Book Review
The Space Environment:
Implications for Spacecraft Design
(revised and expanded edition)
Alan C. Tribble
Princeton University Press, Princeton,
N.J., 2003
232 pp.,
ISBN 0-691-10299-6
Reviewed by Henry J. P. Smith
see all book reviews  The
Space Environment: Implications for
Spacecraft Design gives a broad overview of
a number of physical disciplines that need
to be dealt with in the design of any space
mission. The author, Alan C. Tribble, is an
executive with a well-known U.S. aerospace
company and has taught courses in the
subject both in universities and at professional
meetings. First printed in 1995, this
revised edition includes some information
developed during the intervening years.
It is of course obvious that space is an
environment quite different from our everyday
experience, but one does not realize just
how alien it is until one starts to think of the
details included in this volume. Tribble
employs some basic physical concepts to
introduce the material of
each chapter, using equations
that ought to be
accessible to most undergraduates
in physical science
and engineering. It
is always interesting to
see how far one can get
with quite simple concepts,
and Tribble carries
this out rather well. Some
of these could be useful
for motivating students with topical issues,
such as the Columbia shuttle disaster.
The text covers five distinct environmental
factors that can affect the performance of
spacecraft: vacuum, the extremely low pressure
encountered by a spacecraft and its
instrumentation; neutral, the residual
atmosphere at various orbital altitudes;
plasma, produced by the charged particles
in space itself; radiation, the high-energy
charged particles and photons in the background;
and finally, micrometeoroid/orbital
debris, which may cause kinetic damage to
a space vehicle or its instruments. Each
subject forms a separate chapter so a reader
may use the book to review what issues
need to be addressed in planning a particular
space experiment or mission for any one
of these design issues. Each chapter provides
a number of exercises and a fairly
extensive bibliography, which will be needed
by anyone considering these issues for
an operational design.
As might be expected,
most of the referenced papers and
books are from the engineering literature,
with the American Institute of Aeronautics
and Astronautics’ Journal of Spacecraft and
Rockets cited most often.
I did note several apparent minor errors
in the text. For example, in the first chapter,
Tribble presents an equation to illustrate
the basic nuclear fusion reactions in the
sun, a subject of only peripheral interest to
the remainder of the book. This equation
was wrong in the first edition and has not
been corrected in the new one. In fact, the
nuclear reaction chain in the sun is more
complex than a single reaction can describe.
Also, in discussing the cosmic radiation
background, Tribble uses a figure that has
the atomic number Z as a parameter, but he
never clearly defines what Z is. There are
also a number of grammatical and stylistic
issues that I found jarring, such as referring
to the “Aurora australialis” instead of the
correct “australis.”
I found the book useful overall. The
author’s style keeps the reader interested in
spite of the few minor faults mentioned. If
one needs a good introduction to the issues
that may arise in the design of an instrument
for a space-based measurement, this would
be a good place to start, but one will definitely
need to follow up with more detailed references
such as those the author provides.
Those who are teaching undergraduate courses
in science or engineering may find some
useful examples in this book.
Biography
Henry J.P. Smith is a part-time lecturer in physics at Northeastern
University in Boston. Semi-retired, he worked for almost 30 years
in industry, in atmospheric and infrared physics, and he built large-scale
computer codes for use in such studies. |
