Steven Squyres Roving Mars

Many important themes can be drawn from reading Roving Mars that share important lessons about the scientific process. This personal account by the author, Steven Squyres, shares his story of passion toward being able to play a hand in the exploration of mars. The account shares many valuable lessons that we can learn for the scientific process and trend that appear in most scientific discovery. The greatest theme that can be gathered from Squyres story is that Science is never easy and it may come with many failures but the most important thing to do is persevere through these challenges. Another important thing to gather from the book is that not all discovery involves proving everything right or testing everything then and there to see if

it holds up to theory, in fact most of the discoveries that the rover team makes are simply observations that point to already know processes that had already been observed or proven on earth and just the mere existence on mars allows them to draw certain similarities and conclusions. The last thing to observe from the book is the ever changing face of science and the costs that change with it, in the changing era we can look closer and see farther than we ever have been able to before but not without a growing cost.

Perseverance is the corner stone of science and it is what pushes scientist to new discoveries and ideas.

If people, especially scientist gave up on their first failure than our world would be nowhere close to where it is today and we would still probably be in the dark if Edison gave up after his first light bulb. Everything in nature is balanced out whether its, electrons and protons, positive and negative magnetic force, matter and dark matter, so why should success and failure be any different; failure is just as natural as success and it should not discourage progress. In his mission to land one of his instruments on mars, Squyres goes through many failures and many challenges as he tries to bring his rovers to life. Some were contributed to uncontrollable circumstances such as NASA picking a different project because it fitted what they wanted, while others were contributed to smaller things such as miss reading dimensions, but through all of them Squyres stuck with it and each time he failed he teamed up with others to try and get his instruments to mars. Finally some light seems to come his way when NASA chooses his payload for the rover project even though they took his rover plans for it already, but at least he got what he wanted and was now in the process of getting his project going, but trouble didn’t end there. Through the building of the rover system things were tested many times and many things failed those tests many times but that only led to a focus for further

improvement.