Contemporary Authors

• Vacation Guide to the Solar System: Science for the Savvy Space Traveler! - 2017 Penguin, New York, NY

• Amazon -

  Jana Grcevich, PhD, received her undergraduate degrees in astronomy, physics, and mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her doctorate in astronomy at Columbia University. Her research interests include dwarf galaxies and interstellar gas, and she discovered two previously unknown local galaxies. She lives in New York, where she collaborates with artists on projects related to astronomy, hosts shows at the Hayden Planetarium, and enjoys wandering through Prospect Park.

• From Publisher -

  Jana Grcevich, PhD, has worked as an astronomer and science educator at the American Museum of Natural History and hosts shows at the Hayden Planetarium. She received her undergraduate degrees in astronomy, physics, and mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her doctorate in astronomy at Columbia University. Her research interests include dwarf galaxies and interstellar gas, with a focus on radio observations and simulations of gas in dwarf galaxies. She teaches astronomy to future high school Earth Science teachers as a part of the Master of Arts in Teaching program at AMNH.

• Columbia University Website - http://user.astro.columbia.edu/~janagrc/

  Graduate Student, Columbia University
  I work in the Astronomy Department at Columbia University. My research interests include Local Group dwarf galaxies, galaxy evolution, and the interstellar medium, topics which I study via observations and simulations. Current projects include identifying undiscovered ultra-faint dwarf galaxies through their HI content and hydrodynamic simulations of mass loss in low-mass satellite galaxies. I'm also active in public outreach through the department.
  The banner image was made from GALFA-HI (Galactic Arecibo L-band Feed Array) Survey data, an all Arecibo sky, high-resolution survey of neutral hydrogen near our Galaxy. I use GALFA-HI data for some of my research projects.

  Contact Information
  Office: Pupin 1414

  Address:
  Department of Astronomy
  Columbia University
  Mail Code 5246
  550 West 120th Street
  New York, New York 10027

  Phone: 212.854.6888
  Fax: 212.854.8121
  Email: janagrc [at] gmail.com

  CV: http://user.astro.columbia.edu/~janagrc/cv.pdf

  Research
  Technical Summary
  I am interested in studying Local Group dwarf galaxies and the interstellar medium. Please see an (automatically generated) list of publications on NASA ADS here. I am a part of the Galactic Arecibo L-Band Feed Array (GALFA-HI) Survey team, a high resolution, all Arecibo sky survey of neutral hydrogen at LSR velocities of -700 to 700. The high resolution of the survey allows us to probe discrete objects deeper into Galactic emission than has been previously possible. The full data set for Data Release 1 is available to the public. Using this data, I collaborated to create a catalog of approximately 2000 discrete, isolated HI clouds using an semi-automated algorithm (Saul 2011, submitted). Most of these clouds are very likely to be associated with the Milky Way, although their origins are not well understood. My particular interest are those clouds which have structural or kinematic characteristics which make them more likely to be undiscovered Local Group galaxies. Out of the catalog, I identified a population of dwarf galaxy candidates whose characteristics are similar to those of Leo T, the only known ultra-faint galaxy known to contain HI. Some of these candidates lie in the region of sky covered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and so a preliminary search for a stellar population at that position can be conducted. One of the candidates showed an apparent stellar population in its color magnitude diagram compared to an equal-area control annulus around the cloud position (Grcevich 2012, in prep). Follow up photometric observations are planned for this and the other candidates. In addition to my observational work, I also also run hydrodynamic simulations of the interaction of the gaseous component of dwarf galaxies with a diffuse hot halo like that of the Milky Way. The code used is Proteus, and is currently implemented in 2D. I found that dwarf galaxies can lose a significant fraction of their gas in less than an orbital timescale due to dynamical stripping even when the traditional ram-pressure criterion for total stripping is not met.
  Non-Technical Summary
  My research focuses on nearby, small galaxies which are called Local Group dwarf galaxies. One thing I focus on is the gas in these galaxies as well as the gas in our Galaxy, the Milky Way. The faintest of these galaxies, the "ultra-faint" dwarf galaxies, are about a hundred thousand times less massive than the Milky Way and a millions times fainter. Many nearby, ultra-faint dwarf galaxies which were too dim to be seen previously have been discovered in the past eight years. Studying the population of ultra-faint dwarf galaxies is important because there is a major discrepancy between theories of dark matter and what astronomers have observed. Dark matter is called "dark" because it doesn't give off or interact with light - we only see it via its gravitational effects. The leading dark matter theories predict there should be a very large number of low-mass clumps of dark matter near our Galaxy, and since we think galaxies should form in most of these dark matter clumps, it is surprising we don't see a greater number of small galaxies in our Galactic neighborhood. It's not clear if this is because the dark matter predictions are wrong, our understanding of how dark matter clumps become galaxies is incomplete, the galaxies in those dark matter clumps are just too faint for us to have seen them, or some combination of these explanations. One of my current projects is to look for some of these "missing" satellite galaxies. I'm going about this in a new way; in the past these galaxies have been discovered first via their stars, while I am searching for them first by looking at the hydrogen gas they might contain. I am using a large map of neutral hydrogen gas to search for gas clouds that are similar in structure to gas in the dwarf galaxies that we already know about. Then I am searching for concentrations of faint stars at those locations to see if these clouds really are previously unknown galaxies. So far, I have found a number of promising dwarf galaxy clouds, and one even shows evidence for the type of stars one would expect in a small galaxy. I also work on computer simulations of the gas in dwarf galaxies. The Milky Way sits in a big cloud of hot gas which is not very dense. Dwarf galaxies orbit the Milky Way and as they do so their gas interacts with the hot gas of the Milky Way. Usually this causes the gas in the small galaxy to be swept away from its associated dark matter clump. Since stars are formed out of gas, this sweeping effect can affect how many stars are formed in the dwarf galaxies. Since the number of stars determines how a bright a galaxy is, this effect might have a significant impact on what these galaxies look like.

• American Museum of Natural History Website - https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/seminars-on-science/about/faculty/jana-grcevich

  COURSE INSTRUCTOR
  Jana Grcevich

  Dr. Grcevich studied Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, and completed her doctorate in Astronomy at Columbia University. She is now a Kathryn W Davis Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History, where she does research and prepares future high school Earth Science teachers as a part of the Master of Arts in Teaching Program.
  Her research interests include searching for undiscovered, extremely faint dwarf galaxies within and just beyond the Local Group, as well as working on simulations of how dwarf galaxies lose gas as they orbit more massive galaxies. In her free time she enjoys aimlessly wandering the streets of New York, making art, and planning hypothetical space vacations via the world's first "space travel agency", the Intergalactic Travel Bureau.

• Simons Foundaton Website - https://www.simonsfoundation.org/team/jana-grcevich/

  Jana Grcevich is a data scientist and astronomer whose academic work focuses on dwarf galaxies and interstellar gas. She has always had a strong interest in communicating science to the public and is the co-author of the forthcoming book “Vacation Guide to the Solar System.” She is working with the science experience organization Guerilla Science to develop a virtual-reality space vacation app. Recently she has become fascinated by natural language processing and other subfields of data science, with a particular emphasis on how they can be used artistically. She holds a doctorate in astronomy from Columbia University and completed her postdoctoral research at the American Museum of Natural History.

• World Science Festival - http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/participants/jana-grcevich/

  Jana Grcevich is co-author of The Vacation Guide to the Solar System, a travel guide to the planets. She holds a Ph.D. in Astronomy from Columbia University, worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History, and is a data scientist living in New York. She collaborates on science-themed art, hosts planetarium shows at the Hayden Planetarium, and helped develop a virtual reality space vacation app with Guerilla Science’s Intergalactic Travel Bureau.

• Book Passage - http://www.bookpassage.com/event/olivia-koski-jana-grcevich-vacation-guide-solar-system-corte-madera

  Jana Grcevich, PHD, has worked as an astronomer and science educator at the American Museum of Natural History and hosts shows at the Hayden Planetarium. She received her undergraduate degrees in astronomy, physics, and mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her doctorate in astronomy at Columbia University. She teaches astronomy to future high school Earth Science teachers as a part of the Master of Arts in Teaching program at AMNH.

