The spacious firmament on high

This is the most dazzling era in astronomy that human history has ever known, but for all the attention it commands it could be the dullest. It seems almost routine, a swiftly forgotten news item at best, to see images of Mars beamed back from the planet’s surface or to have a comet’s content analysed by fragmenting its surface with a rocket. The astonishing construction of a space station circling the earth is of such little interest, it is wholly obscured by anxieties about the Shuttle that serves it. The seven-year, 2.2-billion-mile, inch-perfect flight of the Cassini spacecraft to examine Saturn’s moons registers only slightly more than the discovery this summer of 30 million new stars in the Milky Way by the Spitzer infra-red space telescope. Compared with what came before, these are the achievements of giants standing on the shoulders of pygmies, but they hardly play outside geekdom.

Anyone, therefore, who can awaken a wider sense of the wonder that such knowledge should create is to be applauded. And Dava Sobel, who launched a new genre of popular scientific history ten years ago with Longitude is eminently qualified. The particular part of the universe she has chosen is the solar system — My Very Erotic Mistress Jane Satisfies Unusual Needs Passionately is the mnemonic required to recall the sequence of planets from the sun — combining poetry, history and science to examine what is known about our own stellar backyard.

What emerges most clearly is the sheer chanciness of our particular life-form’s existence. Of our nearest neighbours, Venus’s atmosphere rains vitriolic acid on the ground and bakes it at 400 degrees centigrade, while cosmic rays relentlessly bombard the Martian deserts that lie almost unprotected by its thin atmosphere.