As his home life spirals downward and hope for a romance sputters out, thirteen-year-old Alan Green tries to convince his friends that their spying game has uncovered a real conspiracy to assassinate the governor.

Called "spellbinding" (Scientific American) and "thrilling...a future classic of popular science" (PW), the up close, inside story of the greatest space exploration project of our time, New Horizons’ mission to Pluto, as shared with David Grinspoon by mission leader Alan Stern and other key players. On July 14, 2015, something amazing happened. More than 3 billion miles from Earth, a small NASA spacecraft called New Horizons screamed past Pluto at more than 32,000 miles per hour, focusing its instruments on the long mysterious icy worlds of the Pluto system, and then, just as quickly, continued on its journey out into the beyond. Nothing like this has occurred in a generation—a raw exploration of new worlds unparalleled since NASA’s Voyager missions to Uranus and Neptune—and nothing quite like it is planned to happen ever again. The photos that New Horizons sent back to Earth graced the front pages of newspapers on all 7 continents, and NASA’s website for the mission received more than 2 billion hits in the days surrounding the flyby. At a time when so many think that our most historic achievements are in the past, the most distant planetary exploration ever attempted not only succeeded in 2015 but made history and captured the world’s imagination. How did this happen? Chasing New Horizons is the story of the men and women behind this amazing mission: of their decades-long commitment and persistence; of the political fights within and outside of NASA; of the sheer human ingenuity it took to design, build, and fly the mission; and of the plans for New Horizons’ next encounter, 1 billion miles past Pluto in 2019. Told from the insider’s perspective of mission leader Dr. Alan Stern and others on New Horizons, and including two stunning 16-page full-color inserts of images, Chasing New Horizons is a riveting account of scientific discovery, and of how much we humans can achieve when people focused on a dream work together toward their incredible goal.

SLAMConceived in the late 1950's as a Mach 3+ global range nuclear warhead delivery system, the Chance Vought SLAM (Supersonic Low Altitude Missile), powered by a ramjet engine propelled by a nuclear reactor developed under Project Pluto, can be considered an unrealised anachronism of the Cold War era. This was a period when human kind proved its ingenuity in many fields, including, unfortunately, that of provisioning the ability to destroy itself on an ever increasing scale.This volume looks at the genesis and development of the SLAM concept and the results of Project Pluto, and details how the concept lost out to the intercontinental ballistic missile concept as the major delivery system for nuclear weapons in the 1960's. The volume is supported by photographs, technical drawings, renderings and flight vehicle and nuclear propulsion planned performance charts. All technical data relating to the concepts have been supplied by contractors and test organisations.There is a deliberate switch from imperial measurements/weights to the fore and metric measurements/weights secondary to metric to the fore and imperial secondary at various stages in the text. This has been done to ensure 100% accuracy in primary reporting from respective designer/test/research organisations, whereas secondary measurements may, at times, be rounded to the nearest cm, kg, inch or lb.

Once perceived as distant, cold, dark, and seemingly unknowable, Pluto had long been marked as the farthest and most unreachable frontier for solar system exploration. The Pluto System After New Horizons is the benchmark research compendium for synthesizing our understanding of the Pluto system. This volume reviews the work of researchers who have spent the last five years assimilating the data returned from New Horizons and the first full scientific synthesis of this fascinating system.

People, children especially, have been baffled, bewildered, and even outraged by the fact that Pluto is no longer called a planet. Through whimsical artwork and an entertaining dialogue format, Pluto’s Secret explains the true story of this distant world. Providing a history of the small, icy world from its discovery and naming to its recent reclassification, this book presents a fascinating look at how scientists organize and classify our solar system as they gain new insights into how it works and what types of things exist within it. The book includes a glossary and bibliography. Praise for Pluto's Secret "Pairing a lighthearted narrative in a hand-lettered†“style typeface with informally drawn cartoon illustrations, this lively tale of astronomical revelations begins with the search for Planet X.†? —Kirkus Reviews "This picture book offers a fresh, positive perspective on Pluto, showing that its change of status is not a demotion but a correction." —Booklist "Light-hearted imagining of a gregarious Pluto.†? —Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books "Fun reading... The book provides a factual history of our faraway 'dwarf,' and on its companion icy worlds, and on the discovery of Kuiper-like bands around other stars." —School Library Journal Award New York Public Library’s annual Children’s Books list: 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing 2013

This is a very proud moment. A pupil of mine from 5H, going to Pluto! I'm sure you will want to keep up your writing skills while you are away, so why don't you write to me and the class about your trip? A holiday to Pluto seems like a well-deserved reward for Jon, considering he has just saved the entire planet. However, with homework arriving from Earth, mad Grans and handbag-stealing, blue-headed skwitches to deal with, Jon's trip might be more eventful than he'd planned!

This is a book about living with Alzheimer’s, not dying with it. It is a book about hope, faith, and humor—a prescription far more powerful than the conventional medication available today to fight this disease. Alzheimer’s is the sixth leading cause of death in the US—and the only one of these diseases on the rise. More than 5 million Americans have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s or a related dementia; about 35 million people worldwide. Greg O’Brien, an award-winning investigative reporter, has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's and is one of those faceless numbers. Acting on long-term memory and skill coupled with well-developed journalistic grit, O’Brien decided to tackle the disease and his imminent decline by writing frankly about the journey. O’Brien is a master storyteller. His story is naked, wrenching, and soul searching for a generation and their loved ones about to cross the threshold of this death in slow motion. On Pluto: Inside the Mind of Alzheimer’s is a trail-blazing roadmap for a generation—both a “how to” for fighting a disease, and a “how not” to give up!

Pluto gets a call from Earth telling him he isn’t a planet anymore, so he sets out on a journey through the solar system to find out why in this funny and fact-filled romp that’s perfect for fans of The Scrambled States of America. Pluto loves being a planet. That is, until the day he gets a call from some Earth scientists telling him he isn’t a planet anymore! You probably wanted to meet a real planet, huh? So, Pluto takes the reader on a hilarious and informative journey through the solar system to introduce the other planets and commiserate about his situation along the way. Younger readers will be so busy laughing over Pluto’s interactions with the other planets, asteroids, moons, and even the sun, they won’t even realize just how much they’re learning about our solar system!

The New York Times bestseller: "You gotta read this. It is the most exciting book about Pluto you will ever read in your life." —Jon Stewart When the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History reclassified Pluto as an icy comet, the New York Times proclaimed on page one, "Pluto Not a Planet? Only in New York." Immediately, the public, professionals, and press were choosing sides over Pluto's planethood. Pluto is entrenched in our cultural and emotional view of the cosmos, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, award-winning author and director of the Rose Center, is on a quest to discover why. He stood at the heart of the controversy over Pluto's demotion, and consequently Plutophiles have freely shared their opinions with him, including endless hate mail from third-graders. With his inimitable wit, Tyson delivers a minihistory of planets, describes the oversized characters of the people who study them, and recounts how America's favorite planet was ousted from the cosmic hub.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Arthur C. Clarke Award! Terraforming - the megascale-engineering of a planet's surface to one more Earth-like - is now commonplace across the Solar System, and Pluto's is set to be the most ambitious transformation yet. Four billion miles from the Sun and two hundred degrees below zero, what this worldlet needs is light and heat. Through captured asteroids and solar mirrors, humanity's finest scientists and engineers are set to deliver them. What nobody factored in was a saboteur - but who, and why? From the start, terraformer Lucian is intrigued by nine-year-old Nou, silent since a horrifying incident that shook the base and upended her family into chaos. If he could reach her, perhaps he could understand what happened that day - and what she knows about the secrets of Pluto. Nou possesses unspoken knowledge that could put a stop to the terraforming. Gripped by her fears, unable to trust her family, there is no one she can talk to. Only through Lucian's gentle friendship will she start to rediscover her voice - and what she has to say could transform our understanding of the Universe.