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.