Mars Rover
description: space exploration vehicle designed to move across the surface of Mars
94 results
The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job
by Emily Lakdawalla · 5 Mar 2018 · 571pp · 111,306 words
Springer Praxis Books Space Exploration Emily Lakdawalla The Design and Engineering of Curiosity How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job Emily LakdawallaThe Planetary Society, Pasadena, CA, USA Springer Praxis Books ISBN 978-3-319-68144-3e-ISBN 978-3-319-68146-7
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’s science, from landing site selection, through pre-landing mapping, the operational adventure, and the science results. Look for Curiosity and Its Science Mission: A Mars Rover Goes to Work in 2019. Acknowledgments This book would not exist without the generous assistance of numerous members of the Mars Science Laboratory team and
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nuclear power design available in 2002 – the General Purpose Heat Source RTG used for Galileo, Ulysses, Cassini, and New Horizons – was not suitable for a Mars rover. It was too massive (more than a meter long and weighing 57 kilograms). It produced more power than needed (285 watts). Most importantly, its electricity
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Edgett K (2000) Sedimentary Rocks of Early Mars. Science 290:1927–1937, DOI: 10.1126/science.290.5498.1927 Manning R and Simon W (2014) Mars Rover Curiosity. Smithsonian Books, Washington, DC Mars Program Synthesis Group (2003) Mars Exploration Strategy 2009–2020 Mars Science Laboratory Mission Project Science Integration Group (PSIG) (2003
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2007 NASA (2008) Next NASA Mars Mission Rescheduled for 2011. Press release dated 4 Dec 2008 NASA (2009) NASA Selects Student’s Entry as New Mars Rover Name. Press release dated 27 May 2009 NASA Office of the Inspector General (2011) NASA’s Management of the Mars Science Laboratory Project. Report dated
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Project and Science Overview. Presentation to the First Landing Site Workshop, Monrovia, CA, USA, May 31-June 2, 2006 Wallace M (2012) Curiosity: The Next Mars Rover. Presentation to the Royal Aeronautical Society, Applied Aerodynamics Group Conference, 17–19 Jul 2012, London, UK Watkins M (2008) MSL Project Status and Landing Site
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Feb 2013 Footnotes 1NASA (2000b) press release dated October 26, 2000 2Mars Program Synthesis Group (2003) Mars Exploration Strategy 2009-2020 3Manning and Simon (2014) Mars Rover Curiosity 4Caffrey et al (2004) 5Manning and Simon (2014) 6Rob Manning credits Dara Sabahi with that realization 7NASA (2000a) Mars Program Independent Assessment Team Summary
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, on Mars, still had the brains of an interplanetary spacecraft. The next major task for the mission was to teach the spacecraft to become a Mars rover. Figure 2.34. Cropped sections from two rear Hazcam images from landing day. Left: RLA_397502188EDR_D0010000AUT_04096M1, taken at 5:18:39, less than
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data reconstruction. Paper presented to the 36th AAS Guidance and Control Conference, 1–6 Feb 2013; Breckenridge, CO, USA Manning R and Simon W (2014) Mars Rover Curiosity. Smithsonian Books, Washington, DC Martin-Mur T et al (2012) Mars Science Laboratory Navigation Results. Paper presented at the 23rd International Symposium on Space
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: 10.2514/1.A32737 NASA (2011a) Mars Science Laboratory Launch. Press kit dated Nov 2011 NASA (2011b) NASA Ready for November Launch of Car-Size Mars Rover. Press release dated 19 Nov 2011 NASA (2011c) NASA Mars-Bound Rover Begins Research In Space. Press release dated 13 Dec 2011 NASA (2012a) Mars
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, 4–11 Mar 2006, Big Sky, Montana, USA United Launch Alliance (2011) Atlas V MSL Mission Overview. Press kit. Wallace M (2012) Curiosity: The Next Mars Rover. Presentation to the Royal Aeronautical Society, Applied Aerodynamics Group Conference, 17–19 Jul 2012, London, UK Way D et al (2013) Assessment of the Mars
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Correction Maneuver was shared with me in an email by Rob Manning on January 8, 2015, and corrects timeline errors he made in his book, Mars Rover Curiosity 8NASA (2011c) 9JPL (2012b) 10Martin-Mur et al (2012) 11Martin-Mur et al (2014) 12Martin-Mur et al (2014) 13Table data are from Abilleira
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science on Mars, how they are supposed to work, and how things have occasionally gone wrong. Figure 4.1. Family portrait of the three JPL Mars rovers. In front is Marie Curie, the flight spare of the Sojourner rover, now a museum piece. At left is the Surface System Test Bed for
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system design. Article in Deep Space Communications and Navigation Systems Center of Excellence (DESCANSO) Design and Performance Summary Series Manning R and Simon W (2014) Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity’s Chief Engineer. Smithsonian Books, Washington DC NASA (2003) NASA Facts: Multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectic generator (MMRTG). Fact sheet
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/guest-blogs/20120821-limonadi-sampling-mars-3-drilling-challenges.html Article dated 21 Aug 2012, accessed 6 May 2016 Manning R and Simon W (2014) Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity’s Chief Engineer. Smithsonian Books, Washington DC Novak K et al (2008) Mars Science Laboratory rover actuator thermal design
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Space Res 57:1223–1240, DOI: 10.1016/j.asr.2015.12.040 Lemmon M T et al (2017) Dust devil activity at the Curiosity Mars rover field site. Paper presented at the 48th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, The Woodlands, Texas, 20–24 Mar 2017 Maki J et al (2012) The
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Mar 2009 Gellert R et al (2015) In Situ Compositional Measurements of Rocks and Soils with the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer on NASA’s Mars Rovers. Elements 11:39–44, DOI: 10.2113/gselements.11.1.39 JPL (2009) Sample Analysis at Mars. https://msl-scicorner.jpl.nasa.gov/Instruments/SAM
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, and science results – is beyond the scope of this book. You may read that story in the next book, Curiosity and Its Science Mission: A Mars Rover Goes to Work . When this book was submitted for publication in late 2017, the rover had just climbed onto Vera Rubin Ridge, seeing for the
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an honorary doctorate from The Open University in 2017. She is currently working on the sequel to this book, Curiosity and Its Science Mission: A Mars Rover Goes to Work . She resides in Los Angeles with her husband (who is not a planetary scientist) and two daughters. Index A Aeolis Mons aerogel
Red Rover: Inside the Story of Robotic Space Exploration, From Genesis to the Mars Rover Curiosity
by Roger Wiens · 12 Mar 2013 · 265pp · 79,896 words
RED ROVER Inside the Story of Robotic Space Exploration, from Genesis to the Mars Rover Curiosity ROGER WIENS BASIC BOOKS A MEMBER OF THE PERSEUS BOOKS GROUP NEW YORK Copyright © 2013 by Roger Wiens Published by Basic Books, A Member
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or driving on another planet or asteroid. Over the past fifteen years, robotic space exploration has enjoyed a huge renaissance, starting arguably with the first Mars rover, the puny 23-pound Sojourner. Mechanical creations from Earth are orbiting Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, the asteroid Vesta, Jupiter, and Saturn; others are on
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to be the bigger and more powerful successor to the twin Mars Exploration Rovers. NASA planned to follow a path of incremental development for its Mars rovers. Sojourner, which landed in 1997, was a minuscule technology-demonstration vehicle. At less than 25 pounds, it had no arm and no mast. It could
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it was to experience in space and on Mars. The shake test went fine, but the thermal test came out badly. In the case of Mars rover instruments, “bake” is a misnomer, as the real challenge comes at cold temperatures. We found that the spectrometer was clearly not built even for arctic
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of the two most expensive instruments was more than $150 million. This is not too surprising, given that the much smaller payload of the previous Mars rovers cost well over $40 million, not adjusting for inflation. Another component that was costing a lot more than expected was the Sample Arm and Sample
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Center. The meeting was open to anyone, not just the Curiosity team. Although many of the attendees were veterans of the two previous generations of Mars rovers, notably absent were the MER science leaders Steve Squyres and Ray Arvidson. Their absence represented the shift in leadership for the new mission. The assembly
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and on robotic exploration. Managing Martians, by Donna Shirley, Broadway Books, 1998, 277 pages. This book was written by the JPL manager of the first Mars rover mission, which landed a toy-sized rover that lasted two months. A Traveler’s Guide to Mars, by William K. Hartmann, Workman Publishing Company, 2003
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Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet, by Steve Squyres, Hyperion, 2005, 422 pages. Steve was the project scientist for the second Mars rover mission. In this book he describes this JPL project and the first several months on Mars. Space Invaders: How Robotic Spacecraft Explore the Solar System
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Crane, (ins. img. 13), 145, 162, 194, 203, 204, 207, 208, 213 Slow Motion Field Test, 172–176 Smithsonian Museum, 183 Snodgrass, Roger, 55 Sojourner, Mars rover, 98, 171 Solar system, formation of, 62, 63, 64 Solar wind, described, 17, 24n Solar-wind concentrator design, 27, 35, 36, 63, (ins. img. 1
Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account From Curiosity's Chief Engineer
by Rob Manning and William L. Simon · 20 Oct 2014 · 237pp · 76,486 words
projects. At the same time, I would continue to be an active part of a loose-knit group juggling ideas for landing a much larger Mars rover, something we initially called a “MegaRover” but was soon being called the “Mars Smart Lander.” Without Pathfinder and Sojourner, we couldn’t have built Spirit
