TO A NATION enthralled by the heroic exploits of the Mercury astronauts, the launch of Lt. Cmdr. Scott Carpenter on NASA’s second orbital space flight was a renewed cause for pride, jubilation and celebration. Within hours, that excitement had given way to stunned disbelief and anxiety as shaken broadcasters began preparing the American public for the very real possibility that an American astronaut and his spacecraft may have been lost at sea. In fact, it had been a very close call. Completely out of fuel and forced to manually guide Aurora 7 through the frightening inferno of re-entry, Carpenter brought the Mercury spacecraft down to a safe splashdown in the ocean. In doing so, he controversially overshot the intended landing zone. Despite his efforts, Carpenter’s performance on the MA-7 mission was later derided by powerful figures within NASA. He would never fly into space again. Taking temporary leave of NASA, Carpenter participated in the U.S. Navy’s pioneering Sealab program. For a record 30 days he lived and worked aboard a pressurized habitat resting on the floor of the ocean, becoming the nation’s first astronaut/aquanaut explorer. Following extensive research conducted by noted spaceflight historian Colin Burgess, the drama-filled flight of Aurora 7 is faithfully recounted in this engrossing book, along with the personal recollections of Scott Carpenter and those closest to the actual events.

The battle is over, but the war is just beginning . . . The Zeta invasion has occurred and the world now knows the truth: that an alien threat exists. While the UNF scramble to maintain calm, the pressure mounts to finally reveal their black ops ALPHA soldiers. The only question is, who will be entrusted to lead them? Harris is still reeling from the devastation that occurred during Decima, and when a startling discovery is revealed, he suddenly loses the trust of the UNF. Next in line is McKinley, but still recovering from his injuries, he’s struggling to accept what he has now become. Carrie, on the other hand, is the strongest she’s ever been, but her linkage to Harris, and his to the Zetas, sees them forced out and treated as the enemy. The power they once had within the UNF is lost. Without a ship or a leader, and with enemies closing in on all sides, the Aurora team must fight to regroup and claw their way back from oblivion. Carrie, Harris and McKinley face their most explosive showdowns yet, as this action-packed installment will leave readers on the edge of their seats!

Thomas Mallon's acclaimed novel vividly tells the story of a day in May-May 24, 1962. While Scott Carpenter orbits the earth in his Aurora 7 capsule, the lives of a host of characters seem interwoven on the ground below: everyone from a convicted child killer to a famous novelist, a New York cabdriver, a sexually conflicted priest, and a British housewife about to give birth to a thalidomide-stricken baby. Aurora 7 is above all the story of Gregory Noonan, a spooky suburban fifth-grader obsessed with the space program. The fate of Gregory and his family will prove mysteriously linked to the astronaut's when the boy flees school to watch the perilous climax of Carpenter's mission on the giant TV monitors in Grand Central Terminal. As John Updike observed, Mallon's novel-featuring cameos by Walter Cronkite, John F. Kennedy, and Lee Harvey Oswald-"hones a multitude of details to a gleaming, smoothly oiled fit . . . and catches dozens of characters in its shimmering web."

For over 120 years, the people of Aurora, Illinois, have gathered together to watch East Aurora and West Aurora High Schools square off in what is now Illinois' longest-running football rivalry. Since first taking to the gridiron in 1893, the schools have laid claim to mythical state championships, represented Illinois in intra-sectional games and pioneered night football. Alumni from these storied rivals include college all-Americans, Hall of Fame coaches, decorated war heroes, an Olympic medalist, a charter member of the NFL, numerous successful high school coaches, outstanding businessmen and civic leaders, including former mayors of Santa Monica, California, and Des Moines, Iowa. Author Steve Solarz pored over the records of more than two thousand games to produce a work that is both an encyclopedic resource and a passionate account of a celebrated tradition.

Astronomy has been associated with the detection of electromagnetic waves or photons from within and beyond the solar system, ranging from Radio to Gamma-ray Astronomy. Particle Astrophysics, including Neutrino and Dark-Matter Astrophysics today, started with the discovery of cosmic rays in 1911. The Space Age expanded particle observations to in-situ studies of lower energy electrons and ions with a variety of charge states in space plasmas traversed by spacecraft. Remote observation of space plasmas became possible only after the discovery of energetic neutral atoms (ENAs) in space in 1950.This book is a primer for those who wish to learn more about the origins of ENAs, related detection techniques, and how ENA images and spectra can be used to study space plasmas beyond the reach of spacecraft. It tells a comprehensive story from the first encounters with ENAs in the Earth's magnetosphere to Neutral-Atom Astronomy of the edge of the heliosphere and the interstellar medium. This story includes how ion mass spectrographs evolved into ENA imagers, overcoming the technical challenges, how to extract information from ENA data, and a variety of diagnostic applications on the magnetosphere, interplanetary space, other solar-system objects, the heliospheric boundary, the local interstellar medium, and a glimpse into the future of Neutral-Atom Astronomy.The authors hope to inform and inspire readers to further enrich this field of study.

Book & DVD. The story of the flight of Aurora 7 has rarely been told. America's fourth manned spaceflight has often been overlooked, sometimes overshadowed by the popularity of the flight of John Glenn which took place just three months earlier. But what is often lost in the telling is the fact that Glenn had almost lost his life when his re-entry had been fraught with problems. Regardless of this danger, Malcolm Scott Carpenter stepped up to his Mercury spacecraft and into the history books. Carpenter was one of America's original seven astronauts and he would only fly into space this one time. His mission was to last less than five hours in space and his assignment was to continue to put the Mercury spacecraft through its paces. With only a single orbital test flight behind them, the engineers at NASA knew that Carpenter would still be taking a monumental risk. On 24 May 1962, Aurora 7, carrying Scott Carpenter leapt off the launch pad aboard the Atlas missile and soared into Earth orbit. After over four and a half hours in orbit Carpenter had fulfilled a busy schedule of assigned tasks, but that schedule had distracted him from the imminent task of re-entry. His small capsule would overshoot the landing site by more than 400 kilometers and would spur the world news agencies to declare him lost. Fortunately, things were not quite so bleak and Carpenter would soon be recovered by the US Navy task force and would return to tell his story. This is the story of America's second manned orbital spaceflight told by the man who flew it from his original reports. On the DVD: Aurora 7 mpg Film, Air-Ground Voice Communication Transcript (35 pages); Description And Performance Analysis (206 pages); Mercury Manned Orbital Capsule Detail Specification (166 pages); Project Mercury: A Chronology (258 pages); Project Mercury Familiarization Manual (431 pages).