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Sojourner: An Insider's View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission
An engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and leader of the robotic program offers an insider's view of the Mars Pathfinder mission that sent a small but sophisticated robot millions of miles through space to explore the rocky terrain of Mars, providing a human perspective on the project and assessing its meaning in terms of scientific discovery. Reprint.
400 pages, Paperback
First published December 2, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 16, 2019
Sojourner: An Insider's View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission is undeniably an insider's look at the Mars Pathfinder Mission.
The author Andrew Mishkin, a senior systems engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a leader of NASA's robotic program, personally worked on, tested, and eventually operated the little rover on Mars and shares the labyrinthine evolution of a radical idea into a reality.
From start to finish it is crammed with almost all the information anyone could possibly want to know about Sojourner and particularly heavy on the details of the numerous issues with the communication, mechanical, electrical, software in the rover.
Tedious though some of that information may be....
And despite everyone's predictions that the 25 pound rover would only last 7 days, Sojourner surpassed expectations and survived 85 days on Mars before the base station (Lander) had its last communication session with Earth. The rover needed the base station to communicate with Earth, despite still functioning at the time communications ended
My sentimental heart would like to imagine that even as I type this Sojourner is defying all odds and still cruising on Mars, testing rocks with its little APXS probe and dutifully sending back data despite the abandonment of its human masters.
The author Andrew Mishkin, a senior systems engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a leader of NASA's robotic program, personally worked on, tested, and eventually operated the little rover on Mars and shares the labyrinthine evolution of a radical idea into a reality.
From start to finish it is crammed with almost all the information anyone could possibly want to know about Sojourner and particularly heavy on the details of the numerous issues with the communication, mechanical, electrical, software in the rover.
Tedious though some of that information may be....
And despite everyone's predictions that the 25 pound rover would only last 7 days, Sojourner surpassed expectations and survived 85 days on Mars before the base station (Lander) had its last communication session with Earth. The rover needed the base station to communicate with Earth, despite still functioning at the time communications ended
My sentimental heart would like to imagine that even as I type this Sojourner is defying all odds and still cruising on Mars, testing rocks with its little APXS probe and dutifully sending back data despite the abandonment of its human masters.
December 10, 2013
Andrew Mishkin is a JPL systems engineer who worked on the Sojourner Mars rover. I already read another book about this project, Managing Martians by Donna Shirley, but this one is much more focused on the technical challenges and therefore much more fun.
JPL started working on rovers in the 1960s for the Surveyor lunar lander program. Two prototypes were built, but none actually flew to the Moon, unlike the Soviet Lunokhods. After 20 years one prototype was taken out of its warehouse and rebuilt. It was the starting point for designing rovers that would explore Mars. Different designs were invented and tested in the Arroyo Seco canyon. It was not even clear whether a wheeled robot is better than a legged one; eventually the wheeled design won as being simpler and more economical. When NASA announced an initiative for covering Mars with a network of environmental observation stations, JPL decided to design a small, cheap rover to explore the neighborhood of each lander. Later this initiative was canceled, and only one lander-rover system flew.
The rover was not supposed to stray far from the lander; should it have communicated with the lander by radio? One team thought so, another preferred a tether. Wire-guided missiles work well, but they do not have wheels that could be entangled in a tether if they drive over it. On the other hand, a tethered rover does not need batteries, and much electronics could stay inside the lander. After a year-long fight, the radio people won. German-built Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer was the rover's main scientific instrument; during the debugging of the probe it was found that its output was very noisy. Something was interfering with the instrument. The team took the instrument producing clean output, and started adding rover components one by one until the source of the noise was discovered: one of the instrument's cables was routed too close to the rover power supply. They rerouted the cable and added copper shielding. During the cold Martian night the rover's electronics might become too cold. JPL requested a spare radioisotope heating unit left over from the Galileo project; the Department of Energy let it have it for free. When the rover was on its way to be launched, the author took a week off, started playing with a rover simulator program at home, and suddenly realized that the time for midnight on Mars in rover software was wrong; the rover might wake up at the wrong time, and deplete its batteries. He went to work the next working day, and added a step to the pre-launch sequence to fix the error.
