First Taste of Space: My Best Pop-Up Space Book by Clare Lloyd

WE LIVE ON PLANET EARTH.

EARTH IS ONLY A SMALL PART OF SPACE!

You're never to young to blast off into space, in Clare Lloyd's My Best Pop-up Space Book (Dorling Kindersley, 2015).

Beginning with Earth--our own place in space--author Lloyd gives youngsters a quick overview of the the planet that is home, describing how it spins on its axis to bring us night and day while revolving around the sun to bring us the seasons of each year, and backs up the narrative with a dramatic double gate-fold of the solar system.  DK (Dorling Kindersley) pioneered those spot-art illustrations that have become their trademark, executed here by Caryn Jenner, pictures that seem to pop from the pages, and in this book they actually do with exciting pop ups and fold-out constructions that fire the imagination.

There is even a sound-effects button (the red spacecraft) that provides the sound track for this voyage to the moon, the sun, the planets, and the stars in outer space, and the book's movable devices demonstrate how the moon's phases change during its cycle.

Little readers also get to suit up and board their own rocket ship as astronauts and prepare to blast off!

ASTRONAUTS LIVE AND WORK IN SPACE.

EVERYTHING FLOATS IN SPACE!

IMAGINE EATING AND SLEEPING WHERE EVERYTHING FLOATS!

Preschoolers get to cruise past the moon rovers on Mars, rings of Saturn and the many moons of Jupiter, all in the three dimensions of DK's sturdy board book pages for the youngest space voyagers.

IS THERE LIFE ON MARS? THERE MIGHT HAVE BEEN IN THE PAST. LANDERS CALLED ROVERS LOOK FOR CLUES!

DK's My Best Pop-up Space Book gives youngsters their own first taste of the science of the stars. Just press that red button, open the book, and lift off!

Into the Unknown: Smithsonian Readers Endless Explorations Level 4

Most of the great pioneers of space flight were world-class daydreamers. Before a leap into space, there must come a great leap of the imagination.

Our exploration of space, in fact, began as a great nighttime daydream. We looked to the stars...

Young, newly independent readers are like explorers, moving out into a world of information and imagining what might be done with it, and that is the premise of Smithsonian Readers: Endless Explorations Level 4 (Smithsonian/Silver Dolphin Books, 2015). With a knowledge base and higher-level language skills, the sky's the limit for upper elementary students to follow their interests wherever they may lead.

This volume offers fascinating facts and photographs on a wide range of subjects, from the Hubble Space Telescope and Mars Rovers to the science of tsunamis and pandemics, the ways of desert tarantulas to the migrations of blue whales, from man's history of earth flight and space flight and into the deeps of the world's oceans and what can be found there.  Six sections--Predators, Space Exploration, Natural Disasters, World Wonders, Ocean Habitats, and the Science and History of Flight--take readers in the upper elementary grades into new places and areas of knowledge.

As in all the four volumes of this series, a glossary follows each section, summarizing the terms introduced in boldface within the text, as does a brief, self-checking quiz, and punch-out cards for review and games. Vocabulary and sentence structure are appropriate for readers approaching the middle-school levels in which reading for subject content requires structure and some sophistication in the learner.

Additional reinforcing kits are also available, such as the Smithsonian Magnetic Adventures: Solar System for hands-on activities.

As for that imagination, that's a do-it-yourself activity for the reader.  Bon voyage, kids! The sky's the limit!

Out There: Beyond: A Solar System Voyage by Michael Benson

It is now almost 400 years since Galileo first peered in wonder at Jupiter and its four circling moons through his small 20x telescope. What he saw eventually changed our world view forever. Over those centuries mankind has learned much about our own solar system, and Michael Benson's Beyond: A Solar System Voyage (Abrams, 2009) gives us breathtaking views of the sun and its planets for which Galileo would doubtless have given all he had to see.

Benson emphasizes that his is not a comprehensive history of planetary knowledge. As he says in his introduction...

With its emphasis on the visual, Beyond is not meant to be a detailed study of the many astonishing scientific discoveries we've made along the way. Rather, this book provides a photographic introduction to the astonishingly diverse landscapes that wheel like gigantic clockwork around our central star, the Sun.

But despite his disclaimer that "the visual harvest of these unmanned space missions belongs as much to the history of photography as it does to the history of science," his introductory chapters are exceedingly well-written accounts of humankind's gradual understanding of our planetary neighbors. Benson begins with the ancients, the sky tablets of the Babylonians, and takes the reader through early astronomers from Philolaus, Seleucus, and Aristarchus to Copernicus, Galileo, Huygens, and then to the modern space race which engendered twentieth century discoveries and exploration.

Nevertheless, the matter of this book is its stunning, awe-inspiring, photos of our space family, presented in the order of the trajectory of NASAs robotic orbiters--first Earth and its moon, then Venus, the Sun, Mercury, Mars, and the giant planets, as shot by several generations of spacecrafts, from the Lunar Orbiter of the 1960s through the two Voyagers, Mariner 10, Viking, Magellan, Galileo, Soho, Cassini, and the rest. Adjectives fail to describe the visual impact of these scenes set against the velvet black of space--Earth and its moon as seen together from a fly-by, the dark side of the moon, the flaring, exploding sun red as a furnace, Venus' surface as seen by x-ray photography through its swirling clouds, the red surface of Mars and its dark, rocky moon Phobos, asteroids so close you feel you can touch them.

And then there are the gorgeous, literally other-worldly shots of the giant planets: Jupiter's Great Red Spot, up close and personal, the boiling surface of Jupiter with its moons, icy-blue Europa and fiery Io, sailing below us with the great planet's face beyond them; Saturn's rings seen from all angles and one surreal photo from high above Saturn's pole showing the dark side of its rings and the long shadow of the planet itself streaming away from the Sun. And then there are the "ice giants," Uranus as pale, smooth, and glowing as an egg, Neptune as brilliantly blue and icy as its name suggests, not to mention its quirky moon Triton, the coldest known place in the solar system which nevertheless supports volcanic activity!

Although the author suggests that the text plays second fiddle to the photographs, there is plenty here for the reader to glean--a history of robotic space exploration, an explanation of the trajectories and operation of these craft, and plenty of basic information and tantalizing tidbits learned through these space voyages. For example, in its 2005 fly-by of Saturn, Cassini learned that Saturn's E ring is composed of ice crystals provided by the liquid water geysers of its moon Euceladus, which freeze as they spew forth into space to form another ring around the planet.

Beautifully designed with thick, glossy black pages against which is set white type and the glorious colored prints, Beyond: A Solar System Voyage is a book for the space geek, the would-be astronaut, the nature photographer who thinks big, and anyone who is willing to think about the beauty and wonder that is our own place in space. As the author concludes...

And if Beyond conveys some of what these strange and beautiful places would look like to someone lucky enough to see them glimmering through the windows of an interplanetary spaceship, then the book has succeeded.

A substantial appendix includes a glossary, a bibliography of useful books and web sites, and a fully detailed index.

Other books of photographs from the solar system and deep space include Benson's companion book for adults, Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes, Voit's Hubble Space Telescope: New Views of the Universe and Kerrod's Hubble: The Mirror on the Universe.

Life on Mars? Mars and the Search for Life by Elaine Scott

Ever since H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs gave us our first fictional Martians, humans have been fascinated with the planet Mars. A rocky planet like our own, in contrast to those vast gas bags farther out in space, the red planet seems like our fraternal twin in the solar system, and all hopes of proving the existence of past or present living things out there have been pinned on Mars.

Notable science writer Elaine Scott's Mars and the Search for Life begins with the notorious broadcast of Wells' evergreen The War of the Worlds (Modern Library Classics), summarizes the study of the planet from Schiaparelli's first telescopic description of its canali through the Mariner fly-by missions and the Viking I and II landings, and finally takes us right up to date with the Phoenix Mars Mission which landed in 2008.

Scott takes pains to introduce the young reader to the requirements of life as we know it--especially temperature range and the all-important water--before launching into a fascinating description of the findings of the long-lived rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which returned strong evidence of salty seas and extensive water flow in Mars' distant past.

In her chapter "Imagine the Future," Scott goes on to discuss the problems and virtues of a manned flight to Mars, including the investigation of the polar ice caps which future explorers may need for drinkable water and for growing their own food while on the planet. She concludes with experimental attempts to simulate many of the conditions on Mars--the Haughton-Mars Project and the Hankville, Utah, Habitat project, constructed in the hopes of providing a training ground for future Mars-tronauts.

Illustrated with dozens of intriguing color photographs of the spacecraft, equipment, and the Martian landscape, this book both invites browsing and supports student research into what is now known about our next-door neighbor in the solar system. Appended is a list of upcoming Mars missions, a glossary, author's note, bibliography and websites, and index. In a starred review, School Library Journal gave Mars and the Search for Life an unqualified thumbs-up, saying "... this clearly written, carefully constructed book will shine like the Red Planet seen on a clear, moonless night."

Author Scott has also explored that other hot topic in astronomy, the status of the former ninth planet, in her well-reviewed When is a Planet Not a Planet?: The Story of Pluto. This kid-fascinating subject is also covered in a bit less detail in Elaine Landau's excellent Pluto: From Planet to Dwarf (True Books), reviewed here.