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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.
- GenresNonfictionScienceSpace
432 pages, Paperback
First published August 3, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 28, 2008
I'm pretty sure I bought this one for the cover. I certainly can't believe I skimmed it before I bought it, because it reads like a dramatically slowed down episode of NOVA on PBS. This is the reading material they provide for MTV fans in hell. On the other hand, if you're good at using a bookmark and you find our adventures in outer space interesting you may find it rewarding to keep this one around and take it in chunks. Engineers will also probably enjoy the problems faced, and there are indeed many accounts of ingenuity and panic interspersed.
April 7, 2022
This is like Andy Weir's "The Martian," but it's all true! A whole series of problems arise, and Squyres and the JPL team have to engineer their way through them. I loved it.
> But back during the earliest days of the project Glenn realized that someday we might need the flexibility to deal with a broken flash file system, and he put INIT_CRIPPLED in the system and left it there. And when the anomaly hit, it saved the mission.
> it’s the Spirit guys who’ve consistently felt shortchanged by events ever since we landed. We rejoice when Spirit touches down safely, and then Opportunity rolls to a stop right in front of a stack of sedimentary rocks. We rejoice when Spirit drives 50 meters in a sol, and then Opportunity reels off 140. We rejoice when Spirit gets to Bonneville and finds a pretty view, and then Opportunity gets to Endurance and finds layered cliffs of sediments
> The Pathfinder system was a wonderful way to land on Mars, but it was definitely not rover-shaped on the inside. Using the Pathfinder lander would mean that we’d have to find a way to fold our rover up into a tetrahedron, and then do the same trick again in reverse once we landed.
> The original plan for the parachutes had been the same as for the airbags: use the Pathfinder chute. But by the time Adam showed up on the project, that idea was already dead. The lander had grown so much that there was no point in even testing the Pathfinder design to see if it might work. Simple calculations were enough to prove that the Pathfinder chute was too small to keep us from crashing
> Something wasn’t right. They flew an identical chute the next day, under perfect conditions again. Again the chute exploded. They had a problem. … when the forces that want to pop the chute open are repeatedly overcome by other forces that flap it closed again. Squidding had never been seen in a parachute like ours before, not in thirty years of testing. But now this chute, the one that Adam was betting would take us to Mars, was squidding … Adam found a tape measure, and sure enough, the vent hole in the middle of the parachute was too big. Something hadn’t been communicated quite right between JPL and the parachute vendor. … The chute still opened too slowly. Even more frustrating, measurements afterward showed that the vent hole was still bigger than he’d wanted it to be. Miscommunication and aerodynamics were conspiring against him
> But in 2005, the next chance to go to Mars, the geometry was terrible. If we launched in 2005, we’d arrive at Mars when the planet was far from the Sun, and when it was almost as far away from Earth as it ever gets. Solar power would be bad, and communication to Earth would be awful. The mission was so bad in 2005 that it wasn’t clear that it made sense to fly it at all.
> But that doesn’t mean that the rocks of the Columbia Hills aren’t older still. In fact, the water that once soaked the hills may date from some truly ancient epoch that has nothing whatsoever to do with the lake that brought us to Gusev Crater.
> At Meridiani, there’s no question that we found what we came looking for, and more. The rocks there were laid down in liquid water, in an environment that surely must have been suitable for some primitive forms of life.
> But back during the earliest days of the project Glenn realized that someday we might need the flexibility to deal with a broken flash file system, and he put INIT_CRIPPLED in the system and left it there. And when the anomaly hit, it saved the mission.
> it’s the Spirit guys who’ve consistently felt shortchanged by events ever since we landed. We rejoice when Spirit touches down safely, and then Opportunity rolls to a stop right in front of a stack of sedimentary rocks. We rejoice when Spirit drives 50 meters in a sol, and then Opportunity reels off 140. We rejoice when Spirit gets to Bonneville and finds a pretty view, and then Opportunity gets to Endurance and finds layered cliffs of sediments
> The Pathfinder system was a wonderful way to land on Mars, but it was definitely not rover-shaped on the inside. Using the Pathfinder lander would mean that we’d have to find a way to fold our rover up into a tetrahedron, and then do the same trick again in reverse once we landed.
> The original plan for the parachutes had been the same as for the airbags: use the Pathfinder chute. But by the time Adam showed up on the project, that idea was already dead. The lander had grown so much that there was no point in even testing the Pathfinder design to see if it might work. Simple calculations were enough to prove that the Pathfinder chute was too small to keep us from crashing
> Something wasn’t right. They flew an identical chute the next day, under perfect conditions again. Again the chute exploded. They had a problem. … when the forces that want to pop the chute open are repeatedly overcome by other forces that flap it closed again. Squidding had never been seen in a parachute like ours before, not in thirty years of testing. But now this chute, the one that Adam was betting would take us to Mars, was squidding … Adam found a tape measure, and sure enough, the vent hole in the middle of the parachute was too big. Something hadn’t been communicated quite right between JPL and the parachute vendor. … The chute still opened too slowly. Even more frustrating, measurements afterward showed that the vent hole was still bigger than he’d wanted it to be. Miscommunication and aerodynamics were conspiring against him
> But in 2005, the next chance to go to Mars, the geometry was terrible. If we launched in 2005, we’d arrive at Mars when the planet was far from the Sun, and when it was almost as far away from Earth as it ever gets. Solar power would be bad, and communication to Earth would be awful. The mission was so bad in 2005 that it wasn’t clear that it made sense to fly it at all.
> But that doesn’t mean that the rocks of the Columbia Hills aren’t older still. In fact, the water that once soaked the hills may date from some truly ancient epoch that has nothing whatsoever to do with the lake that brought us to Gusev Crater.
> At Meridiani, there’s no question that we found what we came looking for, and more. The rocks there were laid down in liquid water, in an environment that surely must have been suitable for some primitive forms of life.
September 10, 2025
I really enjoyed learning about what goes into a NASA project as well as all the hurdles needed to be jumped. Squyres has such love for the rover program and it really came through and it's nice to see how most people anthropomorphize the rovers. The only thing that sucked is this book was published in 2005 during the beginning of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers mission meaning I'd love a book by him going over all the findings they made in their respective lives since they continued on for many more years.
April 3, 2009
Amazing. Astounding.. Breathtaking adventure in space. In charge of of whole project he make it sound easy. Learned more science here than in years before. Local, from our town of 2400.
January 22, 2012
Being engineer, I liked mainly the part about technical problems and solutions. Even though the author is geologist, he has good understanding of basic technical principles and describes main problems they have run into. Reading this book I understood, how hard work is to send something to space and I surprised, together with the author, I think, that their mission runs so long.
April 21, 2009
Exciting account of the politics and engineering challenges to get Spirit and Opportunity to Mars, and what they found when they got there. And just like the team that worked on them, you even start to get attached to the two rovers.
May 12, 2020
Pretty fun and interesting look at the process of putting two robots on Mars. Gets a bit hard to follow with technical jargon sometimes, so the glossary is somewhat necessary, which slows down reading a bit, but I think that's unavoidable
July 31, 2016
Excellent book, although it drags a bit in places. A bit out of date, since the rovers (as of 2010) are still functioning during the martian summer.
October 26, 2016
Very entertaining. But I'm a nerd.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews