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It's (Just) Rocket Science - Trisha Muro ****

It can be difficult to come up with a new and different way to look at basic science - but Trisha Muro manages this by using the applications of a whole list of satellites and probes to illustrate basics of physics. This could have got messy, but Muro keeps the reader on an even keel as we travel from topic to topic. 

Sometimes the spaceflight missions are fairly obscure - readers may not have come across, for instance, the very first mentioned (TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), which is linked into the geometry of orbits. I thought this would be one of the weaker points, as exoplanets didn't strike me as a great link into the topic of orbits, but it worked surprisingly well. Others include the familiar favourites from the James Webb Space Telescope to the Voyager probe.

Mostly the topics are managed without much dipping into mathematics - the odd equation, but nothing scary. There are two 'interludes' that do include more mathematical physics, but there's nothing as challenging as calculus, let alone the kind of high level maths needed for the general theory of relativity. Incidentally this was a slight disappointment as Muro uses the old bowling ball on a rubber sheet analogy, missing (as far as I could see) any explanation of why a dropped object falls under gravity.

If I have any complaint is that rather too much of the physics itself is space-based - so we have chapters on the geometry of orbits, our place in space, the physics of rocket launch, the physics of orbit etc. The structuring works best, oddly, where the physics is very down to Earth - because this is where the physics is most meaningful to use in ordinary life - and, to be fair, some of the basics are covered. If we take the 'three pillars of physics' identified by Jim Al-Khalili as relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics in his excellent The World According to Physics, though, only one - relativity - gets significant coverage.

Even so, as long as we accept that the aspects of physics covered will be slanted towards space, it's an enjoyable and informative read.

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