After a distinguished career as professor of English and women's studies, Suzanne Juhasz decided to retire. She saw retirement as a time to revive old interests and discover new ones. She started writing personal narrative, appeared in plays, took singing lessons, and continued her lifelong ballet classes. She expected this new phase to be exciting and satisfying. What she didn't anticipate was the uncertainty and anxiety that came with redefining herself in this in-between stage: past middle age but not quite elderly-what she has termed "senior space." She found herself on a journey of self-reflection, looking back on her family-her identities as daughter, granddaughter, mother, and grandmother, on her romantic relationships, and on her thirty-year career to help her understand her present. In this memoir, Juhasz offers an engaging view into the intimate details of her life: marrying young, having children, becoming a feminist, experiencing divorce, being one of the first generation of women's studies scholars. By sharing her story, she shows that as women mature, they are not cutting the threads of their lives but weaving them into new patterns.

For millenia humans have considered Mars the most fascinating planet in our solar system. We’ve watched this Earth-like world first with the naked eye, then using telescopes, and, most recently, through robotic orbiters and landers and rovers on the surface. Historian William Sheehan and astronomer and planetary scientist Jim Bell combine their talents to tell a unique story of what we’ve learned by studying Mars through evolving technologies. What the eye sees as a mysterious red dot wandering through the sky becomes a blurry mirage of apparent seas, continents, and canals as viewed through Earth-based telescopes. Beginning with the Mariner and Viking missions of the 1960s and 1970s, space-based instruments and monitoring systems have flooded scientists with data on Mars’s meteorology and geology, and have even sought evidence of possible existence of life-forms on or beneath the surface. This knowledge has transformed our perception of the Red Planet and has provided clues for better understanding our own blue world. Discovering Mars vividly conveys the way our understanding of this other planet has grown from earliest times to the present. The story is epic in scope—an Iliad or Odyssey for our time, at least so far largely without the folly, greed, lust, and tragedy of those ancient stories. Instead, the narrative of our quest for the Red Planet has showcased some of our species’ most hopeful attributes: curiosity, cooperation, exploration, and the restless drive to understand our place in the larger universe. Sheehan and Bell have written an ambitious first draft of that narrative even as the latest chapters continue to be added both by researchers on Earth and our robotic emissaries on and around Mars, including the latest: the Perseverance rover and its Ingenuity helicopter drone, which set down in Mars’s Jezero Crater in February 2021.

The search -- Discoveries -- Observation -- Detection, recognition, and classification of cosmic phenomena -- The fringes of legitimacy : the need for enlightened planning.

Explorer was the original American space program and Explorer 1 its first satellite, launched in 1958. Sixty years later, it is the longest continuously running space program in the world, demonstrating to the world how we can explore the cosmos with small spacecraft. Almost a hundred Explorers have already been launched. Explorers have made some of the fundamental discoveries of the Space Age. Explorer 1 discovered Earth’s radiation belts. Later Explorers surveyed the Sun, the X-ray and ultraviolet universes, black holes, magnetars and gamma ray bursts. An Explorer found the remnant of the Big Bang. One Explorer chased and was the first to intercept a comet. The program went through a period of few launches during the crisis of funding for space science in the 1980s. However, with the era of ‘faster, cheaper, better,’ the program was reinvented, and new exiting missions began to take shape, like Swift and the asteroid hunter WISE. Discovering the Cosmos with Small Spacecraft gives an account of each mission and its discoveries. It breaks down the program into its main periods of activity and examines the politics and debate on the role of small spacecraft in space science. It introduces the launchers (Juno, Thor, etc.), the launch centers, the ground centers and key personalities like James Van Allen who helped develop and run the spacecraft’s exciting programs.

Traces the roots of logos in different cultural milieux.