• Space.com - https://www.space.com/37090-vacation-guide-solar-system-book-author-interview.html

  'Vacation Guide to the Solar System': Where Would YOU Go?
  By Sarah Lewin, Space.com Associate Editor | June 6, 2017 06:30am ET
  50 3 MORE

  “Vacation Guide to the Solar System” by Olivia Koski and Jana Grcevich
  Credit: Random House
  Olivia Koski and Jana Grcevich want to send everyone to space — on vacation.
  In "Vacation Guide to the Solar System" (Penguin Books, 2017), the science writer and astronomer team up to take readers through the finer points of a future where a relaxing trip to float in the clouds of Venus is commonplace, and where daring travelers ski on Mercury or skydive on Saturn. Just remember to sign up for years of time off at work!
  Space.com caught up with Koski and Grcevich about their new book, and discussed the Intergalactic Travel Bureau it sprung from and the best (and most dangerous) places to visit in the vacationer's solar system. [See more vivid art from "Vacation Guide to the Solar System" (Gallery)]
  Advertisement

  A popular pastime on Uranus, in "Vacation Guide to the Solar System," is to jump down through the gases of the planet's atmosphere.
  Credit: Steve Thomas/Random House
  Space.com: So why a solar system vacation guide?
  Olivia Koski: It all started with something called the Intergalactic Travel Bureau, a pop-up agency where the organization Guerilla Science invites members of the public to come and plan their vacation with an astronomer. Guerilla Science does all kinds of events and performances at festivals — all with the mission to imbue science into culture, so planning vacations to space was an idea that we had to make astronomy and space science relevant to the average person.
  Guerilla Science had done this in London for the Royal Astronomers' Ball back in 2011, and then in 2012 we brought the Intergalactic Travel Bureau to New York, and recruited Jana as one of our first space travel agents.
  Jana Grcevich: I was a graduate student in astronomy at the time, and that sounded like a lot of fun — and it was. It's very different from sitting at a computer all day long; I was finishing my thesis, hard at work alone in my room.
  It's like translating [science] in a way that's far more vivid and interesting. I kind of got caught up with it as well, in doing this — just thinking about what it would be like to go low-gravity hiking, or skiing on Pluto. There are so many different places where you can go and think about the human experience of being there.
  Koski: As we started talking to people about what they want to do on vacation, we realized that there was definitely the need for a guide to vacationing in space … It just felt like doing the book would be a natural extension of the experience.
  Space.com: What are the most fascinating real-life facts you incorporated into the travel guide?
  Grcevich: I just am fascinated by everything that's going on, on Titan. If I could travel anywhere, I would definitely choose Titan, which is a moon of Saturn, because it has lakes. They're not water lakes, they're methane and ethane — very cold, 300 degrees below zero — but you could have a beach vacation there. It'd be very unlike a beach vacation on Earth, and it would be cloudy all the time because there's an orangish haze in the sky. It'd be very dark, because it's far from the sun, but the atmosphere there is very thick, and that's superunusual for a moon. It's so thick, in fact, you could probably become airborne pretty easily under human power or with minimal external power, so you could fly on Titan, and I think that'd be a fascinating experience.
  And all along the equator, it has black dunes that are made out of this dark sand that's kind of the consistency of grape nuts — so I'm just imagining you're flying over Kraken Mare, which is this huge lake on Titan, or you're going over these dark, windswept dunes in this thick atmosphere … the human experience of that would be really fascinating. [How Humans Could Live on Saturn's Moon Titan (Infographic)]

