Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet Paperback - 2006

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. The key is not just to follow the robots, but to follow the intense and passionate people who conceived and built them."—from the bookBroken into three parts, the book will cover the mission from its inception through its final stages. The first section, "Beginnings," will relate how the mission was born. It covers the politics, mistakes, and confusion that were involved in taking the mission from its earliest concepts through to NASA’s final approval. The second part, "Building a Mission to Mars," will focus on the exhilarating and exhausting race to get the spacecraft to the launch pad in time. "Flight," the third part, will tell the story of the journey to Mars and what is found there. "Flight" will be told in a journal format so as to get across the real suspense and excitement that is felt as the author is awaiting and beginning to gather results.