The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars
Weaving natural history, memoir, and the stories of maverick scientists, daring adventurers, and stargazing dreamers, this epic work takes us from Antarctica to outer space to tell the tale of how the study of meteorites became a scientific passion. A famed polar explorer who risked personal ruin-and the lives of his crew-in a quest for massive iron meteorites hidden in an Arctic wasteland.
Meteorites and Their Parent Planets provides an engrossing overview of a highly interdisciplinary field--the study of extraterrestrial materials. The second edition of this successful book has been thoroughly revised, and describes the nature of meteorites, where they come from, and how they get to Earth. Meteorites offer important insights into processes in stars and in interstellar regions, the birth of our solar system, the formation and evolution of planets and smaller bodies, and the origin of life.
The face of the Moon we see today has been substantially etched by the effects of meteor impacts. Craters on the Moon are the result of ancient impacts with large meteorites - or small asteroid-like bodies - which produced both primary craters (where the meteorites hit) and secondary craters (where material hurled high above the surface crashed back down). Even some of the vast lunar "seas" - actually basalt plains from ancient volcanic eruptions - may have been the result of impacts that triggered lava outflows.
