Space Telescopes

Space telescopesare among humankind's greatest scientific achievements of the last fifty years.This book describes the instruments themselvesand what they were designed to discover about the Solar System and distant stars.Exactly howthese telescopes werebuilt and launched and the data they provided is explored. Only certain kinds of radiation can penetrateour planet'satmosphere, which limits what we can observe. But with space telescopes all this changed. We now have the means to "see" beyond Earth using ultraviolet, microwave,and infrared rays, X-rays and gamma rays. In this book we meet the pioneers and the telescopes that were built around their ideas. This book looks at space telescopes not simply chronologically but alsoin order of the electromagnetic spectrum, making it possible tounderstand better why they were made.