Space Probes: 50 Years of Exploration from Luna 1 to New Horizons Author: Philipe Séguéla Publisher: Firefly ISBN: 978-1-55407-944-5 Price: $49.95 (Hb) 375pp
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Organised by destination (in order: the Moon, Venus, Mars, giant planets, Mercury, the Sun, comets, dwarf planets and asteroids), the sequence at first seemed a little haphazard and given the title I expected the missions to appear to chronological order. It soon became clear that the planetary objects at least are presented in the order in which humans sent probes there (for those who like to follow timelines there’s a handy chronological chart in the appendix).

The book opens with an overview of how probes are launched, and a brief history of rocketry and spaceflight. I was impressed with how up to date it was. I tried to catch it out with the StardustNEXT flyby of Comet Tempel 1 in 2011 but that was included, as was the EPOXI fly-by of comet Hartley 2 at the end of 2010 and Rosetta’s fly-by of asteroid Lutetia in the summer of 2011. I even found a mission I’d never even heard of before – the Japanese Hiten–Hagoromo mission of the early 1990s that looped around the Earth–Moon system. Although aspects of the mission did not go to plan, the Hiten probe was deliberately crashed into the Moon in 1993 and in doing so Japan became the third nation after the Soviets and Americans to send a probe to the Moon.

Some missions (like Hiten–Hagoromo) are described in just one page, while more successful missions, particularly the plethora of Mars orbiters and landers, have multiple pages dedicated to them, including many spectacular full-page colour images, details of the spacecraft’s trajectory and images of the hardware and launch.

This was, thankfully, not the heavy-going encyclopedic tome I had been expecting before opening the book, but an easy to read and accessible story of space exploration. I was surprised to learn that Space Probes was compiled by a professor of neuroscience, but Séguéla lays any concerns to rest in this opening note, where I rather liked the way he drew parallels between the human body’s nervous system to the relay switches and high resolution digital ‘retinas’ in space probes.

Emily Baldwin