adds all events in robotic deep space exploration after 2000 and up to the end of 2016, but it also completely corrects and updates all accounts of missions from prior years. The information in the monograph is current as of mid-2017 when I completed writing.