Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars
Getting to Mars required engineering genius, scientific strategy, and the drive to persevere in the face of failure.
Although the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has become synonymous with the United States’ planetary exploration during the past half century, its most recent focus has been on Mars. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing through the Mars Phoenix mission of 2007, JPL led the way in engineering an impressive, rapidly evolving succession of Mars orbiters and landers, including roving robotic vehicles whose successful deployment onto the Martian surface posed some of the most complicated technical problems in space flight history.
In Exploration and Engineering, Erik M. Conway reveals how JPL engineers’ creative technological feats led to major breakthroughs in Mars exploration. He takes readers into the heart of the lab’s problem-solving approach and management structure, where talented scientists grappled with technical challenges while also coping, not always successfully, with funding shortfalls, unrealistic schedules, and managerial turmoil.
Conway, JPL’s historian, offers an insider’s perspective into the changing goals of Mars exploration, the ways in which sophisticated computer simulations drove the design process, and the remarkable evolution of landing technologies over a thirty-year period.
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Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars
Getting to Mars required engineering genius, scientific strategy, and the drive to persevere in the face of failure.
Although the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has become synonymous with the United States’ planetary exploration during the past half century, its most recent focus has been on Mars. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing through the Mars Phoenix mission of 2007, JPL led the way in engineering an impressive, rapidly evolving succession of Mars orbiters and landers, including roving robotic vehicles whose successful deployment onto the Martian surface posed some of the most complicated technical problems in space flight history.
In Exploration and Engineering, Erik M. Conway reveals how JPL engineers’ creative technological feats led to major breakthroughs in Mars exploration. He takes readers into the heart of the lab’s problem-solving approach and management structure, where talented scientists grappled with technical challenges while also coping, not always successfully, with funding shortfalls, unrealistic schedules, and managerial turmoil.
Conway, JPL’s historian, offers an insider’s perspective into the changing goals of Mars exploration, the ways in which sophisticated computer simulations drove the design process, and the remarkable evolution of landing technologies over a thirty-year period.
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Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars
Getting to Mars required engineering genius, scientific strategy, and the drive to persevere in the face of failure.
Although the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has become synonymous with the United States’ planetary exploration during the past half century, its most recent focus has been on Mars. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing through the Mars Phoenix mission of 2007, JPL led the way in engineering an impressive, rapidly evolving succession of Mars orbiters and landers, including roving robotic vehicles whose successful deployment onto the Martian surface posed some of the most complicated technical problems in space flight history.
In Exploration and Engineering, Erik M. Conway reveals how JPL engineers’ creative technological feats led to major breakthroughs in Mars exploration. He takes readers into the heart of the lab’s problem-solving approach and management structure, where talented scientists grappled with technical challenges while also coping, not always successfully, with funding shortfalls, unrealistic schedules, and managerial turmoil.
Conway, JPL’s historian, offers an insider’s perspective into the changing goals of Mars exploration, the ways in which sophisticated computer simulations drove the design process, and the remarkable evolution of landing technologies over a thirty-year period.
Erik M. Conway serves as historian, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Planetary Observers, Mars Observer2. Politics and Engineering on the Martian Frontier3. Attack of the Great Galactic Ghoul4. Engineering for Uncertainty5. Mars Mania6. The Faster-Better-Cheaper Future7. Revenge of the Great Galactic Ghoul8. Recovery and Reform9. Margins on the Final Frontier10. Sending a Spy Satellite to Mars11. Robotic Geologists on the Red Planet12. Reengineering a Spacecraft, and a ProgramConclusionEpilogueAppendixNotesBibliographyIndex
What People are Saying About This
From the Publisher
No subject in the history of planetary science has been more publicly enticing than the efforts to understand Mars. In Exploration and Engineering, historian Erik M. Conway presents a very detailed, mission-by-mission discussion of Mars exploration since Viking. This capably told narrative captures the fascinating details of the Mars program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.—Roger D. Launius, National Air and Space Museum, editor of Exploring the Solar System: The History and Science of Planetary Exploration
Roger D. Launius
No subject in the history of planetary science has been more publicly enticing than the efforts to understand Mars. In Exploration and Engineering, historian Erik M. Conway presents a very detailed, mission-by-mission discussion of Mars exploration since Viking. This capably told narrative captures the fascinating details of the Mars program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
