Ninety days. That was the whole plan.
Spirit and Opportunity reached Mars in early 2004, wrapped in airbags, bounced across the ground, rolled to a stop and opened up. Each was built to work for about three months before the cold and the dust finished it. They worked for years. Elizabeth Rusch tells it through Steve Squyres, the lead scientist, so you get the geology and you also get a grown man who cannot sleep, which is more of the truth about this job than most books will admit to.
Eighty pages, mostly photographs. It reads faster than it looks.
The science it actually teaches
The mission had one question: was there ever liquid water on Mars? Everything else in the book is the machinery of answering it, which is why it sits on our Stealth Science shelf.
The method is field geology done by remote control, and it is recognizably field geology. You drive to an outcrop. You grind the weathered skin off the rock with a tool on the arm, because the outside of a rock has been lying to you for a billion years. You look at the fresh face and you read the minerals. Any geologist on Earth would recognize the sequence. The only difference is that the hammer is on another planet.
The evidence is not one dramatic moment, and I like the book for refusing to pretend it was. It is a stack of ordinary things. Small round grey pebbles scattered over the ground, nicknamed blueberries, made largely of hematite, an iron mineral that on Earth usually forms in water. Rock in fine layers with ripple patterns in it. Salts of the kind left behind when water evaporates. None of those alone proves anything. Together they close the case, and watching a child understand the difference between one proof and a converging stack is worth the eleven dollars on its own.
Then the part that makes this the honest book about scientific work.
You cannot steer it live. A radio signal takes roughly twenty minutes each way, so nobody has a joystick. Every Mars day is written the night before as a list of commands, sent, run without supervision, and then you wait for the pictures to find out what your plan actually did.
The team lived on Mars time, and this is the detail children remember. A Martian day runs about forty minutes longer than ours. If your workday has to line up with the rover's, then every day you start forty minutes later than the day before, and inside a couple of weeks you are eating breakfast at midnight and your family has stopped seeing you. That is what the job cost, in a book for a ten-year-old, stated plainly.
Two more, and they are the reason I would hand this one over first.
A wheel on Spirit seized. There was no fixing it, so they drove the rover backwards and dragged the dead wheel behind. It scraped a trench through the soil, and the trench turned up bright material that turned out to be nearly pure silica, the kind of deposit hot water leaves. One of the mission's best results came out of the thing that broke.
And the dust. Everyone expected dust to settle on the solar panels, cut the power and end the mission on schedule. Instead the wind kept blowing across the panels and cleaning them off, again and again, for years. That is not engineering. That is weather, and luck, and the book says so instead of pretending it was all foresight.
The child it lands with
The child who takes things apart and does not always get them back together.
This is a book about two machines that lost pieces, got stuck, went partly deaf and kept working anyway, and about people who planned for three months and then improvised for years. A child who believes science means getting it right the first time needs to read it, and a child who is already terrified of getting things wrong needs it more.
Of the four Scientists in the Field titles we carry, this one has the most actual story in it, which makes it the one to try on a reluctant reader who likes machines.
One place to stop and talk
Stop at the broken wheel, and take it in three steps, because it is the best teaching moment in the whole series.
First the situation. A wheel jams on a machine that is tens of millions of miles away. Nobody is going out there with a socket set. There is no version of this where it gets repaired. So the team stops trying to fix it and starts asking what a rover with a dead wheel can still do, which is a different question and a much better one.
Then the result. Dragging that wheel cut a trench, the trench exposed pale soil, and the soil turned out to be nearly pure silica. On Earth that means hot water was once there. Put it to them straight: if the wheel had held, would anybody have dug that hole?
Then bring it home, because this is the transferable part. Ask what has broken in your child's own project this month, the model or the code or the recipe or the shed, and what the break showed them that a working version would have kept hidden. Ten minutes on that beats a week of being told that mistakes are how we learn.
What to know going in
The rovers die, and not in this book, and that is the thing to plan for.
Children get attached to Spirit and Opportunity in a way that catches parents off guard. They are given names, personalities, a sibling relationship and a great deal of affection in these pages. What the book does not cover is the end: Spirit eventually got stuck in soft ground and went silent, and Opportunity kept driving for years after this book was printed before a planet-wide dust storm finished it. Your child will ask what happened to them, probably the same evening they finish. Decide beforehand what you are going to say, because you are the one who will be saying it.
There is a lot of adult worry on the page too. Budgets, careers, a scientist visibly frightened that his machine has died in the night. Nothing violent and nothing frightening in the usual sense, but real distress, and some children read that more sharply than adults expect.
Where to get it
The Mighty Mars Rovers is $11.99, the most expensive of the four Scientists in the Field titles on our Stealth Science shelf and the fastest read of them, because eighty pages of that count are photographs. If you want to find out whether this series works in your house before you commit to more of it, buy this one first. It is the only one with something like a plot, and a child who bounces off this one will bounce off all of them.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
Mission to Pluto: One Pass, No Brakes
Mission to Pluto: The First Visit to an Ice Dwarf and the Kuiper Belt by Mary Kay Carson
Grade 5 to 8
Who Really Killed Cock Robin? A Food Web as a Suspect List
Who Really Killed Cock Robin?: An Ecological Mystery by Jean Craighead George
Grade 4 to 7
Who Was Charles Darwin? Twenty Years of Evidence
Who Was Charles Darwin? by Deborah Hopkinson
Grade 3 to 6
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
