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Book Review: Roving Mars

The Mars Exploration Rovers have unquestionably been one of NASA’s most exciting and successful missions to date. The projects scientific principal investigator, Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University has written a candid and fascinating new book about the mission. Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet offers an inside look at the journeys the rovers have taken; not only their captivating treks across Mars, but the surprisingly circuitous and difficult route they took from inception to development and launch.

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Heavy Galaxies Evolved Early

New observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal have disrupted theories that massive galaxies didn’t evolve early in the Universe. Astronomers have found four remote galaxies, which are several times larger than our own Milky Way, which probably formed when the Universe was only 2 billion years old. Astronomers previously believed that the largest galaxies only came together very recently, after billions of years of mergers into larger and larger structures.

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Near Miss Today By Asteroid 2004 FH

The closest asteroid ever recorded to pass by the Earth was discovered on Monday evening by NASA’s LINEAR asteroid survey. Asteroid 2004 FH, which is only 30 metres across, will fly past the Earth at a distance of only 43,000 km – well within the orbit of the Moon. Objects of this size are believed to pass the Earth once every two years or so, but they’re usually undetected. 2004 FH will make its closest approach at 2208 UTC (5:08 pm EST), and should be visible to areas of Europe and Asia with binoculars.

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Book Review: Sojourner, An Insider’s View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission

Sojourner is the little robot that enthralled Earth in 1997. For the first time, a mobile construct of humans was being guided by humans on the surface of another planet. Andrew Mishkin is a systems engineer who worked on the Sojourner project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) during the inception, birth, and life of this little rover. He uses his notes, official documentation, unofficial recollections and friendships to present Sojourner, An Insider’s View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission – a book that is an historical reference, a guide to systems engineering, and an insight into the bureaucracy of government science departments.