Steve Squyres

Steve Squyers, the Principle Investigator on the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rover missions, takes readers through the development of those missions, from early discussions about what to do next on Mars, through the planning, design and building of the rovers, to their scientific adventures on Mars up through their first shutdown for the Martian winter.

He goes into a lot of detail about all the various trials and tribulations involved: convincing people at NASA to do the two-rover mission, show more funding and scheduling problems (so many scheduling problems!), technical problems that cropped up both before and after launch... And, to be honest, many of those details are not quite as interesting as you might want them to be. But Squyres' account does give a good general sense of what it's like to scramble desperately to get a something like this off the ground and onto Mars, and it does leave me impressed that they got it to work at all, never mind as incredibly well as they did.

And there's no denying that both Spirit and Opportunity were immense successes. It's rather amusing to read Squyres words here, writing in 2004 or 2005 and anticipating the rovers' future: "Surely they'll die before long... within months, perhaps, or in a year or two at the outside. Even in the most optimistic scenario, it's hard to believe that Spirit can survive a second winter on Mars. And Opportunity, the good-luck rover in the warm and sunny climate of Meridiani Planum, will succumb, too, one way or another." Spirit, of course, ended up functioning for over six years on Mars, and good-luck rover Opportunity made it nearly fifteen. Fifteen! Not bad for machines whose nominal operational lifetime was supposed to be 90 days!

So, even though this book held my attention much, much better at some points than at others, the rovers themselves, and the folks behind them, have my complete and unflagging respect. show less

Author has a cool job as science lead on the rover. Sounds friggin awesome! Loved hearing the stories and challenges. However, the writing was a bit uneven. Often he would allude to an issue or problem, but then skip right over it and not give any clarity on how it was solved or what happened. But really fun reading about such an historic science mission.

This is sort of about roving mars, but more about getting the rover TO mars- I can't say I was really all tha interested in NASA's politics when I picked this up but Squyres managed to hook me- was odd, I KNEW the rovers got there, but he somehow managed to make me doubt it. Enjoyable read anyhow.

Steve Squyres was the Principal Investigator for the Spirit and Opportunity missions and this is his memoir of how the idea came into being, how they were designed and built, launched and mission on Mars for the first 150 days. It's fairly lively as his excitement bleeds over but lets face it, the byzantine bureaucracy of NASA can be boring no matter how well written. But you learn what goes on and shows how close the mission came to being canceled many times. The engineering challenges were show more sometimes interesting. The science aspect was boring for me since the discovery of water (or evidence of) is now well known and no great surprise. Overall this is a detailed but interesting look into the people, processes, engineering, technology and science behind probably the most famous NASA mission of the 2000's, as told from the perspective of the lead investigator whose idea it was from the start. show less