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Pathfinder in the 1990s and had led the project-level system engineering on Mars Exploration Rover with me, on which she and her team pioneered Mars rover operations concepts. By then she had become the most experienced Mars surface operations engineer within NASA. Jennifer and her husband, who was in the Air
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strings to help their own scientists and gain national prestige by establishing a foothold in the relatively new art of developing space hardware for a Mars rover. “Frankly,” Roger says, “I figured the chances of our instruments being selected were lousy. We had not yet proven we could build an instrument that
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. The rock had been given the name “Jake Matijevic,” in honor of MSL’s Surface Operations Systems chief engineer and former manager of the first Mars rover, the little Sojourner, who had passed away just days after the landing. Like the Coronation results, these analyses showed this basaltic “lava” rock to be
The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World
by Sarah Stewart Johnson · 6 Jul 2020 · 400pp · 99,489 words
FOR MERIDIANI Ibid., p. 307. “HOLY SMOKES” Ibid., pp. 293–294; misunderstanding the expression, Korea’s major afternoon daily ran with the headline, THE SECOND MARS ROVER LANDS, SEEING MYSTERIOUS SMOKE. “HOLE IN ONE” Squyres, Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet, p. 294. BARELY ANKLE-HIGH Marcus
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of the Voyager imaging team. Steven Squyres, “The Morphology and Evolution of Ganymede and Callisto,” Cornell PhD thesis (1981). STIPPLED WITH BLUEBERRIES David R. Williams, “Mars Rover ‘Opportunity’ Images,” NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (June 16, 2004). COLUMBIA HILLS The Columbia Hills were named after the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated as
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Mahaffy et. al., “The Sample Analysis at Mars Investigation and Instrument Suite,” Space Science Reviews; Emily Lakdawalla, The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018). SIMPLE COMPOUNDS C. Freissinet, et al., “Organic Molecules in the Sheepbed Mudstone, Gale Crater, Mars,” Journal of Geophysical
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of making the movie Gravity. For more information, see: Emily Lakdawalla, “Similarities and differences in the landing sites of ESA’s and NASA’s 2020 Mars rovers,” Nature Astronomy, 3 (2019), p. 190; Mike Wall, “4 Mars Missions Are One Year Away from Launching to the Red Planet in July 2020,” Space
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-Hosted Life on Earth and the Search on Mars: A Review and Strategy for Exploration,” Astrobiology (2019). SITE CALLED MIDWAY Paul Voosen, “NASA’s Next Mars Rover Aims to Explore Two Promising Sites.” Science 362, no. 6411 (2018), pp. 139–140. Midway’s strongest advocate in the landing site selection process was
The Search for Life on Mars
by Elizabeth Howell · 14 Apr 2020 · 530pp · 145,220 words
, engineers put the new, improved wheels through their paces for their next mission. Named after Rosalind Franklin, the pioneer of DNA, Europe’s first-ever Mars rover will dig deeper into the surface, which some believe will provide the evidence life existed. An improved version of the self-contained chemistry laboratory known
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role, she became interested in how rovers would work on Mars and what technology would be needed. In the way of all space agencies, the Mars Rover program, which Shirley joined in 1987, grew very fast. Two years later, the Red Planet briefly flowered as a grand national goal after President George
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is by Ashwin Vasavada: “Our Changing View of Mars,” Physics Today, March 2017. For findings in Yellowknife Bay, see Kerr, R. A., “New Results Send Mars Rover on a Quest for Ancient Life,” Science, December 2013, and Ken Kremer, “Curiosity Celebrates 1st Martian Christmas at Yellowknife Bay,” Universe Today, 2014. The background
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on Spirit and Opportunity’s findings may be found in Koren, Marina, “NASA Mars Rovers Curiosity and Opportunity Are Having a Rough Year,” Atlantic, September 18, 2018, and Wall, Mike, “How NASA’s Opportunity and Spirit Rovers Changed Mars Exploration
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–2537: SAM Wet Chemistry Experiment,” Mission Update, Mars Exploration Program, September 24, 2019. The cautionary quote regarding the organics is taken from Ian Sample, “Nasa Mars Rover Finds Organic Matter in Ancient Lake Bed,” Guardian, June 7, 2018. Background on what happened in 2014 may be found in Wall, Mike, “Curiosity Rover
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news release, November 19, 2018. A good discussion of the other candidate sites is David, L., “Scientists Double Down on Landing Sites for Sample-Collecting Mars Rover,” Scientific American, October 22, 2018, and “Overview of Improvements on the Mars 2020, the Entry, Descent & Landing Technologies,” JPL Mars website. Information on the Sayh
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, interviewed on June 5, 2019. See Wall, Mike, “Meet ‘Kazachok’: Landing Platform for ExoMars Rover Gets a Name,” Space.com, March 21, 2019; “ESA’s Mars Rover Has a Name, Rosalind Franklin,” ESA press release, February 7, 2019; “ExoMars Landing Platform Arrives in Europe with Name,” ESA release, March 21, 2019; Amos
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to Find Out,” Newsweek, May 19, 2018; Wilks, Jeremy, “Will ExoMars Be the Mission to Find Life on Mars?” Euronews, November 23, 2018; Wilks, J., “Mars Rovers: The Red Planet Welcomes Careful Drivers,” Engineering and Technology, May 25, 2017; and “Mars Doesn’t Need Our Microbes: How to Keep the Red Planet
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Pristine,” Discover, June 2019. MOMA is described in detail in https://exploration.esa.int/web/mars; Todd, Iain, “Science Instruments Installed on UK-built Mars Rover Rosalind Franklin,” BBC Sky at Night magazine, August 22, 2019; “Moving on Mars,” ESA Feature, May 30, 2019; and Amos, J., “Rosalind Franklin
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Mars Rover Assembly Continued,” BBC News Online, August 27, 2019. The saga of the parachutes was covered in “ExoMars Parachute Testing Continues,” ESA website, “Our Activities,” August
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, 100, 106, 119, 131, 136, 140, 258, 273, 289, 319n Mars 2, 96, 325n Mars 3, 96, 325n Mars ’96 mission, 337n Mars 2020. See Mars rovers, Perseverance rover Mars Climate Orbiter, 136, 165 Mars Color Imager (MARCI), 136 Mars Descent Imager (MARDI), 71, 136, 137 Mars exploration programs, 128, 145, 158
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Polar Lander, 2, 136, 166 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), 12, 18, 20, 21, 63, 64, 69, 130–132, 134, 137, 181, 196, 197, 271, 351n Mars rovers, 40, 57, 58–62, 64–73, 77, 78, 83, 84, 125, 133–35, 137–40, 141, 143–45, 151, 152–58, 162, 164, 192, 254
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ramps and rails 274 shoulder joint 274 “wheel walking,” 275 Roscosmos (Russian space agency), 78, 271, 337n Ross, James Clark, 4, 23, 344n rovers. See Mars rovers; individual rover names Rubin, Vera, 68, 135, 323n rusty dusts, 64, 109, 113 Sagan, Carl, 93, 107, 269, 326n, 350n, 353n Sample Analysis at Mars
The Mission: A True Story
by David W. Brown · 26 Jan 2021
Karla Clark, an engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory Wernher von Braun, a rocket scientist Daniel Goldin, the NASA administrator from 1992 to 2001 Pathfinder, a Mars rover mission in 1997 James Green, the head of planetary science at NASA Fran Bagenal, a planetary scientist Ralph Lorenz, a planetary scientist Jonathan Lunine, a
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, a spacecraft that will orbit Jupiter Mars Science Laboratory, a rover mission in 2012 Tom Gavin, an engineer Dave Senske, a planetary scientist Spirit } Two Mars rovers, landed in 2004 Opportunity Lori Garver, the deputy administrator of NASA from 2009 to 2013 Joan Salute, a program executive at NASA headquarters Barry Goldstein
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the road, these missions were worth every dime to the astronaut-centric agency. This gave Jet Propulsion Laboratory greater latitude in planning its most ambitious Mars rover yet: the Mars Science Laboratory. The vehicle was about the size of a Jeep, weighed just shy of a ton, was a six-wheeled beast
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a line clean through the icy moon and moved on to the next thing, because in his portfolio of missions, he now also held the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. He was on the winning team! But the solar system stretched beyond the Red Planet. The Mars community framed its exploration as
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in St. Louis, Susan studying physics, and Curt, planetary science. His graduate advisor was Ray Arvidson, the deputy lead on proposals for a pair of Mars rovers—the same robots that Curt would one day add to his portfolio as program scientist at NASA headquarters. Ray expected his students to get real
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. (You were going to do research.) Thus spake Ray: Your day job is your research. Your night job is teaching assistant. Your sleep job is Mars rover operations. So to give him that experience, Arvidson and his colleagues would say, Hey, Curt, we need you to look over this part of the
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all work stopped tomorrow and every Martian spacecraft self-destructed, scientists could still spend a decade studying new data. Mars. Steve Squyres—he of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity—spoke so gleefully, and Louise was just blindsided. As if it mattered, the Jupiter Europa Orbiter was announced as the second-highest
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world—was renamed the Ronald Greeley Center for Planetary Studies. Ron had been a key scientist on most missions the agency flew, and on every Mars rover to have pressed tracks into rusty Martian soil. Just after he passed away, the rover Opportunity settled in for the winter on the rim of
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meeting, another request for information, another mission study, another consult, another talk, another news article speeding across the wire, the decaying budgets of planetary science, Mars rovers and the James Webb Space Telescope gobbling everything green, AND WHERE WAS BOB’S SPACESHIP? He kept taking these leaps, and it was—what if
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/article/stern-steps-down-as-head. See also K. Tobin, “Mixed Signals from NASA About Fate of Mars Rover,” CNN, last modified March 24, 2008, http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/03/24/nasa.mars.rover. See also K. Cowing, “Give Us What We Want or We’ll Shoot the Cute Little Rover
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, 2008, http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2008/03/give-us-what-we-want-or-well-shoot-the-cute-little-rover.html. See also J. Foust, “Mars Rover Funding Cuts: Will There Be a Backlash?,” Space Politics, last modified March 24, 2008, http://www.spacepolitics.com/2008/03/24
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/mars-rover-funding-cuts-will-there-be-a-backlash. 259.Stern and Grinspoon, Chasing New Horizons, 142. See also T. May, interview by author, May 11, 2016.
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that We Were Going to Mars, Jet Propulsion Laboratory slapped on the agency’s desk a little something it had been working on called the Mars Rover Sample Return. What size rover do you fine ladies and gents want? We have one that weighs about the same as a kangaroo, and gee
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, 2017. 423.C. Greeley, email message to author, December 13, 2013. 424.Ibid., December 8, 2013. 425.G. Webster, “‘Greeley Haven’ Is Winter Workplace for Mars Rover,” NASA: Spirit and Opportunity: Mars Exploration Rovers, last modified January 5, 2012, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/news/mer20120105.html. 426.R. Greeley
Interplanetary Robots
by Rod Pyle
at first—arrive before it starts up, and you stand there, wondering what this set of gray strips running floor-to-ceiling next to the Mars rover are. Then it suddenly bursts into cold white light, a massive wave of it, moving from top to bottom or the reverse. The pulses of
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the moon. It was launched on an Atlas rocket, the repurposed nuclear missile that had also launched John Glenn into orbit in 1962. Like the Mars rovers that would come decades later, the Surveyors did not go into lunar orbit before landing, but were sent in a trajectory that aimed right at
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operated for an accumulated seventeen months on the moon and returned 87,000 images for examination. While modest compared to the results gleaned from modern Mars rovers or the Voyager program, some of which have operated for a decade or more, for the time the Surveyors were a notable achievement in command
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four months, the rover covered a distance of almost 26 miles in that time, a record for robotic traverses that stood until NASA's Opportunity Mars rover surpassed it by a slight margin—as of 2018, Opportunity's total distance traveled stands at 28.06 miles, but that's taken fourteen years
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the use of shock-absorbing airbags after a long and exhaustive research effort led by Rob Manning, the chief engineer for all of JPL's Mars rovers. A week or so after the landing, I would return to JPL for a post-landing conference. There would be a number of these, but
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enjoyable process. On trumpet was his Caltech-educated brother Rob, who was the chief engineer on Curiosity. He's been in that post for every Mars rover built, after cutting his teeth in projects like Cassini. “My first decade at JPL revolved around spacecraft computers and advanced computer architectures,” he says.1
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devices could succeed on Venus, where electronics would simply melt. “Venus is too inhospitable for the kind of complex control systems you have on a Mars rover,” Sauder said. “But with a fully mechanical rover, you might be able to survive as long as a year.”1 Another engineer on the project
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level of autonomy. If NASA has its way, we could be exploring the seas of Titan within twenty years. In the next few years, the Mars rover Curiosity will have a twin on the planet, much as the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity did when its sibling Spirit was still roving half a
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rover drives along, seeking underground deposits of water in any state. A weather-detecting instrument will be present, as has been carried on all previous Mars rovers. Called MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer), this instrument will measure temperature, wind, humidity, and several other characteristics of the Martian environment. Finally, our good friend
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advanced machines. And the agencies who do this work, JPL premiere among them, have set the bar high—few would ever have imagined that a Mars rover could continue to be operational for fourteen years on the planet, but Opportunity continued to explore well into 2018 after a landing in 2004. We
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Mariner 4 and, 70–71, 74–75 Mariner 9 and, 117 MER rovers, 97 MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), 143–45 Opportunity Mars rover, 92, 97, 303, 307 Percival Lowell's sketch of, 69 producing oxygen on, 143 PUFFER mini-rovers, 321 sample-return projects, 232–33, 315–16
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Space Flight Center, 62, 158 Martian sample-return project, 233 Mars InSight, 79 Moon Mineralogy Mapper, 63 NIAC (NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts), 299, 301 Opportunity Mars rover, 92, 97, 303, 317 Pioneer probes to Venus, 154–55 Planetary Protection department, 308–309 Planetary Science Decadal Survey, 239 Soviet planetary programs and, 232
Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet
by Steven Squyres · 2 Aug 2005 · 554pp · 142,089 words
there and grab them and bring them back, in 2005 or whenever NASA got around to it. In one shot we could do a killer Mars rover mission and get NASA positioned so they could pull off the sample return mission they really wanted. This was too cool an idea, and there
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Manhattan. Lately they had begun to branch out into mechanisms for spacecraft. Steve’s note was terse. “I’ve heard you’re working on a Mars rover mission,” it said, “and I was wondering if there was anything we could do for you.” Well, yeah, just maybe you could. “Send me whatever
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. A few days after the landing, the following short piece ran in the Korea Herald, an English-language newspaper in Seoul: “The day after the Mars rover, Opportunity, landed on the red planet and sent the first batch of photographs last week, the country’s major afternoon daily, the Munhwa Ilbo, translated
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transmitted from Mars, was quoted as exclaiming: ‘Holy smoke . . . I’m just blown away by this.’ “Thereupon, the Munhwa Ilbo ran the headline: ‘The second Mars rover lands, sees mysterious smoke’ . . . It was fortunate for the Munhwa Ilbo that Dr. Squyres didn’t shout: ‘Holy cow.’ ” Copyright Copyright © 2005 Steven W. Squyres
Case for Mars
by Robert Zubrin · 27 Jun 2011 · 437pp · 126,860 words
the home base, Mars explorers will also need to navigate. While good maps of Mars are available from orbital imaging, the essential problem for a Mars rover crew will be determining their own location. This is critical not only for documenting the location of various scientific finds, but, more importantly, to prevent
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if pushed, it will roll back to its starting point. STR: Solar thermal rocket. Telerobotic operation: Remote control of some device, such as a small Mars rover equipped with TV cameras, by human operators at a significant distance away. Thrust: The amount of force a rocket engine can exert to accelerate a
Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol · 13 Apr 2020 · 389pp · 112,319 words
light switch. If the drugs you’re developing were certain to work, if your client were certain to be acquitted in court, or if your Mars rover were certain to land, your jobs wouldn’t exist. Our ability to make the most out of uncertainty is what creates the most potential value
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reliability, we could expect 5,600 defects.”41 Simplicity also reduces costs. The Atlas V rocket—which has taken many objects, including military satellites and Mars rovers, into space—uses up to three types of engines for different stages of flight.42 This complexity drives up the expenses: “To a first-order
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the daily newspaper Munhwa Ilbo. The journalist wrote up the story of Opportunity’s historic Mars landing, summed up by the following headline: “The Second Mars Rover Lands, Sees Mysterious Smoke.” As another Korean journalist observed, it was fortunate Squyres didn’t say holy cow. Like their Viking grandfathers, our rovers were
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could do what it was supposed to do: avoid hazards, drill into rocks, take photos, and the like. It’s one thing to drive a Mars rover on Earth. But it’s something else to operate it on Mars, where everything, from atmospheric density to surface gravity, is different from Earth. The
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volatile environment of space before we can begin trusting them. We achieve that accuracy through a process called calibration. For example, each instrument on our Mars rovers had a calibration target. The fanciest target was built for our onboard camera, Pancam.8 The target was a sundial mounted on the rover deck
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Toor, “NASA Details Curiosity’s Mars Landing in ‘Seven Minutes of Terror’ Video,” Verge, June 26, 2012, www.theverge.com/2012/6/26/3117662/nasa-mars-rover-curiosity-seven-minutes-terror-video. 3. For distance, see NASA, “Mars Close Approach to Earth: July 31, 2018,” NASA, https://mars.nasa.gov/allaboutmars/nightsky
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.nasa.gov/redplanet/viking.html. 19. Squyres, Roving Mars. 20. Squyres, Roving Mars, 90. 21. NASA, Girl with Dreams Names Mars Rovers “Spirit” and “Opportunity,” (June 8, 2003) www.nasa.gov/missions/highlights/mars_rover_names.html. 22. Squyres, Roving Mars, 145. 23. Squyres, Roving Mars, 122. 24. The description of Spirit and Opportunity
