Mars Up Close: Inside the Curiosity Mission. This item is unavailable.Mars Up Close: Inside the Curiosity Mission

With images never published before, many with surprising colors and landscapes that make you want to spend your next vacation on Mars, this is the one and only book written in consultation with NASA scientists that explains everything, detail by detail and moment by moment, about the most ambitious space expedition the human race has ever undertaken. Mars Up Close combines inside stories, fascinating facts, up-to-date maps, accessible science, eye-popping pictures, and visions of a future not that far away thanks to the groundbreaking success of NASA's Curiosity mission. Renowned science journalist Marc Kaufman spent two years embedded with the engineers and scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, cheering on the rover's spine-tingling landing, learning the backstory of anticipated findings, and witnessing the inescapable frustrations that come from operating a $2.5-billion multitasking robot on a planet 35 million miles from Earth. For pop science, space, and technology lovers, Mars Up Close takes you inside the mission and onto the surface of Mars. As an added special feature, this book contains embedded Augmented Reality coding: Download NASA's free app and bring the Curiosity rover and other Mars spacecraft into 3-D reality right on its pages!

MARC KAUFMAN writes about NASA and space science for NationalGeographic.com/NewsWatch and The Washington Post, where he was a reporter on the national staff for 10 years. Kirkus listed his previous book, First Contact, as one of the best nonfiction titles in 2011. He has worked as a foreign correspondent at The Washington Post, reporting from Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, and as New Delhi bureau chief for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His articles have appeared in New York, Smithsonian, and Condé Nast Traveler.