Dale P. Cruikshank

Ice, ice everywhere, and not a drop to drink!

Planetary astronomy was the unloved step-sister of stellar astronomy for many years -- broadly speaking, until the space program revived it. Yet, somehow, Pluto became so beloved that there was great anger at it being demoted from a "planet" to a "dwarf planet" -- even though the logic of the demotion seems impeccable to me: Pluto is one of many Kuiper Belt objects, whereas Earth, or Jupiter, or Saturn is alone in our part of space.

Given how show more beloved Pluto is, you'd think there would have been more books written since the New Horizons probe finally gave us a close look at it. But there are only a few. This one seems to be about the most solid.

Solid, as in, solid ice. The first parts of the book give a thorough (probably more thorough than warranted) account of the discovery first of Uranus, which led directly to the discovery of Neptune, which led rather less directly to the discovery of Pluto.

But then the book bogs down in... all sorts of things. How do the satellites of Uranus tell us more about Pluto? If they tell us anything, it's about ices (not just water ices, but also methane ices, nitrogen ices, carbon monoxide ices -- oddly, there isn't much about ammonia ice). It felt as if at least a third of the book was spent trying to figure out which ices were on which worlds.

Now let's be clear: This was extremely hard work, and it is pretty much the only thing we can learn about a far distant rock until we can fly a probe to it. But it's just too nitpicky for me -- and I like nitpicky.

That's ultimately the problem with this book: not enough time looking at the goal (which is learning about Pluto) and too much time learning about the things we need to learn about to learn about how to learn about the goal. And, yes, I put the phrase "learn about" in there repeatedly, to try to give the idea of how much extra freight in here. You can learn a great deal from this book. But if you're like me, you'll wish that they would get on with it -- or cut out a third to a half of the stuff that is of interest to astronomers because they worked so hard to learn it, but that isn't really what we're here for. show less