By Rob Manning
The firsthand account of the pains and tribulations of engineering one of the main advanced items of area know-how, the Mars Rover interest, through its leader engineer Rob Manning
In the process our enduring quest for wisdom approximately ourselves and our universe, we have not came across solutions to at least one of our so much basic questions: Does lifestyles exist wherever else within the universe? Ten years and billions of greenbacks within the making, the Mars Rover interest is poised to respond to this all-important question.
In Mars Rover interest: An inside of Account from Curiosity's leader Engineer, Rob Manning, the project's leader engineer, tells of bringing the groundbreaking spacecraft to lifestyles. Manning and his staff at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, tasked with designing a lander again and again better and extra complicated than any earlier than, confronted technical setbacks, fights over insufficient assets, and the demanding situations of major a military of very good, passionate, and sometimes pissed off experts.
Manning's attention-grabbing own account--which contains info from his specific interviews with prime interest scientists--is choked with stories of innovative feats of technological know-how, expertise, and engineering. Readers adventure firsthand the disgruntlement at encountering power technical difficulties, the pain of close to defeat, the experience of victory at discovering cutting edge recommendations to those difficulties, the sheer terror of staking careers and reputations on a lander that could not be proven in the world, and the frenzy of triumph at its winning landing on Mars on August five, 2012. this is often the tale of endurance, commitment, and unrelenting interest.
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The firsthand account of the rigors and tribulations of engineering one of the main complicated items of area expertise, the Mars Rover interest, through its leader engineer Rob ManningIn the process our enduring quest for wisdom approximately ourselves and our universe, we have not came across solutions to 1 of our so much primary questions: Does lifestyles exist at any place else within the universe?
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Additional resources for Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity's Chief Engineer
Sample text
Not only that, the spaceships took pictures that they could put on a radio beam and send down to Earth to be printed in the newspaper and delivered to our front door. I could hold the local newspaper in my hand and see pictures from space. It was a heady time to be a kid. The funny part was that we knew so little about outer space. The Moon was clearly visible, but Mars was this blotchy red thing. Our classroom textbooks offered little about the outer planets beyond the simple observations that they were different colors, some were very big, and one looked like a coffee mug with two handles (Saturn with its rings).
If the lander needed to be high up off the ground to avoid rocks, how would the rover get off the lander? I took on the job of looking across all of these bubbles to make sense out of them and see if there was a common thread or a common architecture that would glue them together. Sometimes it’s important to remind ourselves that there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. We encouraged the teams to ask, ask, and ask. When we didn’t know, we would say so. Arrogance has no place in this work.
As it turned out, Armstrong and the techniques of the Apollo man-on-the-moon era offered what became one of the most important elements that transformed our efforts from “wouldn’t be great if we could …” into a viable project. Back in the 1960s, NASA engineers had needed to make sure that the astronauts returning from the moon would land reasonably close to the recovery ships in the Pacific Ocean. The spacecraft would somehow have to be steerable during reentry. The pioneering engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center developed a solution that would turn the entry space capsule into a hypersonic aircraft.