
Mars Rover Curiosity
An Inside Account from Curiosity's Chief Engineer
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Narrated by:
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Bronson Pinchot
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 AudioListeners also enjoyed...




















Awesome
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Great story for project managers
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good story, bad narration
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Good overview
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Terrific book, wonderfully read!....thanks To All, Ken
Curiosity - an account of how the best and brightest opened the door to Mars
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Engineering is beautiful
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Lots of interesting tidbits
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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.
CURIOSITY
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More fantastic than science fiction
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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.
Complexity conquered at great expense
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