A few years back I was at the Museum of Flight for a talk when I took a stroll through the gift shop.  My eye caught a book with a picture of a Mars rover on the front and a “Haynes” label in the corner.  If you work on cars, Haynes is a publisher that makes 3rd-party repair manuals for specific vehicles.  Chilton and Bentley are other examples.  Wanting to see the coolest thing in the world, my initial thought was I had found a repair manual for a Mars rover!  OK, not a repair manual, but something with detailed blueprints and system operation diagrams.  Upon opening “NASA Mars Rovers: Owner’s Workshop Manual,” it wasn’t that detailed, but does cover three generations of rovers from conception to deployment.

There is a little pre-history of missions to Mars.  I was surprised to learn that the Mariner 4 orbiter sent back digital images in 1964, three years before I was born.  I hadn’t realized we were getting images from other planets before we had put a man on the moon.  Those pictures were sent at a mind-bending 8.3 bits/second!.  Of course I wasn’t really paying attention until the time of the Viking landers.

The book discusses the Sojourner, a mini proof-of-concept rover made as a side experiment to the Pathfinder lander.  Then based on that success, the larger, twin, Spirit and Opportunity rovers that lasted far beyond their projected lifetimes.  Both of these used balloons to form a spherical “bouncing ball” for final descent.  This worked quite well, other than the deflated balloons getting in the way after landing.  Curiosity used a rocket-powered “sky-crane” with rockets keeping it in place while lowering the lander with its attached rover.  The whole thing struck me as complicated and doomed from excess complexity, but it worked flawlessly.

The book contains a lot of technical detail, like voltages and currents.  At times it seems to include everything the author was able to dig up, rather than what would be useful to understanding.  But there is enough detail about things like program decision processes to make it interesting. I especially enjoyed several of the photos of experiment assemblies before they were mounted. Its like looking at a Formula 1 clutch up close for the first time.  Sure, we’ve all seen a clutch (at least the people most likely to buy this book), but the F1 version is different and fascinating.  I enjoyed “NASA Mars Rovers” and am glad it grabbed me with its marketing flair.