Stuff I’m Reading:
Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet by Steve Squyres.
I have always been interested by Mars and this book promised to follow the journey of Spirit and Opportunity, the two unmanned rovers that landed on the planet in 2004. Steve Squyres was the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, and this book starts with the earlier failed proposals before he finally got the call with this mission.
Squyres discusses things like the politics of NASA, budget issues, and the natural animosity between scientists and engineers--which is the result of the two having very different philosophies. The Engineer operates under the “get it done” real world approach whereas the Scientist hopes to reach for the skies, at times leading to unworkable ambitions. After much discussion it was decided that the best way to approach it would be to use two different Martian rovers, to build a redundancy into the system should one fail (much like my two keyboard system!).
Part two is all about the development of the rovers. As this mission unfolds the scientist vs. engineer gap must be closed to make them succeed.
Part three then takes a day by day look at what happened on the mission, from launch to landing on Mars. You really feel Squyres’ triumph when Spirit lands on Mars and his pain when they lose contact with it later. The rest of the book takes from his journals as the two rovers drive around doing “science stuff” and taking pictures. The pictures are great, the writing is heavy-scientific but aimed at the layman (there is a glossary in back) and overall it is a good read.
As a big Star Trek fan I look at things like this as the baby steps man will take on his way to greater things…like warp drive and visiting planets with blue aliens that Captain Kirk can bang.
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