  Your trip to Jupiter and its Galilean moons may be cut short by an untimely death from radiation poisoning.
  Credit: Steve Thomas/Random House
  Koski: For me, if I could survive the radiation [I would] visit the Galilean moons of Jupiter. It just blows me away, the diversity of landscapes from one moon to the next. You have Io, which is this moon full of volcanoes — it's just this hellish landscape of fire and molten lava, and then Europa, which isn't that far away, is this ice moon that potentially has an ocean that harbors life underneath it. It's just …
  Grcevich: We don't know if it harbors life, but it could.
  Koski: But it could, who knows? There's definitely an ocean there underneath the ice, most likely.
  Grcevich: A salty-water ocean.
  Koski: I would love to go on a submarine tour and see what's there.
  Space.com: How did you develop the infrastructure on all these planets and moons? Hoppers to get around, floating cities, wheeled submarines…
  Grcevich: It depends. For example, in the upper atmosphere of Venus, conditions are surprisingly similar to Earth in terms of temperature and pressure, and you have to deal with some corrosive clouds, but for the most part, it's very similar to Earth. Scientists have been thinking about how you would send a mission to the upper atmosphere of Venus, and so there are published papers and NASA reports that do the basic calculations and analysis of how that would work.
  There hasn't been a moon hopper [which maneuvers on the moon in large leaps], but it's something that has been thought out in terms of the basics of how it would work physically. In those cases, especially for the moon, Mars and Venus, there's something real to work with. For some of the more distant planets, because that's a little further in the future, it's more speculative. We did talk to scientists who have thought about airships in the atmospheres, for example, of the gas giant planets, [but that] is difficult because the atmosphere there is so light, it's hard to keep something afloat, but they've thought about the engineering that would be required for that.

  Koski: It's pretty amazing, the scientific research that's out there, the conceptual research and reports that have been produced at NASA. They've been thinking about this stuff for decades, and coming up with pretty amazing concepts for traveling to different places and exploring them. I think virtually everything is based on either a report or conversation with a scientist that might have been speculative, but still within the realm of possibility. It was important to us that everything was rooted in some science or engineering reality, even if, as we mention in the book, we took some pretty significant liberties.
  Probably the one where we really were speculating a lot was the surface of Venus. They've sent probes to the surface of Venus and taken pictures of the surface of Venus, but it's a pretty harsh environment, and things don't survive there for very long because the pressures are so high, the temperature is so high. We have a concept in the book for a submarine on wheels, which comes from our own imaginations.

  Venus' surface is far too hot and high-pressure to visit for long. Probes rarely last long, and exploration would take a very heavy-duty vehicle.
  Credit: Steve Thomas/Random House
  Grcevich: I would not travel in that; if somebody tried to tell me to go to the surface of Venus, I would not go. I also would not go to Mercury. There are a lot of places …
  Koski: The moons of Jupiter — I'm pretty sure you would die pretty quickly of radiation poisoning, but you know ...
  Space.com: I like that you were pretty real about that in the book — you don't want to go there for too long.
  Koski: Yeah, you don't want to go to the surface of Venus for too long, even if you could. It's just really, really, really hot there, and the pressure is really high, and it's almost like you could probably handle one of those things — really high pressure or high temperatures — but both … I don't know.
  Grcevich: Not even keeping a human alive, but keeping a robot functional on the surface is a huge ... I mean, we haven't done it yet. We sent something there, maybe it lasts 40 minutes, and then it dies a horrible death.
  Koski: [Whereas for Venus' atmosphere,] the floating airships — there's been a lot of research into floating airships, which I think is great.
  Grcevich: If you made a vessel with breathable air, it would float, because of the density of Venus' atmosphere even at those altitudes. There's winds, but they're not necessarily so turbulent that you can't imagine creating some sort of craft that would survive it, and the temperatures and pressures are very similar to Earth, as I mentioned. It would be corrosive, so that would be an engineering challenge, but … Before this, I had been, like, Why would anybody ever consider sending a human to Venus? — it sounds like a terrible idea. And it still sounds like a terrible idea, but at least there's kind of a vision of how that would work in theory.

