79 books like Asteroid Hunters

The subtitle of this book says it all. As a planetary scientist for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Yeomans’ job was to plot the courses of known and newly-discovered NEOs – that is, asteroids and comets that in space terms come close to Earth’s orbit – and determine if and when they might be on a collision course with our planet. With more than 25,000 known NEOs orbiting around up there, it’s not an easy task. But Yeomans makes the crucial point: it’s not the space rocks we know about that pose the biggest threat, but rather the thousands and thousands of large near-Earth asteroids we don’t know about that are the greatest danger. It’s not like the movie Armageddon; it would take years to develop a space mission to deflect or destroy an incoming asteroid, so it’s crucial that we find and track them – as Yeomans says, before… show more.

This book is an entertaining look at the history of mankind’s knowledge about asteroids, which began in 1801 with the discovery of the 600-mile wide asteroid Ceres. Today more than half a million asteroids in our Solar System have been identified, while billions more (mostly small ones) are still waiting to be discovered. The vast majority pose no threat to Earth, but they are fascinating anyway. There are asteroids shaped like giant dog bones, asteroids that resemble human skulls, asteroids that have smaller asteroids orbiting around them as they orbit around the sun. Peebles’ book tells you everything you need to know about these space rocks – and more things that you’ll want to know. A thoroughly enjoyable book.

This book is the story of the biggest collision of space objects mankind has ever seen – literally – told by the man who saw it coming. In 1993 Levy was working with astronomers Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker at a mountain-top observatory in California when they spotted a comet that had been captured by Jupiter’s enormous gravity and sucked into orbit around the Solar System’s biggest planet. Levy and the Shoemakers predicted that pieces of the comet would soon strike Jupiter’s surface with almost unimaginable force – which prompted skepticism among some astronomers. But sure enough, in 1994 the comet fragments hit Jupiter’s surface with the collective force of a 50 million megaton bomb – thousands of times the energy of all the nuclear weapons on Earth. The event made us realize that if it could happen to Jupiter, it could happen to Earth – and that we’d better take… show more.

This book is about the positive side of Near-Earth Objects – that is, they can benefit mankind as well as threaten it. Lewis explains how asteroids are chock full of valuable minerals – iron, nickel, platinum, iridium, and so on – that are either rare or difficult and messy to extract on Earth. Lewis persuasively argues that it’s not just possible but almost inevitable that Earthlings will eventually start extracting those space rock riches -- not so much to bring them back to Earth but to use them for manufacturing industries in space, thus sparing our planet from much of the pollution that threatens our world. It’s not just futuristic day-dreaming; already private companies are spending big money to develop space-mining technologies. The bottom line of this fascinating book is that there’s gold in them thar hills – or rather, in them thar far reaches of space. And sooner than… show more.

This is a science fiction book and hence might seem an odd choice for a list of books about global warming.

However, this book does a great job describing what might happen in coming decades if we don’t take rapid action on climate change, so I think it can help inspire people to make sure that we do indeed act soon. I also loved the way the book shows how exploration of space can be part of the long-term solution to climate change, something that I also deeply believe in. 

Another unusual premise. An asteroid has been spotted on a collision course with Earth, and civilization appears doomed, yet our hero remains set on solving his current case, a death originally dismissed as suicide, which is, in fact, a murder.

Surprisingly, the two themes are made to sit well together, and the intent to solve the crime never seems inappropriate in dire circumstances. This is a real page-turner, which I loved.

I confess that this is the first book I read based on someone else’s recommendation. I’d never heard of Greg Bear, but I was immensely pleased with the experience of discovering him. The world-building in this science fiction epic is enveloping in its detail and believability. It was with Greg Bear’s masterful work that I discovered the ability to take people to another world and make them believably think it could exist. It’s a masterful work and a great addition to the pantheon of science fiction.

I found this book on TikTok. The author's words and images inspired me to order it. Once I picked up the book, I couldn’t put it down. The book is thought-provoking from the first page. What is Oliver hiding from his wife? The zombie apocalypse starts, and you almost forget about the question as you follow Oliver and Zoe as they struggle through the end of the world.

I loved that even though this book is about a new type of zombie apocalypse, the overall feeling I got from it was the hope that Oliver and Zoe kept. They hoped that the other was alive and that they could keep each other safe when they were reunited.

This novel, about the discovery of an alien probe hidden within an Earth orbit-crossing asteroid and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence it provokes, is the first volume of a long, six-volume epic, the Galactic Center series, that is regarded by most critics as a landmark work. You can read this novel on its own or you can go from there with the rest of the series; in any case, it’s hard SF at its thought-provoking best.

Most realistic fiction set on Mars is about small exploratory expeditions. There is surprisingly little available about colonization that doesn't bring in the discovery of intelligent inhabitants or a lost civilization, or at least traces of one having existed in the past. And the few novels with no fantastic elements tend to focus on political controversy. So I was happy to find this recent book that depicts what a colony on Mars might really be like. It's based on the board game "Terraforming Mars," which I haven’t seen, but doesn't depend on any knowledge of the game. The story is part murder mystery and while it’s intended to be entertainment rather than serious literature, it will be enjoyed by readers who are excited by the idea of settling a new world.