Today, there exists an integrated, large-scale satellite system to track sea-level rise, its speed, causes, and impacts. Building it was a struggle every step of the way. It was the most vivid and potentially consequential program within NASA’s larger Earth Science directorate. How did it happen? Who did what? Why? This book seeks to answer such questions. It goes back to the origins of NASA’s interest in the oceans in the 1960s and first true ocean satellite, Seasat, in 1978. After three months of operation, Seasat failed. But before it did, it showed how much satellites could tell about...

Today, there exists an integrated, large-scale satellite system to track sea-level rise, its speed, causes, and impacts. Building it was a struggle every step of the way. It was the most vivid and potentially consequential program within NASA’s larger Earth Science directorate. How did it happen? Who did what? Why? This book seeks to answer such questions. It goes back to the origins of NASA’s interest in the oceans in the 1960s and first true ocean satellite, Seasat, in 1978. After three months of operation, Seasat failed. But before it did, it showed how much satellites could tell about...

This book presents the process of circulation and adoption of Newtonianism in the Viceroyalty of New Granada (modern-day Colombia) in the eighteenth century by examining José Celestino Mutis’s lectures at the Colegio del Rosario between the 1760s and 1770s. Mostly famous for his botanical activities as director of the botanical expedition, Mutis lectured the first course of mathematics ever created in New Granada on his arrival in Bogota in 1762, in which he included several lectures on physics that encompassed multiple aspects of his interpretation of Newton’s experimental physics.