This is a fascinating book describing the Voyagers, their creation, and their discoveries. It has lovely photographs to inspire and solid diagrams to illuminate scientific principles. The author explores the process of the mathematical equations to identify that a time when such a project could succeed in visiting multiple planets of the solar system, the development of the technology to build the Voyagers, amazing pictures sent back, and some of the questions scientists were able to answer using the data. There are also some interesting questions we have now because of what we learned!
One of the things I noticed was the relatively high number of female scientists mentioned in the text, especially as the data from Voyagers came back over the years. I believe the author must have done so on purpose, though she doesn't say so explicitly (and the book is the better for it).
It does mention the Galileo affair in the usual sense:
In 1632 Galileo was arrested by the Roman Catholic Church and locked up for the rest of his life. His crime? Refusing to take back his statement that Earth and the other planets revolve around the Sun.
So one more opportunity to remind our students there was a little more to the story.
I intend to assign this book in Level 3 (6th grade) in our astronomy unit (after Our Universe and The Stars). The chapters are short so an advanced reader can probably read more than one in a day and cover the book in a week with narrations. It would be an excellent book for strewing, too, if you had the kind of student who would pick it up and read it on their own.
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