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.youtube.com/watch?v=NI6KEzsb26U&feature=youtu.be. 25. John Callas, “A Heartfelt Goodbye to a Spirited Mars Rover,” NASA, May 25, 2011, https://mars.nasa.gov/news/1129/a-heartfelt-goodbye-to-a-spirited-mars-rover. 26. NASA, “NASA’s Record-Setting Opportunity Rover Mission on Mars Comes to End,” press release, February
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, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI6KEzsb26U&feature=youtu.be; Dian Schaffhauser, “Steven Squyres Doesn’t Mind Failure: An Interview with the Scientist Behind the Mars Rovers,” MPUG [Microsoft Project User Group], February 9, 2016, www.mpug.com/articles/steven-squyres-interview. 26. Squyres, Roving Mars, 138. 27. Squyres, Roving Mars, 156
Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World
by Oliver Morton · 15 Feb 2003 · 409pp · 129,423 words
The Martian
by Andy Weir · 1 Jan 2011 · 410pp · 103,421 words
The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility
by Robert Zubrin · 30 Apr 2019 · 452pp · 126,310 words
Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang · 27 Feb 2012 · 476pp · 118,381 words
Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy
by David A. Mindell · 12 Oct 2015 · 265pp · 74,807 words
Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration
by Buzz Aldrin and Leonard David · 1 Apr 2013 · 183pp · 51,514 words
Mars Crossing
by Geoffrey A. Landis · 15 Jan 2000 · 340pp · 96,242 words
A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith · 6 Nov 2023 · 490pp · 132,502 words
The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission
by Jim Bell · 24 Feb 2015 · 310pp · 89,653 words
Beyond: Our Future in Space
by Chris Impey · 12 Apr 2015 · 370pp · 97,138 words
Space 2.0
by Rod Pyle · 2 Jan 2019 · 352pp · 87,930 words
How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books)
by Stephen Petranek · 6 Jul 2015 · 70pp · 22,172 words
Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars
by Nathalia Holt · 4 Apr 2016 · 288pp · 92,175 words
Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos and the Trillion-Dollar Space Race
by Christian Davenport · 6 Sep 2025 · 441pp · 127,950 words
Amazing Stories of the Space Age
by Rod Pyle · 21 Dec 2016
Voyage
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Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization
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The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets
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Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight
by David A. Mindell · 3 Apr 2008 · 377pp · 21,687 words
Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings
by Earl Swift · 5 Jul 2021 · 410pp · 120,234 words
Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth
by Andrew Smith · 3 Apr 2006 · 409pp · 138,088 words
Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions
by Temple Grandin, Ph.d. · 11 Oct 2022
Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World
by Greg Milner · 4 May 2016 · 385pp · 103,561 words
The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low
by Richard Jurek · 2 Dec 2019 · 431pp · 118,074 words
Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life
by J. Craig Venter · 16 Oct 2013 · 285pp · 78,180 words
Cosmos
by Carl Sagan · 1 Jan 1980 · 404pp · 131,034 words
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
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USA Travel Guide
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Architects of Intelligence
by Martin Ford · 16 Nov 2018 · 586pp · 186,548 words
Life in the Universe: A Beginner's Guide
by Lewis Dartnell · 1 Mar 2007 · 223pp · 62,564 words
Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe
by Mike Massimino · 3 Oct 2016 · 286pp · 101,129 words
QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition
by Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John · 7 Oct 2010 · 624pp · 104,923 words
Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions
by Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher · 1 Jul 2009
Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight
by Margaret Lazarus Dean · 18 May 2015 · 338pp · 112,127 words
Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto
by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon · 2 May 2018 · 323pp · 94,156 words
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by P. W. Singer · 1 Jan 2010 · 797pp · 227,399 words
Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
by Michio Kaku · 15 Mar 2011 · 523pp · 148,929 words
Wonders of the Universe
by Brian Cox and Andrew Cohen · 12 Jul 2011
The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles
by Bruce H. Lipton · 1 Jan 2005 · 220pp · 66,518 words
Exoplanets: Hidden Worlds and the Quest for Extraterrestrial Life
by Donald Goldsmith · 9 Sep 2018 · 265pp · 76,875 words
Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler · 3 Feb 2015 · 368pp · 96,825 words
Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing
by Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman · 20 Nov 2012 · 307pp · 92,165 words
Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone
by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols · 25 Sep 2017 · 391pp · 71,600 words
Advanced Software Testing—Vol. 3, 2nd Edition
by Jamie L. Mitchell and Rex Black · 15 Feb 2015
1,000 Places to See in the United States and Canada Before You Die, Updated Ed.
