Review: Roving Mars By Steve Squyres, E-book version Options

[djellison]

I gave in - Amazon.co.uk told me delivery of this long awaited title would take a few weeks more and so I ended up with a problem - meeting Steve in only 3 weeks, and no chance to have read his book yet! I found an online retailer who sold an E-version of the book. Still got hard-copies on order, but at least I now had a chance to read it in plenty of time.

The bottom line - this is the book you've been waiting for. We all know where the rovers came from, where they landed, what they've seen. We all knew what happened to the Titanic - but millions flocked to the cinema to see HOW it happened.

'Roving Mars' is in three main parts - the struggle to get a mission at all, the struggle to get a mission to the launch pad - and the struggle of running the mission once on the surface. If that sounds like a lot of struggling, then that's because it was. From the earliest Pancam design ( a bush-broom like camera designed for the OLD Pathfinder multi-lander design ) that was turned down, thru to the near cancellation of MER on several occasions - even I had no idea just how much of a struggle it was to get these things off the ground. It is an almost a tragic vein combined with the nature of competitively won contracts to fly good instrumentation culminating in the fight to fly that make the first part of Roving mars without doubt the most revealing. Being turned down twice, before having a mission cancelled, and then having to start the fight all over again after the '01 failures, Steve just started again, gathered a good team, good plans, good designs and made sure that there was no option but to pick his new mission - the one that we see on the surface of mars today - and that we have two of them was as much a surprise to Steve as it was to anybody else.

Once selected - it's clear things were hardly a cake-walk. At post landing press conferences, Pete Theisinger, Steve Squyres, Ed Weiler and Firouz Naderi looked to be one big happy family, but rest assured, it was not always that way. The hunt for used pyro-bolts to prove the health of the vehicle is an almost comic tale

Then the landings, the thrill of those first Pancam images, and even then the struggle didnt stop - fighting to get that compromise between science HERE, and making progress to hopefully do science THERE - but the origins of the decisions that were taken are a great insight - with the narrative taking the form of a diary, much like that of his recent updates at the Athena website, but with more personal details, who, how and why the decisions were made.

Of course - for the most technically minded among us - even a transcript of SOWG meetings and complete uplink sequences wouldn’t suffice. Steve has managed to go as technical as he probably could without alienating those who want to read the story of MER without needing a degree in the subject.

It closes with one fitting touch - a collection of the names of all who were involved in every stage of the mission. On my e-version of this book - this list runs from page 615 to 755 - about 3900 names, a fitting reminder of the scale of what they achieved.

If you've logged on to the JPL website - seen a raw image and for that brief second gone "wow" - then find out why, and read this.

Review Score out of Six

Doug Ellison
Unmannedspaceflight.com
Buy Roving Mars at Amazon.com

Upcoming reviews include 'Mapping Mars', 'Full Moon', 'A Travellers Guide to Mars', 'Sojourner', 'Visions of Mars' and others

[Guest_PhilCo126_*]

Might there be a 2nd book published by Dr Squyres on the MER activities?

[djellison]

If you read the end of the Squyres Q'n'A we discussed it - unlikely, but a post-script for a later edition is a possibility

Doug

[mars loon]

Might there be a 2nd book published by Dr Squyres on the MER activities?

In reply to a question a few months back, Steve told me that he may do a 2nd Edition of "Roving Mars" at the conclusion of the mission and add a few extra chapters to include all that’s happened since the book ending. I enjoyed reading of the human drama behind the scenes, and as Doug wrote, it wasn’t a cake walk. Many ups and downs, conflicts and comeraderie.

I have read large portions of the book and also give it a rating of infinite wheels.

… ....

For the most part, the book ends in the summer of 2004 with a few short paragraphs going into Sep 2004 with Spirit starting its climb up Husband Hill and Oppy still inside Endurance. So about 3/4 of the actual mission time on Mars is NOT in the book. Steve told me that was due to the long lag time between him completing the manuscript and the actual publication (nomal for the industry). Recently at the Hayden, Steve was kind enough to autograph my copy of Roving Mars.

As a companion to the book, I highly recommend viewing of both PBS documentaries, as I wrote earlier in the DVD thread, since altogether they bring both the people and robots alive:

Mars:Dead or Alive and Welcome to Mars

They bring to life the people on the mission and the rovers too.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mars/

For all these reasons, I also can’t wait for the premiere of the IMAX Movie version of “Roving Mars” on 27 Jan 2006, which is loosly based on the book and will tell a bit more of the story. And this adventure of Humans and Robots is Exhilirating !!