The exploration of Mars is brought up to date with this collection of the latest results from the Mars Exploration Rovers, and the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey missions.
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Baseball fans have the Sporting News Register for getting their stats fix, and farmer-types can turn to the time-honored Almanac. So it's only fair that space-exploration junkies should have Robert Godwin's definitive NASA Mission Reports, providing page after page of official data and diagrams, not to mention CD-ROMs packed with movies, pictures, and searchable NASA documents.
While most of Godwin's NASA books focus on a particular mission (e.g., Apollo 13 and Gemini 6), the Mars book chronologically surveys every single mission that's been mounted to the red planet, from the 1964 launch of Mariner 4 to the more current Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor encounters. And it's this breadth that makes the book a standout even in this excellent series. Not only can you marvel at the 16K flight computer on 1975's Centaur and the much more impressive hardware on the MGS, but you can even see the quality of NASA's press materials evolve. (When's the last time you saw a diagram with a typewritten legend?)
With NASA press kits for all the probes and a choice assortment of the more interesting mission reports, Godwin has assembled an authoritative, blow-by-blow resource for serious space buffs. And good news on the "Windows" CD-ROM that's included: Since the files are primarily mpegs, jpegs, and html, readers can access the CD and its hour and a half of vintage video from just about any platform. --Paul Hughes
Review
"A mine of useful information and well worth getting..." -- Astronomy Now, September 2001. "A well-conceived book which those interested in planetary exploration cannot afford to miss..." -- Spaceflight, November 2000.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A must-have for completists,
By
This review is from: Mars: The NASA Mission Reports: Apogee Books Space Series 10 (Includes CDROM: Mars Movies and Images) (Paperback)
In a departure from other books in this series, this one focuses on unmanned missions, in this case the missions to Mars. Going all the way back to Mariner 4, the mission that broke the hearts of sf fans everywhere by showing that Mars was a cratered desert planet with no John Carter or Dejah Thoris to be found anywhere, it includes press kits and mission reports for each mission to Mars, as well as investigation reports for those missions that have failed (most notably the recent ones).The enclosed CD is somewhat better organized than usual, with many, many images from the various missions, plus movies and additional reports that didn't make it into the text. The last item in the book is a rather depressing one. It's a 1969 report from Wernher von Braun on a manned Mars landing. If we'd followed von Braun's vision, by now we'd have a permanent space station with a crew of 100, a lunar base with a crew of 50, and a Mars presence with 48 on the ground and 24 in orbit, and all for maybe double the budget of NASA now (which is still effectively far less than the Apollo days). What we have instead is a skeletal space station. It's another must-have for the space completist but less key for those less interested, except perhaps as a very useful reference.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A treasuretrove!,
By Jim Kirk (Boston MA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Mars: The NASA Mission Reports: Apogee Books Space Series 10 (Includes CDROM: Mars Movies and Images) (Paperback)
This is an absolutely indespensable compendium of data relating to the US's unmanned Mars missions starting with the Mariner probes and bringing us right up to 1999's troubling double failures. The text is surprisingly lucid for such a technical document and the data on the missions is exhaustive. The disk features literally hundreds of photos that give the reader an appreciation of how far the imaging technology has come in the past 30 odd years. Reading this volume also makes you appreciate the incredible complexity and challenge of mounting even a small unmanned mission to mars.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Space history, and a look at what we missed,
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This review is from: Mars: The NASA Mission Reports: Apogee Books Space Series 10 (Includes CDROM: Mars Movies and Images) (Paperback)
It's hard to get more technical, but it's exactly what you need if you want to have a look at the technology that was used to conquer that "final frontier", starting about 40 years ago. It was definitly a time where exploration was risky, and NASA was actually willing to risk it. Those little probes were so rudimentary compared to what we can do now, and yet, they were state-of-the-art machines that were launched one after another to the planets... with equally deceiving and surprising results. When you think that the Viking data is still being used (and the new results are still controversial), it's hard not to be impressed. Ironically, this book, which may have been a tribute to NASA creativeness, ends up with the Mars Observer, Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter reports, three probes that failed. The failure is definitly not the problem, because most of the Mars probes failed. But NASA attitude has dramatically changed since the first Mariner. A failure was merely a plausible outcome, but now, it's a catastrophy that invokes a complete Mars programme reeavaluation... And to kill it completely, this invaluable little book includes the Werner Von Braun infamous roadmap to Mars... envisionned for the 1980's. Another sad hint that NASA failed to its destiny, and will probably never recover. This book shoudl definitly be read with some other good space history books, that will help put the technical prowess in perspective. I would recommend the following: - Failure is Not An Option, by Gene Kranz
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