  Why not go skiing on Pluto? It works best on the dwarf planet's methane snowcaps. A typical jump could launch you 24 feet in the air, but it'll take a while to build up speed.
  Credit: Steve Thomas/Random House
  Space.com: Where would you recommend for first-time travelers?
  Koski: Personally, I think the moon is a great choice because it's so close — you don't have to take a ton of time off work, and it's the most affordable, even if it's probably out of reach for most people. But there are people on planet Earth who can afford it, and who have actually purchased a ticket to the moon. That's pretty incredible, if you think about it.
  We started this in 2011, and there was a lot of talk about suborbital space trips at the time. Of course, those keep getting delayed, but even this year, I think Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos both said [they're] going to do one by the end of 2018. It's on the horizon, and it's going to happen soon. Elon Musk sold a trip to the moon to some people. It's funny, because when we've been on the street saying, "Hey, can we offer you a trip to the moon? Want to go to the moon?" people laugh it off, but that is becoming a reality, and that's another aspect of it that is really enjoyable and really fascinating for people to talk about: Where the real meets the fiction.
  Grcevich: It's a lot different to talk about going to Saturn's moons or things like that; that's not really in the near future for us. But over the course of doing this, one thing that really struck me was, coming across this image from 1919. It was an illustrated version of people going to space, and they were on biplanes. They were out in the open and there were clouds in space, and it talked about how long it would take to get to Neptune — it was thousands of years or something.
  It took us 10 years to send a probe to Pluto, and it made me have a moment of realization that, yes, as a technical scientist, this doesn't seem like it's in the near future, but in the medium and the far future, things change on such a rapid scale that, provided we keep exploring space, people are going to be vacationing in space. It's worth imagining that future for ourselves as realistically as possible, because we can sit down and figure out what a human would experience, what it would feel like, what it would look like to be there — and someday humans will be there.
  This interview has been edited for length. You can buy "Vacation Guide to the Solar System" on Amazon.com.
  Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Vacation Guide to the Solar System: Science for the Savvy Space Traveler

264.14 (Apr. 3, 2017): p66+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Vacation Guide to the Solar System: Science for the Savvy Space Traveler
Olivia Koski and Jana Grcevich. Viking, $20 (240) ISBN 978-0-14-312977-6
With private space companies now offering brief trips to orbit the Earth and the moon, this colorful vacation guide provides a timely and non-technical look at what future space tourists should anticipate. Science exhibit designer Koski and science educator Grcevich open with a brief look at the preparation needed before undertaking space travel, especially since a voyage anywhere beyond the moon and the closest planets will require years, even decades. Many details here will be old news for space travel fans: shoes are unnecessary; Velcro and duct tape can fix nearly anything; and with lift costs around $ 10,000 per pound to escape Earth's gravity, travelers must pack light and expect to wear their clothes as long as possible. Tourist excursions include visiting historic landing sites and the final resting places of old probes, or trying exotic sports such as terrasurfing on Venus, rock-climbing on Mars, skydiving through the colorful clouds of a gas giant, or skiing the pink snows of Pluto. Colorful poster art and graphics add appeal. This is an ideal introduction to the solar system for younger readers and casual space fans who crave an imaginative trip into the possibilities of real space tourism. Agent: Rachel Vogel, Waxrnan Leavell Literary. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Vacation Guide to the Solar System: Science for the Savvy Space Traveler." Publishers Weekly, 3 Apr. 2017, p. 66+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A489813756/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=454a9033. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A489813756

• Arstechnica
  https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/a-travel-guide-for-our-future-solar-system/
  Word count: 1035

  A travel guide for our future Solar System
  The Vacation Guide to the Solar System is from a future we wish were now.
  John Timmer - 7/9/2017, 4:00 PM

  Enlarge / Four images from New Horizons' Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) were combined with color data from the spacecraft's Ralph instrument to create this enhanced color global view of Pluto.
  NASA/Johns Hopkins University/SWRI

  Humanity's expansion into the Solar System seems to be a recurrent theme around here. We dedicated a podcast to The Expanse and reviewed the book Beyond Earth, which imagines humanity colonizing Saturn's moon Titan. Recently, we got a chance to look at a different take on humanity's travels to other worlds, one that goes a step beyond political drama and existential threats.

