| SOJOURNER An Insider's View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission Andrew Mishkin New York: Berkley Books, 2003 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-425-19199-6 | ||||
| ISBN 0-425-19199-0 | 333p. | HC/BWI | $21.95 | |
| Page 9: | "Through a combination of theory, experimentation, failures, and inspiration, the growing team [at GALCIT] developed the first practical rocket engines in the United States." |
| I would accept "first practical solid rocket engines". The sentence as written is too broad, and completely ignores Goddard's work. |
| Page 10: | "Viking was the first mission to reach the surface of Mars..." |
| The first U.S. mission. The lander of Russia's Mars 3 mission operated for 20 seconds on the surface of Mars in 1971, predating Viking by five years. |
| Page 55: | "All of the work on Robby was geared to the "One-Hundred-Meter Milestone." JPL had signed up to prove that Robby could autonomously traverse the length of a football field through the natural terrain of the Arroyo Seco." |
| Nit: Considering the trouble caused to a certain Mars mission by mixing English and metric units of measurement, perhaps Mishkin should have worded this differently. |
| Page 79: | "In frustration, one of their team pulled the CPU chip out of its socket, threw it to the ground, and possibly stomped on it." |
| I would have checked this more closely, in order to remove the qualifier — especially since Mishkin reports that the chip was picked up and re-tested. |
| Page 238: | "She [Sharon Laubach] had gotten that job by hanging around the MarsYard helping out until she had wrangled a position doing her dissertation research on the newest Rocky microrover." |
| Seems to me that this should be "wangled". |
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