ROVING MARS
ROVING MARS is a riveting first-person account of the Mars Exploration Mission from beginning to end from the scientist behind it all. The book covers the journey of rovers Spirit and Opportunity to Mars, and their successful landing on the planet’s surface. Scientists will have the first in-depth study of our closest planet through the use of sophisticated on-board cameras and scientific instruments. They will spend months operating on the surface of the planet, collecting data and transmitting images back to Earth. "For much of the last several centuries, exploration has been one of humanity’s most important pursuits. Bust most of what we call ‘exploration’ today is not. There are adventurers who find some new way to cover old ground, and there are researchers who go to familiar places like Antarctica or low Earth orbit to carry out their work. Even the most successful NASA spacecraft, like the Hubble Space Telescope and the various Mars orbiters, are more like remote observation outposts than they are robotic explorers. This mission, however, will be exploration in the true sense—sending robotic surrogates for human explorers into an unknown environment on a voyage of scientific discovery. I want the mission to capture the public imagination in the same way that the journeys of explorers of past centuries did.
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What Hacker News says
- Sounds good, will be watching.
Squyres' book, Roving Mars, is highly recommended. A deep, technical accounting of his life-long ambition to get his equipment on Mars.
- This book is written by Steven Squyres, the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission.
I got at as a Christmas present and didn’t expect much but it turned out to be one of the best books I have read:
https://www.amazon.com.au/Roving-Mars-Steve-Squyres/dp/14013...
- I was rooting for this little guy to continue it's long legacy. Back around 2010 I happened upon Squyres' book on bringing the MER(s) to reality & I've been hooked ever since.
Def'y a good read:
- Steven Squyres, the Principal Scientist of the program came to Microsoft to give a talk. One of the best talks I’ve been to.
So many interesting tidbits like the parts about the rovers expected short lifetime due to the dust, and how (if I remember correctly) they fixed this by shaking the solar panels like wings.
He talked about the rover drivers, and how they all had to live in special light cycle controlled buildings to get them used to working on Martian days vs. Earth (the extra hour adds up over time).
He wrote a book, a worthy read. The printing I got had some amazing pictures in it:
https://www.amazon.com/Roving-Mars-Spirit-Opportunity-Explor...
RIP Opportunity. An amazing testament to our need to explore.
- Sort of.
I think the book "Roving Mars" covers this the best. They were worried about a dust storm like the one that killed Opportunity, so they designed the rover to last 90 days even in the pitch darkness of a dust storm. To make sure they'd succeed even in this worst case, they added two additional petals worth of solar panels (IIRC, about a 50% increase in area) to the MERs.
Reading a contemporary description, they seemed to be very scared they wouldn't make the 90 days - hence this major and risky redesign. (The new panels had to open, and if one failed it would block off both the new solar panel, and one of the original ones.)
It worked, and so they had enough extra power to last through that first Martian year, where the winds blew the panels clean. And the rest is history.
- I was really fortunate to have him as an astronomy professor right around the time of the launch. He's great at making complex things easy to understand, and his enthusiasm is contagious. Highly recommend his book, but if you've only got an hour here's a good video conversation.
* Roving Mars with Steve Squyres - Conversations with History - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI6KEzsb26U