  Further Reading
  Forget Mars—let’s go colonize Titan!
  Instead, it's all about planetary tourism. Set up like a travel guide, with chapters for each planet and Pluto, Vacation Guide to the Solar System imagines a future in which people spend a couple of decades to do a round-trip to Saturn and don't want to miss any of the major sights when they get there. And, while Vacation Guide is anything but a hard science book, you'll probably end up smarter for having read it. Which is the entire point.
  Guerillas in space
  The book's authors, Olivia Koski and Jana Grcevich, belong to a group called Guerilla Science, which uses art, installations, performances, and more to try to insert a little science into the lives of people who weren't necessarily looking for it. The group started the Intergalactic Travel Bureau as a bit of a performance—members of Guerilla Science would act as travel planners and ask people what they were interested in before suggesting a planet that would suit those tastes. Eventually, the made-up bureau morphed into an actual storefront in Manhattan.
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  Now, the Intergalactic Travel Bureau has released a book, one that adopts most of the tropes of a typical tourist guide. So, for each planet, there's a page of basic statistics on the destination, like how Venus goes around the Sun at 78,000 miles an hour. Or how its runaway greenhouse means that the high, low, and median temperatures are all the same. Or how its slow rotation means a day drags on for over 2,800 hours.
  Vacation Guide to the Solar System has sections on when to go to each world (Pluto's highly elliptical orbit makes getting there while it's close key) and a detailed discussion of travel times, as well as how to travel around the planet once you get there. For those planets where the surface is accessible and not made of metallic hydrogen, there's a discussion of precautions you need to take to survive seeing the sights.
  Thanks to the ESA, NASA, and the Soviet space program, we have a remarkably good idea of what those sights are. So each chapter has a long list of craters, cloud formations, and other strange terrain that no space tourist should miss. Even if the planet doesn't have a surface, it's guaranteed to have moons that do. Koski and Grcevich imagine all sorts of mountain-climbing challenges, along with some truly sci-fi pastimes, like low-gravity baseball or bungee jumping through the depths of Saturn's atmosphere from one of its floating cities.
  The authors do cut the verisimilitude ever so slightly short, though. Unlike in a real travel guide, Vacation has no tips on where to stay or eat. There is, however, a long discussion of the unpleasantries of space travel, making it unclear why anyone would want to spend more than a decade to get to Pluto. Though the authors helpfully note that a lot of tourists make this their final journey, since the round trip is nearly half a lifetime.
  Does it travel well?
  Let's be clear: the authors' dedication to staying in travel-guide mode is admirable and definitely the biggest charm of the book. That said, most people don't read a travel guide cover-to-cover, because it can get more than a bit repetitive. For this topic, the risk of repetition is enhanced by the fact that most of the striking features NASA has identified off-world are variations on craters, chasms, and cliffs. Comparisons to Everest and the Grand Canyon abound.
  That said, Vacation is not a book that suffers if you put it down for a bit and come back to it. There's no plot, so forgetting details of an earlier chapter is irrelevant.
  And those details are definitely in keeping with the overall goal of sneaking science in to what's partly a work of science fiction. Jana Grcevich is an astronomer, and the material in the book was vetted by multiple other astronomers. The basic information is all solid.
  Where Vacation really shines, however, is that Koski and Grcevich have thought through the consequences of those facts carefully. Like noting there's a moon (one of Mars', I think) that's small enough that someone with reasonable arm strength can throw a baseball into orbit. But the attention to detail goes much deeper than that.
  For example, they note that we can't build anything that would survive conditions anywhere close to Saturn's surface, which means lighter-than-air ships are essential. But Saturn has a low-density atmosphere that's mostly hydrogen. So, for a dirigible to work on Saturn, its entire interior would have to be a vacuum. In contrast, Pluto's low gravity and frigid nitrogen ices make transport a snap. Simply pump a bit of waste heat under your hovercraft, and it'll explosively evaporate the surface, allowing you to speed across the dwarf planet.
  Vacation has plenty of other examples, and I'm having a hard time avoiding spoiling the best of them (I've deleted at least three sentences with others). To see more, you'll have to pick up the book. If you do, it's a fun, new way to look at our Solar System. But, if you're like me, that'll mix with a wistfulness about how you'll never actually see it all.

• Astronomy
  http://www.astronomy.com/news/2017/05/guide-to-the-solar-system
  Word count: 1481

  A tourist’s guidebook like no other — to the rest of the solar system
  “Vacation Guide to the Solar System” offers a glimpse of future human space travel
  By Charles Q Choi | Published: Wednesday, May 17, 2017

  Credit: Steve Thomas, Olivia Koski, Jana Grcevich, Penguin Books
  Imagine skydiving for dozens of miles through the skies of Saturn, luxuriating in floating cities nestled in the clouds of Venus, rappelling down Mariner Valley's dramatic cliffs on Mars, or ski jumps on the methane snowcaps of Pluto. The new "Vacation Guide to the Solar System" by Olivia Koski and Jana Grcevich (Penguin Books, 2017) offers would-be explorers a guidebook to what such voyages might be like in the future, adventures driven by dreams and supported with science.

