Paolo Ulivi provides a well-paced, rapidly moving, balanced, even-handed account of lunar exploration as a popular history. He covers the unmanned programmes, e.g. Ranger, and other American probes in the late 50s and in the later chapters he looks at recent lunar exploration and future plans for the same. It s a book that will be perfect for an enthusiast or someone coming to the story for the first time, as it does not include excessive technical depth. Uniquely drawing on recently declassified documents, detail of Chinese lunar exploration projects is provided, as well as nuclear lunar...

Paolo Ulivi and David Harland provide in Robotic Exploration of the Solar System a detailed history of unmanned missions of exploration of our Solar System As in their previous book Lunar Exploration, the subject will be treated wherever possible from an engineering and scientific standpoint. Technical descriptions of the spacecraft, of their mission designs and of instrumentations will be provided. Scientific results will be discussed in considerable depth, together with details of mission management.

The books will cover missions from the 1950s until the...