Roving Mars, Review links Options

[ustrax]

It looks like the IMAX movie has already a release date:
Friday, January 27, 2006

[paxdan]

Sat down this morning in the back garden with my copy of roving mars and have just finished it. Thanks Steve.

[Phillip]

I read the book on a plane and it made a four hour flight pass in a whisk of a moment. As I had 50 pages or so left at the end of the flight, I regretted the "inconvenience" of landing! One of my favorite gems was Sqyres report on what someone wrote on a whiteboard after the early "scare" with Spirit caused by the flash memory problems: "The Spirit was willing, but the flash was weak."

Great Stuff!

[vikingmars]

I finally received my copy thru Amazon.uk last Saturday (only 5 days wait).
It's indeed a great book filled up with inside sories about the MER program, some of which I was aware of during sites selection. GREAT stuff !
Buy "Roving Mars" : you won' regret it !

[odave]

I just finished Roving Mars last night - here are my thoughts:

* Very well written, it felt like Steve was right there in the room with me.

* A great survey of the entire process of spacecraft specification, development, implementation, and flight. Everything is covered - the science, the technology/engineering, the politics, and the people.

* I had no idea how harrowing the journey to the launch pad was. Steve did an excellent job of conveying the frustration and tension felt during the whole ATLO process - so much so that at times I had to remind myself not to worry, they did launch!

* I learned he invited one of the airbag sewing "Ladies from Dover" to view Spirit's launch - very classy. I wonder if they ever saw images of the airbag bounce marks. It'd be neat for them to see the imprint of their handywork on the Martian soil.

* It's good to know that there's a standard on Engineering Slang - many of the terms he used are the same as the ones heard here at our shop

So just like everybody else, I'll highly recommend this book for anyone reading UMSF!

[Edit]: One other thing - Steve hit the nail on the head in his description of scientists vs engineers and how they work together. I read the passage to my wife, and she thought it described me (an engineer) to a T!

[Redstone]

I hope Doug will forgive me for posting this information in two forums. But it's short notice, and its a 75 minute talk by Steve Squyres which I think many won't want to miss.

Squyres is going to be on BookTV on C-SPAN2 tomorrow (Sunday 18th) at 9:30 am Eastern Time. (1330 GMT, 2:30 pm BST). Its a 75 minute talk about his book with Q&A afterwards.

Schedule and details at: http://www.booktv.org/schedule/

C-SPAN can be watched streaming at http://www.c-span.org/. Click on the links near the bottom center of the homepage.

I think this is a recording of the Houston presentation that CosmicRocker attended, but it could be something new.

[dvandorn]

Thanks! I won't be awake for it (I work second shift, basically, and to give you an idea, I just got home from work about 10 minutes ago, and my local time (CST) is 2:40 a.m.).

But, through the miracle of DVR, I have it all set up to record. This may be one that I'll copy permanently to tape.

-the other Doug

[edstrick]

Got it set up to record on DVD. Oooooo!
I still want his presentation at Ames Research Center July a year ago.

[ljk4-1]

David Grinspoon (author of Venus Revealed and Lonely Planets) review of Roving Mars and Dying Planet in the November, 2005 issue of Scientific American:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa...7F0000&colID=12

Excerpts:

"Two recent books come at the planet from very different perspectives. In Roving Mars, Steve Squyres gives us a vivid, intimate travelogue of the spectacularly successful (and as of this writing, ongoing) mission of the Mars Exploration Rovers, for which he serves as principal investigator. Robert Markley's Dying Planet takes a more distant view of the human relationship with Mars. An English professor at the University of Illinois, Markley writes about Mars science as a knowledgeable outsider, weaving in cultural history and science fiction."

"Markley might have a field day with some of the language in Roving Mars. Squyres seems obsessed with finding a "water story," even to the point of repeatedly implying that the success of each rover's mission hinges on finding concrete evidence of rocks formed in or altered by liquid water. Now of course, "following the water" is important for figuring out the natural history of Mars and whether it might have been more life-friendly in the past. But isn't a robot geologist, especially the first one on a new world, successful if it simply learns any story the rocks have to tell? It doesn't seem quite right to launch an investigation committed to finding a certain answer. Even less so when that answer, "Yes, there was water here, at some uncertain time and for some uncertain duration," basically confirms the paradigm that has been developing since 1971, as Mariner 9 and subsequent orbiters have provided images and global maps showing abundant evidence for flooding and channel formation. Ultimately the tremendous success of this mission goes much deeper than a simple verification of this widespread belief. Mars has myriad stories to tell. If water is what we seek, then that's what we'll find."

