Mars Up Close - Marc Kaufman

The Mars Curiosity Rover remains an improbable accomplishment that took equal measures of mathematical wizardry, meticulous planning and, to hear Marc Kaufman tell it, imagination. His new book, Mars Up Close, tells the story of how NASA was able to park a vehicle on the surface of a planet 140 million miles away. The rover had to slow its approach from 13,000 miles per hour to a near-stop before cratering into the planet and destroying years of work and millions of dollars of investment and space research.