The Design and Engineering of Curiosity: How the Mars Rover Performs Its Job (Springer Praxis Books)

With the recent news that Curiosity has discovered some form of organic compound on Mars, it's inevitable that people are going to be asking just how it would have gone about doing so. There's going to be plenty of misinformation, uneducated speculation, and downright wrong explanations of how the rover works. Thankfully, there's a book for that.This is actually the first part of a two-volume set - a companion volume, focusing mainly on mission science, is due out next year. Even if it's only "half" a book, this is still a substantial reference work. The first chapter covers the evolution of Curiosity and the rocky road, full of budget cuts, "descopes," and launch delays that it faced in the decade prior to launch. The second chapter looks at the journey to Mars, focusing on the notoriously complex Entry, Descent, and Landing phase. The third chapter describes surface operations, including planning processes and a summary of the mission so far, while the fourth chapter covers power systems, thermal control, avionics, etc. The final four chapters, roughly half the book, describes all of the scientific, chemistry, and geological instruments, explaining the engineering design of each, how they work, some of the results obtained so far, and some of the problems they've encountered. The text is accompanied by a large number of color photographs and diagrams, annotated images of rover hardware, graphs, and summary tables.Where this book really delivers is in a superbly detailed presentation on exactly WHY MSL, for all its great cost, is such a unique, powerful, and versatile vehicle for scientific and geological studies. This isn't the kind of book that tells us how many millimeters in diameter the drill is, or what type of metal the bits are made of. Instead, Emily Lakdawalla explains how the drill is actually used, its internal arrangement, some of the anomalies encountered on Mars, and how a bit could be changed if need be. For a more complicated instrument, such as MAHLI, she describes how the camera is focused, the different imaging modes, and the use of the calibration target. The hard details, such as camera specifications, image scales, motor counts, and the dates mosaics were taken, are all included as side tables. The appendix is an extremely useful summary of the first 1,648 sols, providing information on scientific activities, drive distances, arm usage, surface temperature and pressure, and so on.I really want to give this five stars, but some publisher issues unfortunately mar it. Although Springer/Praxis has published a huge number of excellent space titles, they've always lacked somewhat in production values. The photo quality is merely decent; most of the pictures look fine, if a little soft, but quite a few are very murky or have poor contrast. The index is very skimpy, so be prepared to spend a lot of time browsing if you want to find a particular piece of data. There's also no glossary, which considering the huge number of acronyms is a frustrating omission. That aside, this an excellent book which deserves to be read by anyone who has a serious interest in the inner workings of MSL.

This book is amazing. From the literal nuts-and-bolts that hold the Curiosity rover together, to the men and women who assembled and run it, this is the most comprehensive, yet accessible book I could imagine being written about the most complicated piece of hardware we've sent out of Earth orbit. This book is an amazing look at all, and I do mean all, of the parts and people that make this mission a continuing success. It's essentially an owner's manual for a spacecraft, yet it's somehow, strangely, a page-turner. Soaking up the minutiae of the twhack arms and getting an engineer's-eye view of the unforeseen degradation of the wheels that drive the rover across the most foreign of places we can drive something on is somehow both riveting and ponderous. I'm not quite sure how something that, on its face, is a technical, diagram-filled piece can remain utterly compelling, yet somehow this book manages that. Written in a no-nonsense, straightforward manner, reading this book takes one into the highest- and lowest-level planning sessions of some of the most important scientists running experiments off-world. I wholeheartedly encourage anyone who liked that scene in the movie Apollo 13 where they dump the stuff on the table and "figure it out" or who enjoyed "The Martian" to pick this one up and devour its depths. For anyone else interested in the science and engineering behind our most audacious space exploration, this is a must-read.

Magnificent!This is a fact-packed but very readable overview of the most sophisticated robotic mission flown to Mars. The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla lays out in accessible detail (backed by abundant references) the evolution of the Mars Science Laboratory, the crises during its development, and how its various systems and instruments work. By drawing together in one place both the nuts and bolts, and the scientific intent, of rover operations, the book takes the reader to the red planet with explanations of everything from heat shields to image compression and chemical analysis. Especially illuminating are the discussions of issues that operators have had to work around.The book has ~200 images, carefully chosen and composed (as one might expect from Emily, a well-known image-processing maven). Particularly useful are the annotations she has added to many images to label various details. Also tremendously useful are the many tables listing such details as when different kinds of images were taken, or when short-circuits occurred, etc.If I were to have any criticism of the book, it is that the index is a little anemic. However, as a designer of mobile robotic planetary missions myself, I doubt this deficiency will be grievous, as I'll probably get to know where everything is just by regular consultation. This book has instantly become my indispensable guide to Curiosity.Ralph Lorenz – Author, Cassini-Huygens Owners Workshop Manual

What I like most is its account of how key decisions were made. This had to be made smaller, or redesigned to use less power, or whatever so that something else would ALSO work. In a project this large there were inevitably many such tradeoffs. Also various unexpected issues had to be fixed, often by workarounds. Despite many challenges, they made it work and deliver a huge amount of scientific data.Lakdawalla also learned from her many conversations with the team how a number of details in the Rover as built ended up different from all previously published descriptions of it.

This book is so incredibly rich in detail about every single component, how they were developed and how they come together to bring Curiosity to life. Despite the detail, it is incredibly readable with everything that needs to be explained, explained.Knowing the background of how the rover came to be gave me a whole new appreciation not just for the rover itself, but for the team behind it.Well worth it.

Very good technical engineering manual for curiosity rover.. Every part, operation, information covered.. Very interesting.....if like me, you love engineering.. This is too level.... I recommend..

This book gives us a fascinating look into the history behind the making of Curiosity.

Very good and technical book. A lot of scientific and historical details. Wish there were more like this one. Good as a gift.

what a great project to have dedicated a professional life to