"It is obvious that Squyres knows all this, so why the dumbed-down rhetoric, where success is equated with proving a certain hypothesis? This is, in part, playing along with a certain line that NASA is using to package our current Mars exploration program. "Follow the Water" makes a fine slogan, and it does capture the essence of the questions of comparative planetology and habitability, both past and future, that form the core goals of our Mars program. Yet the actual motivations and strategies are never that simple. Given Squyres's admirable candor in addressing other aspects of NASA politics, I was surprised to see him uncritically adopt what seems like a simplified motivational mantra when describing the success criteria for his complex, multifaceted mission. Maybe he's just haunted by Lowell's ghost."

[dvandorn]

Markley has a point -- and yet, he doesn't. He seems to see the "Follow the Water" mission as a negative, limiting definition of the MER mission, as the antithesis of the scientific method. "Why look for water, which we know was there, when we should simply be looking for the real story the rocks tell us?" seems to be Markley's basic point.

There are two problems with Markley's question. The first is that we did *not* know for certain that water formed the large-scale physical features revealed by Mariner 9, the Viking orbiters, and so on. There have been very elegant theories put forward that purport to explain every feature we see by the action of CO2 phase changes (the "White Mars" theories). These theories have been more or less discredited by the results of the MERs, true -- but that's why you get ground truth, to prove or disprove various theories about the world we observe.

And that's the other problem with Markley's main point -- you do *not* always just investigate what's there, with absolutely no pre-conceived notions as to what you'll find. Sure, if we could just pull limitless chunks of Mars from wherever we wish on the planet and bring them back to Earth for whatever investigations we can think of to run on them, we ought to just grab whatever we can and follow whatever story the rocks tell us. But we can't do that. We can only place a very few sensors on the surface, and only on one or two spots on the surface, and we have to select those instruments, and those spots, based on *something*.

And so, when we have to make these kinds of decisions -- what instruments to fly, where to land them -- we have to try and base those decisions on our best theories as to what we're likely to find. And we have to drop the high-minded approach of "let's just gather all the data we can about the rocks and let them tell their own story," we *must* try and either prove or disprove current theories.

Hence, we get "Follow the Water." It's the same reason the major part of the Viking landers' science payload was designed to look for extant microbial life that, for the instruments to detect it, must be almost identical to terrestrial microbial life. They designed the instrumentation the way they did because, as with the MERs, the Viking landers couldn't carry enough instrumentation to determine exactly every chemical compound in the rocks and soils, exactly how old each piece of rock and soil is, exactly where each rock formed, how and why... and because it was felt that the most important theory to prove or disprove, at that point in time, was whether or not terrestrial-type organisms lived on Mars.

Viking found a situation that didn't fit into the theories; some of the life detectors got positive results, but others (especially the organics detector) did not. Some, Markley possibly included, might say that the Vikings were a complete waste of time, since they were designed to find things that weren't there. But the mixed results of the Viking experiments did not derail investigations of Mars -- they served to re-define the debate.

So, Squyres and company were given a set of goals, primary of which was to determine ground truth on the issue of Mars having once supported open bodies of liquid water. Prove that, and you can proceed on to further investigations, like looking for organic materials (which is, of course, the primary mission of MSL). *Disprove* it, and you reach another of those points where you must re-define the debate.

While it may be noble to believe that researchers always approach their investigations without pre-conceived notions of what results they will find, the bare reality is that almost all scientific investigation is undertaken, and *designed*, to either prove or disprove a given set of theories. The results achievable by most experiments and investigations are usually defined such that they will either strongly prove, or strongly disprove, whatever theory is being tested.

Methinks Mr. Markley might need to descend from the ivory towers and take a realistic look at how and why scientific investigations work...

-the other Doug

[helvick]

I wish I could have said it as well myself, very well put Doug.

[dvandorn]

Thanks -- though on re-reading I note that I was probably assigning an outlook to Mr. Markley that really was being presented by Mr. Grinspoon. So, consider my remarks appropriately adjusted...

-the other Doug

[odave]

I didn't get the impression from Roving Mars that Squyres equated not finding evidence of past water with mission failure. He did talk about how disappointed and depressed the Spirit team felt when they didn't find juicy lake bed sediments in Gusev, but I don't remember reading a single sentence that stated or implied that Spirit was a failure because of it.

As dvandorn points out, it seems like Grinspoon has a disagreement with NASA's direction on robotic exploration of Mars and is reflecting it, rather unfairly I think, in a book review.