The Ghost in the Telescope: The Story of the Herschel Space Observatory [Paperback]

1. Launch  2. Beginnings  3. Dust Stories  4. Whiteboard Memories  5. The Makers  6. The Astronomers  7. Minding the Heavens  8. First Light  9. Into the Rift  10. Data Monkeys and Cooler Burps  11. The Birth of a Galaxy  12. Andromeda Dreams  13.Whoomph!  14. The Water Trail  15. The Museum  

                                                                     

Stephen Eales spends his time trying to understand the births and life cycles of galaxies, using telescopes all over the world and in space. He is the author of over 300 peer-reviewed papers and, in 2016, he was awarded the Herschel Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society for his contributions to observational astrophysics.

The Ghost in the Telescope is an insiders account of the Herschel Space Observatory, which was launched to answer two of the biggest questions in astronomy: How were the stars and galaxies born?

Written in an engaging manner for a general audience, this book tells the stories of the telescope itself, the discoveries it made, and the engineers and astronomers who built and used it.

This book, based on the authors own experience and interviews with the key astronomers and engineers, tells the story of the mission, from its original concept on a piece of paper in Venice to the moment after the end of the mission when the engineers had to decide whether to crash the spacecraft into the Moon. Containing soml#,