Mars Rover Curiosity

An Inside Account from Curiosity's Chief Engineer

By: Rob Manning, William L. Simon

Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot

Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

In the course of our enduring quest for knowledge about ourselves and our universe, we haven't found answers to one of our most fundamental questions: Does life exist anywhere else in the universe? Ten years and billions of dollars in the making, the Mars rover Curiosity is poised to answer this all-important question.

Here, Rob Manning, the project's chief engineer, tells of bringing the groundbreaking spacecraft to life. Manning and his team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, tasked with designing a lander many times larger and more complex than any before, faced technical setbacks, fights over inadequate resources, and the challenges of leading an army of brilliant, passionate, and often frustrated experts.

Manning's fascinating personal account—which includes information from his exclusive interviews with leading Curiosity scientists—is packed with tales of revolutionary feats of science, technology, and engineering. Listeners experience firsthand the disappointment at encountering persistent technical problems, the agony of near defeat, the sense of victory at finding innovative solutions to these problems, the sheer terror of staking careers and reputations on a lander that couldn't be tested on Earth, and the rush of triumph at its successful touchdown on Mars on August 5, 2012. This is the story of persistence, dedication, and unrelenting curiosity.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2014 Rob Manning, William L. Simon (P)2014 Blackstone Audio

Good overview

Good chronological overview. Right amount of technical info for a "non-technical" person like myself. Wasn't quite as inspiring as other space related audibles I have listened to, but seems to be intended to be more factual.

Curiosity - an account of how the best and brightest opened the door to Mars

This book is ideal for apace exploration enthusiasts and for folks who develop complex new projects. It provides a terrific narrative to the ups and downs of doing something new and taking risks to accomplish these new developments. Also good for high school and college students to see what it takes to do great things.

Terrific book, wonderfully read!....thanks To All, Ken

Engineering is beautiful

This book definitely rekindled my love for engineering. It is just the right amount of “technical” without getting boring. If you love engineering, you’ll love this!

Awesome

The book was well written and the story kept me engaged throughout. Working on interplanetary missions is a dream come true and its so cool to get a view in to the inner workings at Nasa. Hope more authors come up with stories about their missions.

good story, bad narration

narrator could put you to sleep but it's a good book about the design, building, and testing of the curiosity rover

Great story for project managers

This provides an interesting and informative story about the development of both a technically and politically challenging program. Besides being entertaining it also provides insight into the challenges of project management.

CURIOSITY

Curiosity is a mechanical, one-eyed, six wheeled, antenna-tailed super dog. It can stiff the air, drill rocks, analyze elemental particles, roam a countryside (at a snail’s pace 300 feet per hour), and talk to humans. Its language is in 1s and 0s. It speaks to Earth from Mars across 49 million miles of space with a message that continues to amaze and encourage human exploration of the universe.

Robert Manning, in collaboration with William Simon (Manning’s ghost writer), reflects on the technological feat of creating and delivering a robotic laboratory to the fourth rock from the sun. Manning heads a team of NASA scientists and engineers to design the latest land rover, called Curiosity, to explore Mars.

“Mars Rover Curiosity” is a tribute to NASA and its organizational skill in achieving a land mark in extraterrestrial exploration. In listening to Manning’s story, one feels humans are on the edge of a continent in the 15th century, planning to sail to an unexplored place to find answers about what there is beyond imagination. NASA’s contribution to science and a possible future for humanity seems inferred by Manning’s story; particularly in light of current scientific evidence for Earth’s global warming.

More fantastic than science fiction

It is incredible what they were able top accomplish. This book is required reading for any space enthusiast.

Complexity conquered at great expense

The Curiosity rover was incredibly ambitious. Consequently, it was incredibly risky and from a budgetary perspective perhaps a failure: it cost too much and it took too long to manufacture. The space industry is plagued by the conflicting desires to be innovative, state of the art, and consistently successful in the production of distinct missions/spacecraft launched only once or twice. Thus, every contingency must be thought of, tested for, and troubleshot while operating at least partially novel systems.

Nevertheless, much is conserved between missions. This is why Opportunity and Spirit were cheap - their landing method was largely derivative of pathfinders. The curiosity rover required a new landing method (a la 7 minutes of terror), a more precise landing (accomplished via aerobraking), and a much greater variety of state of the art instruments. This was predictably hard, expensive, and time consuming - and thus predictably coincided with management pulling its hair out at the thought of failure, cost overruns preventing other missions from launching, and and the uncompromising deadlines of celestial transit windows (the planets align optimally only once every 2 years). A single error in a complex, mass impoverished (and thus back up limited), system can ruin the whole mission.

This is primarily what the book is about. And, unfortunately, to land people they will need to invent a new landing method yet again, probably using retrorockets. Hopefully spaceX will implement that system with its 2018 mission.

Good, But Something's Missing

If you are going to buy this book, you need to understand that it focuses on the struggle to build the Curiosity rover and science package and getting it to Mars. Only the last 30 minutes or so focus on what has been learned by the rover on Mars. So if you are looking for information regarding the geologic history of Mars or what the rover has found, you will find a relatively small amount of information here, although there is some.

The book is nevertheless very interesting. The book explains in great detail the challenges of landing anything on Mars in one piece, and why Curiosity was a very different proposition than, for example, the much smaller Spirit and Opportunity rovers. The book also covers the many political challenges in securing funding. One can only marvel at the ingenuity of the scientists as they are confronted with one challenge after another.

It would be nice if there were a sequel about what the rover has found.

Bronson Pinchot's narration, as always, is excellent.