The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington is one of the great museums of the world. It is awe-inspiring to see artefacts from the 1903 Wright Flyer to the original Apollo 11 command module. They demonstrate a tradition of brilliant, painstaking design and engineering in the face of environments hostile to man and machine.
Steve Squyres, the scientific principal investigator of the team that proposed, designed and built the Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, is proud to be part of that tradition. But there were plenty of problems along the way. Before the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) project, Squyres had painful years of rejected proposals, starting with one in 1993 for a camera to go on the Mars Environmental Survey Pathfinder. When the MER team finally did receive approval from NASA to construct the rovers, the time frame was almost impossibly brief, with immense technical problems to surmount.
Then, in 2003, when a lastminute problem emerged just before the start of the launch window, it looked as though the launch of Spirit and Opportunity might be delayed until the next good window in 2005, or even permanently. And while Squyres was arguing for the launch to go ahead, an important NASA official told him, depressingly, "I think they'd look pretty damn good over in the Air and Space Museum." That particular problem - as with all those that had preceded it - was finally solved by the hardworking team, but more just kept on coming.
When Spirit and Opportunity were finally launched and on their way to Mars, there was a solar storm of historic proportions, causing Squyres to note wryly: "It wouldn't be MER if we didn't get hit during our cruise by the strongest solar fl are ever recorded. If plagues of locusts could happen in space, we'd probably get hit by one of those, too." Eventually, the rovers proved to be a spectacular success in both scientific and engineering terms, moving well and sending streams of priceless data back to Earth. In this firsthand account of the mission, Squyres, whose original training was as a geologist, shares the excitement he felt as evidence from the rovers started to indicate that a substantial quantity of liquid water had been present on Mars in the distant past.
The "level-one requirement" imposed by NASA was that the rovers should work for 90 sols (Mars days), and drive 600 metres. At the time of writing this review, more than two years after their mid-2003 launches, they are still mobile, and still returning important scientific data to Earth.
In Roving Mars, Squyres is unfailingly modest about his own achievements, and generous about others'. He has an easy, fluid writing style, and explains highly technical issues very clearly. Throughout, he gives the reader an excellent feeling for the combination of bureaucratic, engineering, scientific, geological and computer work involved in bringing an impossible-seeming project to successful completion.
