Red Rover: Inside the Story of Robotic Space Exploration, from Genesis to the Mars Rover Curiosity

Wiens is a geochemist who has worked on various NASA robotic missions, most notably as "principal investigator" for the ChemCam instrument on the Curiosity rover now at work on Mars. In this book, he describes in great detail the many ups and downs of piecing together the machinery for a new space project at a time when NASA's budget was tightly constrained. One crisis follows another with dizzying speed, but each technical problem was solved just in time, and political obstacles were likewise overcome. Much of the narrative is densely packed with engineering jargon likely to be a challenge for many readers. The scientific objectives and results of the various project missions—the Genesis project, for example, which aimed to sample the contents of solar wind to see whether it contained much less of the rare isotopes of oxygen than do the planets—are rather lightly covered.