Red Rover

January 7, 2013
This entertaining insider account of Wiens’s work on two groundbreaking robotic space explorers—the Genesis and Curiosity rovers—captures all the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of modern space science. An early fascination with all things intergalactic led Wiens from a childhood of model rockets to a career at NASA after the Challenger disaster. Under the leadership of administrator Dan Goldin, the rattled agency focused its efforts on discovery missions: small, specialized, and relatively cheap robotic programs. Wiens’s Genesis project—a probe that would collect samples of solar wind and return them to Earth—made the cut and launched in 2001 after years of planning. Despite an unexpected crash landing, Genesis vindicated itself by delivering valuable data intact. Wiens’s next pitch persuaded NASA to add the ChemCam, a device that uses a laser to burn minerals to reveal their composition, to a Mars rover, but everything from forest fires and funding issues to lab closures and the loss of the Columbia in 2003 kept ChemCam Earthbound until Curiosity launched in 2011. Wiens brings his work to life, candidly addressing the inevitable technological and bureaucratic obstacles and failures that compose the frustrating prelude to scientific victory. 16 b&w images. Agent: Felicia Eth, Felicia Eth Literary Representation.

January 15, 2013
A memoir by one of the builders of the ChemCam laser instrument now on board the Mars exploration vehicle Curiosity. Now the principal investigator for the ChemCam instrument, Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wiens describes its current operation and the development of the program. He has worked on NASA's robotic exploration program since its inception, and he helped design the instruments taken aloft as part of the Genesis program to capture particles in the solar wind and return them to Earth, which began in 1990 and ended successfully in 2004. Wiens began work on Mars exploration and laser instruments in 1997. Both programs, unlike the shuttle and moon-shot efforts, involved scientist-led small groups. They bid competitively to place their experimental instruments on space-exploration vehicles and landing modules and dealt with cost pressures that dictated building equipment from off-the-shelf components. Improvisation was the rule. To offset the budget constraints that delayed and threatened to undermine the efforts, it became an international program, enlisting support from French researchers. Even so, ChemCam was nearly eliminated to save funds. Wiens explains the ultimate scientific success of the earlier Genesis program, which established that solar oxygen is not composed of the same isotope that predominates in the Earth's atmosphere. The author provides fascinating insight into the struggle to solve scientific problems despite technical constraints and equipment failures. Their success also depended on their ability to creatively deal with ongoing bureaucratic and budgetary hassles. A winning memoir of great achievement.

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April 1, 2013

Wiens is a geochemist who has worked on various NASA robotic missions, most notably as "principal investigator" for the ChemCam instrument on the Curiosity rover now at work on Mars. In this book, he describes in great detail the many ups and downs of piecing together the machinery for a new space project at a time when NASA's budget was tightly constrained. One crisis follows another with dizzying speed, but each technical problem was solved just in time, and political obstacles were likewise overcome. Much of the narrative is densely packed with engineering jargon likely to be a challenge for many readers. The scientific objectives and results of the various project missions--the Genesis project, for example, which aimed to sample the contents of solar wind to see whether it contained much less of the rare isotopes of oxygen than do the planets--are rather lightly covered. VERDICT Outside of the most dedicated and knowledgeable fans of space technology, this book will be of limited interest to readers.--Jack W. Weigel, formerly with Univ. of Michigan Lib., Ann Arbor

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2013
Launched in late November 2011, the Curiosity rover was the most expensive, elaborate robotic device to touch the Martian surface since NASA began sending landers to the Red Planet in 1975 with Viking I. When Curiosity booted up its onboard equipment last August, one of the instruments used to analyze rock and soil samples was the ChemCam, a laser-zapping device built by Los Alamos geochemist Wiens. Here Wiens uses his involvement with this latest Martian venture as a springboard for an engaging history of robotic space exploration from the Genesis project that initiated his career to the unique problems he and his team faced with the one ton, jeep-sized Curiosity. Along with fascinating anecdotes about the bureaucratic challenges and equipment snafus he needed to overcome to get ChemCam loaded onto the rover, Wiens also describes the feats of engineering that produced Genesis in 2004, a probe designed to capture solar wind. A remarkable memoir and testament to the ingenuity of the space program's many scientists who build the tools needed to explore our solar system.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)