  Many other tomes on the solar system have appeared over the years, ones often packed with beautiful photos and enchanting paintings. However, by recasting these locales not just as places to look at but as destinations to visit, the new book invites readers to imagine what it might be like to be there and do things.

  Although the authors have taken some artistic license in their book when it comes to embellishments such as the existence of underground or floating cities, they stressed that such creative flourishes have a solid foundation in actual science — Koski is a one-time laser engineer at Lockheed Martin, and Grcevich has worked as an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History.

  Credit: Steve Thomas, Olivia Koski, Jana Grcevich, Penguin Books
  "If you dig into NASA technical reports, you can find a ton of research into what missions to the planets around the solar system would be like," Koski said. "The book might seem fantastical, but it reflects a lot of work going on at NASA for decades."

  Just like a regular guidebook, this new travel guide details ways to get to each destination, and the complications involved. For instance, to catch up with swift-moving Mercury, which travels 106,000 mph around the sun, roughly 40,000 mph faster than Earth, the book noted that it takes less fuel to leave the solar system than it does to visit Mercury without accidentally getting pulled into the sun. To land on the moon's surface, it suggested either rocketing down or, more efficiently, riding a space elevator capsule from a space station down a long, super-strong cable. To get to Saturn in a hurry, it noted that in the 1960s, NASA's Project Orion researched spaceships propelled by exploding nuclear bombs.

  The chapters on each destination are packed with the kinds of details that would make tourists want to visit. "We really just started with the physical characteristics of each destination — what temperatures or gravity are like there, what its atmosphere is like — and thought about how those compared with Earth and what you could do at each place," Koski said. "It's really fun thinking of everyday leisure activities putting them on another planet, and seeing what happens."

  Credit: Steve Thomas, Olivia Koski, Jana Grcevich, Penguin Books
  Highlights at each destination are many and varied:

  * On the moon, aside from historical landmarks such as the Apollo landing sites, tourists can visit the mysterious Reiner Gamma anomaly in the Ocean of Storms, one of the largest sources of so-called "transient lunar phenomena" — strange flashes of light, changes in color, and other short-lived bursts of activity witnessed by observers on Earth for at least the past thousand years. The guidebook also offers diagrams and advice on how best to walk in the moon's reduced gravity.

  * On Mercury, tourists can watch a double sunset, with the sun appearing to set and temporarily rise again because of the odd nature of the scorched planet's orbit. Tourists can also venture from Mercury's underground cities to stroll with its slow-moving terminator line dividing day and night, which only travels at a reasonable walking pace of 2.2 mph, hundreds of times slower than Earth's terminator.

  * Venus can host cities in the sky because Earth air floats easily in Venus' thick atmosphere — habitats filled with breathable air can rise like a helium balloon would on Earth. Tourists visiting the surface will need vehicles resembling submarines on wheels to deal with the dense atmosphere.

  Credit: Steve Thomas, Olivia Koski, Jana Grcevich, Penguin Books
  * Sunsets on Mars are colored the reverse on Earth because of the way sunlight scatters off dust in the red planet's atmosphere — the sky far from the sun is reddish, while that around the sun is blue. On Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons, tourists can jump higher than Earth's tallest building, the 2,722-foot-high Burj Khalifa in Dubai, with a single leap due to its low gravity.

  * Jupiter's draws include the 12,000-mile-wide Great Red Spot and auroras a thousand times more powerful than Earth's. Its four largest so-called Galilean moons offer everything from fiery volcanoes to frigid ice sheets.

  * Saturn's attractions naturally include its rings and the mysterious hexagon near its north pole that is more than two and a half times wider than Earth. Tourists can also skydive into Saturn, although the guidebook warns to not begin skydives too high in altitude — "by the time these unlucky adventurers reach the denser gases, they are traveling so fast that they burn up like meteors." It also notes that on Saturn's largest moon Titan, the gravity is low enough and the atmosphere thick enough that tourists in wingsuits can fly under their own power, with perhaps a slight assist from thrusters.

  Credit: Steve Thomas, Olivia Koski, Jana Grcevich, Penguin Books
  * Uranus' atmosphere is rich in helium. As such, "heliox clubs" in the aerial cities of Uranus offer a wide variety of flavored mixes of helium and oxygen, leading to nightly high-pitched karaoke contests.

