Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet [Hardcover]

For fans of Spirit and Opportunity and the team that made them what they are, some of this book will be familiar - like Dr. Squyres' quotes about the launches, landings and images - but fans will still want to have it for all the other goodies.

Dr. Squyres answers questions we didn't see in media interviews - like:
-who is that EDL guy who looks like Elvis' younger brother?
-what does Dr. Steve hope for the Rovers centuries from now?
-how was beer involved in the MER project?
-how do smart, strong, stubborn people come together to do something so challenging?

Technical details abound - including stories about getting the airbags right, making it to the launchpad, and the INIT_CRIPPLED command that saved the day. The technical details remind me a bit of Tracey Kidder's Soul of the New Machine. So, I think it would be a fun read for fans of Kidder's book.

There are some press release images in the two sets of mostly color pictures, but there are also some fun surprises.

There is also an Appendix listing over 4,000 names - the best effort to name the entire MER team - wow.

(Let me start off by saying that I reserve 5 stars for books that are truly outstanding, not, like some Amazon reviewers, for any book that is just pretty good. For me, 4 stars is a VERY good rating.)

I have felt some lingering jealousy watching the videos of the rover control center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I support spacecraft for a living, but somehow what I've been doing hasn't seemed quite as exciting or sexy as working with rovers on Mars (and particularly not now, with Goddard's heyday apparently in the past.)

Squyres' book both dulls and enhances the glamor. He spends some time talking about the long, hard slog he took to become Principal Investigator for a Mars mission, starting in 1989 with an effort to develop a camera to fly on a NASA Mars mission. He proposed sticking it on a mission called MESUR Pathfinder in the early 90's and was turned down. He tried again to develop a science package to go to Mars in 1998, and that was turned down. NASA expressed interest again a few years later, he resubmitted, and it was turned down again. He put a lot of work into a complex set of missions set to start going to Mars in 2001, a program that was killed when Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander failed in quick succession.

By 2000, though, NASA was looking for a glamorous mission to redeem its Mars reputation, and Squyres' rover seemed to fit the bill. Not only was his mission chosen, but he was asked for two of them.

The schedule ended up being brutal, having to develop a complex mission inside of three years with the unforgiving, inflexible 2003 Mars launch window looming up ahead. Squyres relates several heroic tales of people who made the impossible possible, from Randy Lindemann coming up with a way to get 32 strings of solar cells on the rover (enough to provide reasonable assurances that it would last for 90 sols) to Adam Steltzner getting the parachutes to work to Matt Wallace assembling the rover components (and verifying them) on a ludicrously tight schedule. And you get the impression that there are dozens more stories like these that Squyres either didn't know about or didn't have space to tell. (The book includes an appendix with the names of those who worked on the rovers. There are more than four thousand of them, and Squyres admits that it's almost certainly not complete.)

There are crises of confidence as the rovers go over budget, and NASA threatens to cut one of them to ensure that sufficient attention is paid to the other. There are failed tests and last-minute problems and checks and re-checks. Even once the rovers get to Mars, Spirit has a nervous breakdown (later traced to an overflowing flash memory directory) just a few days in, right when the rover team really needs to concentrate on Opportunity's approach and landing. But Spirit recovers and Opportunity makes an interplanetary hole-in-one, right in front of the bedrock that every geologist wants to see.

The remainder of the book is a day-by-day recounting of what went on during rover operations and provides a rawer version of what those of us interested in the missions have learned in a more cut-and-dried form from press conferences and press releases. We get to read as Squyres and his team of geologists gradually convince themselves that there's no reasonable explanation for the features in Opportunity's Eagle Crater outcrop other than flowing water. He relates his disappointment as Spirit arrives at Bonneville and doesn't find bedrock, facing a long, hard drive to the Columbia Hills for even a chance at doing the geology the rover came to Mars to do. On the other hand, he relates the excitement as Opportunity descends into Endurance Crater, finding layer after layer to examine.

Then the rovers go into solar conjunction, and that's where the book ends. And that's probably the main criticism people are going to have with this book: it stops too soon. Other than Pot of Gold, the first rock Spirit happened upon in the Columbia Hills, there's little about what Spirit has learned. And Opportunity continued to explore Endurance Crater, checked out its heat shield, found the first meteorite to be encountered on Mars, and is now examining the edges of the "etched terrain." So there certainly needs to be a sequel.

The only other criticism might be that this is truly a journal, almost entirely a recounting, frequently day-by-day, of what it went through to build the rovers and then operate them on Mars. There's not much stepping back and looking at the bigger picture beyond that. But for us Mars junkies, getting behind-the-scenes of rover science and operations is fascinating all by itself. If that turns you on, then this is a great book to read.

Squyres is smart, dynamic and articulate, and gives the inside

story not only of the construction and operation of the rovers,

but also all the politics that led to the project in the first

place. It's a pretty gripping read, and makes the personalities

involved come to life, as well as the rovers themselves. Tech

fans will not be disappointed with the details of software,

grounding, parachute design and all of the nitty-gritty

problems that had to be fixed. I loved it.