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Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet |  |
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Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet | |
Steve Squyres is the face and voice of NASA?s Mars Exploration Rover mission. Squyres dreamed up the mission in 1987, saw it through from conception in 1995 to a successful landing in 2004, and serves as the principal scientist of its $400 million payload. He has gained a rare inside look at what it took for Rovers Spirit and Opportunity to land on the red planet in January 2004 -- and knows firsthand their findings.
作者简介 Steve Squyres is the scientist and principal investigator behind the Mars Exploration Program as well as a Professor of Astronomy at Cornell University. He has participated in a number of planetary spaceflight missions. He lives in Ithaca, New York.
媒体推荐 ". . . a fascinating, passionate insider?s account." -- Kirkus Reviews
"Roving Mars offers fascinating insights into our exploration of Mars through intelligent probes." -- Arthur C. Clarke
"Roving Mars provides you-are-there thrills and chills you can?t get anywhere else . . ." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"It?s an exceptional story exceptionally well told." -- Minneapolis Star-Tribune
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly
Cornell University scientist Squyres is the principal investigator on the Mars missions that landed the rovers Spirit and Opportunity in January 2004. Expected to operate for only a few weeks, they are still going strong a year and a half later. But as Squyres recounts, their development was plagued with problems, and shortly before the launch of Spirit, it looked like the missions might be scrubbed; the giant landing airbags had failed in test after test. Spirit has endured a communications breakdown and a troublesome rear wheel, but Opportunity quickly found geological evidence for the existence of water millions of years ago. Squyres relates the toll that monitoring the rovers took on his colleagues. The Martian day is 39 minutes longer than a day on Earth, so the team had to reset their watches and their internal clocks to work, eat and sleep like Martians. Squyres communicates the excitement and the anxieties involved in a project of this magnitude, steering clear of technical jargon, though more casual science buffs might want to fast-forward occasionally in early chapters packed with detail on the ins and outs of NASA's approval process for proposals and institutional politicking. 16 pages of color illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
NASA's two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which are currently driving around Mars, have been astoundingly successful; but as Squyres recounts, they came close to staying earthbound. Buffeted by budgetary and technical problems, the rover missions received the green light only in 2001, giving the engineers and scientists just two years to get ready for a 2003 launch. The resulting freneticism of prelaunch preparation permeates Squyres' blow-by-blow narration of his work, which concentrated on several instruments. A geologist designated as the lead scientist for the missions, Squyres had to negotiate with engineers to fit his stuff on their spacecraft--a fundamental antagonism in the space--exploration business. In fact, Squyres bluntly states he distrusted the lead engineer, Peter Theisinger. The working out of their differences, amid other examples of mollification between engineers and scientists, depicts the daily human drama (from Squyres' viewpoint) of diagnosing and solving technical problems, an angle that ought to augment the author's base readership of space-program fans. Couched in conversational prose, Squyres' enthusiasm for exploring Mars shines brightly. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
San Francisco Chronicle
"Roving Mars provides you-are-there thrills and chills you can’t get anywhere else . . ."
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"It’s an exceptional story exceptionally well told."
Kirkus Reviews
". . . a fascinating, passionate insider’s account."
Arthur C. Clarke
"Roving Mars offers fascinating insights into our exploration of Mars through intelligent probes."
Science News
"Riveting and informative." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
