Squyres: Roving Mars

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Steven W. Squyres, Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet. Hyperion, August 3, 2005. 434 pages.

Squyres is a professor of astronomy at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He is the principal investigator for the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. This book recounts not only the Mars missions of the title, but also the 15-year struggle of a dedicated scientist to do good science in a highly political environment. I found the book particularly compelling because of my intimate knowledge of the NASA funding process, which may make it less interesting to some. Squyres does an honest job of recounting exactly how the process works and revealing all its ugly underpinnings while still managing to romanticize the experience. It brought back for me all the excitement of working on a space project as well as all the frustration.

-- Notes by JMB