The spacecraft was successfully launched, flew to Mars (not without more adventures), and landed; the rover descended from the lander, and started driving around and chemically analyzing rocks. Designed to last 7 to 30 Martian days, it lasted for 89. Later the author also worked on the Mars Exploration Rover project.
JPL started working on rovers in the 1960s for the Surveyor lunar lander program. Two prototypes were built, but none actually flew to the Moon, unlike the Soviet Lunokhods. After 20 years one prototype was taken out of its warehouse and rebuilt. It was the starting point for designing rovers that would explore Mars. Different designs were invented and tested in the Arroyo Seco canyon. It was not even clear whether a wheeled robot is better than a legged one; eventually the wheeled design won as being simpler and more economical. When NASA announced an initiative for covering Mars with a network of environmental observation stations, JPL decided to design a small, cheap rover to explore the neighborhood of each lander. Later this initiative was canceled, and only one lander-rover system flew.
The rover was not supposed to stray far from the lander; should it have communicated with the lander by radio? One team thought so, another preferred a tether. Wire-guided missiles work well, but they do not have wheels that could be entangled in a tether if they drive over it. On the other hand, a tethered rover does not need batteries, and much electronics could stay inside the lander. After a year-long fight, the radio people won. German-built Alpha Proton X-ray Spectrometer was the rover's main scientific instrument; during the debugging of the probe it was found that its output was very noisy. Something was interfering with the instrument. The team took the instrument producing clean output, and started adding rover components one by one until the source of the noise was discovered: one of the instrument's cables was routed too close to the rover power supply. They rerouted the cable and added copper shielding. During the cold Martian night the rover's electronics might become too cold. JPL requested a spare radioisotope heating unit left over from the Galileo project; the Department of Energy let it have it for free. When the rover was on its way to be launched, the author took a week off, started playing with a rover simulator program at home, and suddenly realized that the time for midnight on Mars in rover software was wrong; the rover might wake up at the wrong time, and deplete its batteries. He went to work the next working day, and added a step to the pre-launch sequence to fix the error.
The spacecraft was successfully launched, flew to Mars (not without more adventures), and landed; the rover descended from the lander, and started driving around and chemically analyzing rocks. Designed to last 7 to 30 Martian days, it lasted for 89. Later the author also worked on the Mars Exploration Rover project.
June 22, 2015
Sojourner was the great herald of roving Mars missions, and there were certainly a number of strong personalities and technical and political obstacles that challenged its success. It would be the making of a stronger book if the author were able to give a more distanced, overall view of the project, instead of the single point-of-view. Unfortunately, this book doesn't adequately convey the excitement of this groundbreaking mission.
May 3, 2021
A very interesting and engaging book about Sojourner, the Mars Pathfinder Mission Rover. The book details how the rover came to be from inception to building, launching to Mars and it's 84 Martian days of exploring the surface of another world. One might think that this might be a boring subject or tedious to read but Mr. Mishkin has crafted an entirely readable story full of the science, facts and people who made the impossible come true.
March 24, 2019
Informative with some great anecdotes, but I would have liked to read more about the lander and more about the actual mission as the focus was almost entirely on building and testing.
August 4, 2021
A good inside view of life and missions at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) but could have used an editor!
November 8, 2021
Accurate and accessible
October 24, 2015
After reading 2 books about Pathfinder, this one brings the most technical insight into the whole project. Mishkin describes technical issues of all sorts (communication, mechanical, electrical, software, ...) they've experienced in great detail. Highly recommended for everyone interested in space hardware and software.
One note -- the book gets better and better as it progresses.
One note -- the book gets better and better as it progresses.
January 29, 2008
An insider's view is exactly what I was after. I wish books like this had been written about previous space missions such as Voyager or Cassini.
November 12, 2012
cool
nice
nice
March 19, 2009
Really neat, interesting to read an engineer's memoirs.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews