Smithsonian Atlas of Space Exploration Options

[Phil Stooke]

I just saw this book while at LPSC (actually saw it in the Borders store on Market Street in The Woodlands, taking a lunch break one day):

Smithsonian Atlas of Space Exploration
By Roger D. Launius, Andrew K. Johnston

Roger Launius is the senior curator in the Division of Space History at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, and Andrew Johnston is a geographer at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies in NASM. It's quite a good reference book but I can't help critiquing the landing site maps. I'm sure the two rather esteemed authors were not responsible for them personally.

The moon ones are outline drawings simply traced from my book! I can be quite sure of that - the way the lander drawings are superimposed for instance, and my Lunokhod 2 map was unique. I think that's fine, but a direct citation would have been appropriate! So what about Mars, where my maps are not yet released? Those are a sorry bunch of maps, drawn to look similar but by someone who didn't know what they were copying. The Viking trench maps for instance are only from the primary mission, so very incomplete. The Pathfinder route map is traced from the nice circular illustration the team published in JGR (and it's on the Photojournal) - nothing wrong with that except it's not in a standard map geometry, it's foreshortened towards the horizon, so you can't measure distances from it.

The text is pretty good, though.

Phil