On a hot August Earth night in 2012, NASAs Curiosity rover began its celebrated seven minutes of terror slowing from 12,600 mph to a triumphant gentle landing at Mars Gale Crater.

The engineering feat of sending this pickup truck-sized rover rocketing through Mars thin atmosphere on a years-long mission to its surface instilled most Americans with newfound pride. And it made those of us who grew up with Apollo a little wistful.

Rob Manning the man arguably at the center of it all has documented both the acrobatics needed to enable the rover to slow itself to land and the decade of design and testing that led up to this moment in Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiositys Chief Engineer.

Mannings just published account of years at NASAs venerable Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), co-written with best-selling non-fiction author William L. Simon, will resonate most with those who want an excellent inside take on the rigorous and often arduous task of designing interplanetary landers and the eureka moments that affords.

Courtesy Smithsonian Books

Manning deserves credit for bringing his own sense of candor and humility to the prose, even if the book sometimes lacks the kind of narrative verve that might have given it broader appeal.

The promise of science with the rovers ten instruments notwithstanding, a large part of the book addresses the mantra of EDL Entry, Descent and Landing.

After all, if Manning and his JPL colleagues cant land safely on the Martian surface, the $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission and a decade of design work and years of potential science will disappear with it.

[Mars] has too much atmosphere to land as we do on the moon and not enough to land as we do on Earth, the authors write. We have to combine all of the tricks we use to land on Earth (heat shields, parachutes) with the techniques we use to land on the Moon (retro rockets, air bags), among many others.

But if anything, live coverage of the missions Entry, Descent and Landing with continual social media reporting from the JPL control room, made us all realize how much times had changed since NASAs Viking 1 landed on Mars some forty years earlier. I personally streamed Curiositys landing at a local Starbucks. Within minutes after the landing at 10:30 pm PDT August 5, the authors note, images taken from the front and rear hazcams arrived at JPL, giving startling visceral proof to our anxious team that Curiosity had landed on Mars. With Mt. Sharp a few kilometers to the south,

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Management Lessons From NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover