Customer Reviews

The Planetary Scientist's Companion

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But not. I saw this on my advisor's shelf and thought it would be totally useful to have on my own. Sometimes its a pain to look up planetary data on the web while doing work, and I thought that maybe it would be nice to have it close at hand in hardcopy.

The previous reviewer gave a good assessment of the overall content of the book -- its a compilation of data relevant to planetary scientists including bulk data on the planets (mass, radius, orbital semimajor axis), chemical data on the planets (relevant chemical reactions, weight % of species), general chemical data (molecular weights and such), etc. Basically a whole bunch of stuff that you use relatively often but always have to go fumbling through your papers to find.

Unfortunately, the level of errors (typographical or otherwise) in the book is too high to allow me to use it when I really need it. In a textbook, or a popular book, description of the concepts and processes involved are more important than getting facts right, so this sort of typo thing doesn't matter. However, in a book of facts, if some of the facts are wrong, it brings into doubt the validity of the rest. Basically, my problem is that I can use it for back-of-the-envelope calculations, but if I'm going to put something in a paper I look it up on the web to make sure that it isn't one of the mistakes. Looking it up on the web was what I used to do anyway, before I got the book. So, in my experience, it hasn't been as useful as I had hoped it would be.

Like a poor-debating jerk I can't remember any particular errors except the one that goaded me into writing this review -- as I was looking through the table on bulk data of planets and satellites it claimed that the 5 major Uranian satellites (Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Oberon) orbited retrograde. I didn't think that was the case, and when I checked on the NSSDC website sure enough, it wasn't.

Three books on our solar system appeared in the last year or two. Each has its own "flavor." I will review them in turn, but browsers should be aware of the others, so they are listed here. In addition to this book, see "The New Solar System" J. Kelly Beatty, Carolyn Collins Petersen, Andrew Chaikin, and "Solar System Dynamics," C. D. Murray and S. F. Dermott.

This book is primarily for the research planetary chemist and geologist. Exhaustive tables are given of the chemical and geological features of the planets and their atmospheres, with a chapter devoted to each. What enticed me to buy the book were the mathematical formulae listed in the index. But these prove to be primarily for reference and do not enter significantly into the subsequent textual material.

I was tempted to return this book because it is relatively expensive for a 400 page paperback. But I decided to keep it out of respect for those planetary aspects which, at present, I am not deeply interested in, but which may in the future enter into my investigation and understanding.

For instance, why do the four inner planets differ so strikingly in density from the five outer planets? Did resonance conditions in the early solar system in some way resemble a mass spectrometer of cosmic dimensions!

It is clear that we have to know the chemistry as well as the physics in order to understand the solar system in its formative stages. This book well serves that dual purpose.

I have not found the same level of errors as the previous reviewer mainly because I am in a different field of planetary science, and I really appreciated having a useful and readily available text as a source of data. The chemical tables are excellent and rigorous, as one would expect from two planetary chemists. The meteorite data compilation is among the best I've ever seen. Planetary data is accurate to the mid-1990s, and is excellent for quick calculations. References are given for all tables, and should be conferred with prior to publishing anything.

Since my field area is rather varied (astrobiology), this book fills a special void in that it compiles data from numerous subjects. If I need to know the mass of Europa, the abundance and location of S class asteroids, and the escape velocity of Mars, this text has it in a fairly easy to find format.