by Patricia Schultz · 13 May 2007 · 2,323pp · 550,739 words
Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization
by K. Eric Drexler · 6 May 2013 · 445pp · 105,255 words
Western USA
by Lonely Planet
Influence: Science and Practice
by Robert B. Cialdini · 1 Jan 1984 · 405pp · 121,531 words
The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here
by Nicole Kobie · 3 Jul 2024 · 348pp · 119,358 words
The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe
by William Poundstone · 3 Jun 2019 · 283pp · 81,376 words
Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World
by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner and Rupert Stadler · 25 Mar 2018
Working Effectively With Legacy Code
by Michael Feathers · 14 Jul 2004 · 508pp · 120,339 words
Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets
by David J. Leinweber · 31 Dec 2008 · 402pp · 110,972 words
Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter
by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac · 17 Sep 2024
Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy
by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel · 4 Sep 2013 · 202pp · 59,883 words
The Nature of Software Development: Keep It Simple, Make It Valuable, Build It Piece by Piece
by Ron Jeffries · 14 Aug 2015 · 444pp · 118,393 words
Toast
by Stross, Charles · 1 Jan 2002
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture
by Harold Goldberg · 5 Apr 2011 · 329pp · 106,831 words
More Joel on Software
by Joel Spolsky · 25 Jun 2008 · 292pp · 81,699 words
This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman · 14 Feb 2012 · 416pp · 106,582 words
Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner
by Po Bronson · 14 Jul 2020 · 320pp · 95,629 words
The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto
by Benjamin Wallace · 18 Mar 2025 · 431pp · 116,274 words
The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy
by Nick Romeo · 15 Jan 2024 · 343pp · 103,376 words
What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View
by William MacAskill · 31 Aug 2022 · 451pp · 125,201 words
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
by John Carreyrou · 20 May 2018 · 359pp · 110,488 words
Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman · 17 Mar 2015 · 527pp · 147,690 words
The Nature of Technology
by W. Brian Arthur · 6 Aug 2009 · 297pp · 77,362 words
Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson · 2 Jan 2003 · 385pp · 99,985 words
Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass
by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri · 6 May 2019 · 346pp · 97,330 words
Frozen in Time
by Mitchell Zuckoff · 4 Mar 2013
Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With the Creators of Major Programming Languages
by Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden · 21 Mar 2009 · 496pp · 174,084 words
Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
by Jessica Bruder · 18 Sep 2017 · 273pp · 85,195 words
The Architecture of Open Source Applications
by Amy Brown and Greg Wilson · 24 May 2011 · 834pp · 180,700 words
Into the Ice: The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery
by Mark Synnott · 14 Apr 2025 · 443pp · 140,219 words
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee · 20 Jan 2014 · 339pp · 88,732 words
Robot Futures
by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh · 1 Mar 2013
To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
by Mark O'Connell · 28 Feb 2017 · 252pp · 79,452 words
Doing Data Science: Straight Talk From the Frontline
by Cathy O'Neil and Rachel Schutt · 8 Oct 2013 · 523pp · 112,185 words
Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing (Columbia Business School Publishing)
by John E. Kelly Iii · 23 Sep 2013 · 118pp · 35,663 words
Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made
by Gaia Vince · 19 Oct 2014 · 505pp · 147,916 words
Practical Python and OpenCV
by Adrian Rosebrock
Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
by Jon Kabat-Zinn · 23 Sep 2013 · 706pp · 237,378 words
The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships: Decoding Social Mysteries Through the Unique Perspectives of Autism
by Temple Grandin and Sean Barron · 30 Sep 2012 · 347pp · 123,884 words
Life as a Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World
by David Kerrigan · 18 Jun 2017 · 472pp · 80,835 words