Sojourning the planets

Monday, December 27th, 2004 | Personal

I just finished reading Sojourner: An Insider’s View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission by Andrew Mishkin – a telltale of the efforts to get the little rover, Sojourner, to the face of Mars. An intriguing tale of problem-solving, natural sciences humour and intrigues of the workplace.

Albeit the story starts out a bit messy it all comes together well and particularly the second part (of three) of the book is fascinating: the problem solving of the actual rover – designing it, troubleshooting it and all the other fun engineering puzzles you play with when developing something.

It is altogether a book to enjoy… if you are into the natural sciences, of course. Readers from other fields can probably read it as a fascinating adventure, but many of the – this is how we got around this problem – will not be terribly interesting to those.

So, pick it up if you get a chance.

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