  * Pluto's low gravity means that typical ski jumps will launch you 24 feet into the air. Tourists can also try skating with heated skates that turn nitrogen ice into gas.

  Like many real guidebooks, this new book opens with advice on how to prepare for your trip. However, while real guidebooks might suggest that you pack sunscreen or a warm coat, this new book's tips include pointers such as what spacesuit to bring and putting your affairs in order because of the numerous ways to die in space, such as getting burned alive, depressurization and nuclear incidents.

  The book is illustrated with imaginary travel posters from Steve Thomas, conceiving of anything from acrobatic low-gravity bicycling on Mercury to deep-sea excursions on Jupiter's moon Europa. "We fell in love with these whimsical posters immediately," Koski said. And they are not just pretty pictures — "it was really important to us to get the science just right in them, into making sure they were as probably as possible, and not violating any major facts."

  Credit: Steve Thomas, Olivia Koski, Jana Grcevich, Penguin Books

  Koski and Grcevich came up with their book while working together as mock travel agents at the Intergalactic Travel Bureau, a project of Guerilla Science, an organization that combines science with performance art. Other offerings from the Intergalactic Travel Bureau include a free virtual reality app that enables anyone with a smartphone and a simple VR viewer to explore places such as the moon, Mars and Europa.

  The new guidebook often reads not just as a travel guide to the solar system, but from the future. "People might think we're fantasizing, but it's clear that reality of space travel is catching up to us — Richard Branson is talking about suborbital flights with Virgin Galactic, and Elon Musk hopes to deliver people to Mars, and recently announced he'd sold a trip to the moon to several unnamed clients," Koski said. "These trips might one day no longer be exercises in imagination, but actual reality."

  "There's a poster from 1918 I wanted printed in our book, which imagined travel to the other planets in our solar system with wonderful images of ships in the sky. It calculated that at the at-that-time great speeds of two miles a minute, it would take more than 2,500 years to get to Neptune. In comparison, the Voyager 2 spacecraft reached Neptune in less than 12 years by traveling at about 42,000 mph," Koski said. "Who knows what might be possible 100 years from now?"

  As to whether readers might expect a vacation guide to exoplanets in the future as a sequel, "we know very little about those places, so it's difficult to write about them with as much science as we put in our book," Koski said. "Maybe the sequel will come in 100 years — maybe we'll have sent missions to exoplanets by then, just as we've sent missions to the other planets in our solar system."

• The Irregular Reader
  https://theirregularreaderblog.wordpress.com/2017/06/04/book-review-vacation-guide-to-the-solar-system-by-olivia-koski-and-jana-grcevich/
  Word count: 314

  Book Review: Vacation Guide to the Solar System by Olivia Koski and Jana Grcevich
  Posted on June 4, 2017 by theirregularreaderblog

  Vacation Guide to the Solar System: Science for the Savvy Space Traveler! by Olivia Koski and Jana Grcevich
  Is the grind of life on Earth getting you down? Want to get away? Look no further! Vacation Guide to the Solar System is your one-stop guide to the farthest reaches of our celestial neighborhood. Want to know what to pack for a trip to Pluto? What to do when you arrive on Venus? What bungee jumping on Neptune would be like? Wonder no more!
  In all seriousness, this book provides a huge amount of information, packaged in art deco, retro-futuristic kitsch. In addition to sci-fi information like baseball tournaments on the moon and ice skating (with heated skates to melt the rock-like ice) on Pluto, the book is also packed with the latest information on our neighboring planets, celestial bodies, comets, dwarf planets, and alien moons. The book itself is stunning, with gorgeous retro travel posters and illustrations combined with actual photos from NASA’s archives.
  The whole thing was put together under the umbrella of Guerrilla Science (you should check out their website here). Guerrilla Science is a rouge collection of scientists and artists whose goal is to bring science to wide audiences through interactive and innovative installations and events. Their Intergalactic Travel Bureau provided the seed for this book.
  This is a great source for information on our solar system, appropriate for kids and adults alike. Fans of astronomy, science, and science fiction should jump on this book. Anyone who likes entertaining nonfiction (Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars immediately springs to mind) will enjoy this book.
  An advance copy of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.