Janet Vertesi is associate professor of sociology at Princeton University. She is the author of Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars, also published by the University of Chicago Press, and coeditor of Representation in Scientific Practice Revisited and digitalSTS.

• PrefaceIntroductionPart 1: OrdersChapter 1: The ContextChapter 2: The IntegratorsChapter 3: The ResolutionsChapter 4: The CollectiveChapter 5: The EnvironmentPart 2: OutcomesChapter 6: The ScienceChapter 7: The SpacecraftChapter 8: The DataChapter 9: The PersonalitiesChapter 10: The Iterative LoopConclusionPostscript: Methodological ReflectionsAcknowledgmentsAppendix: Acronym and Technical DictionaryNotesReferencesIndex

"Vertesi has lifted the curtain for all to see. Embedded with various NASA projects for years, she takes readers into the heart of two of them. . . . [She] does not simply describe the nuts and bolts of how these missions operate. Rather, she draws sweeping conclusions about the very nature of scientific discovery—what gets found—and how it depends on the ways in which scientists collaborate. That has implications for just about any group of researchers in any field. . . . In the end, science from both missions flowed directly from the people involved. No matter how the lakes on Titan shimmer, or what the mineralogy of a particular Martian rock turns out to be, it was the people behind the spacecraft, keyboards and endless tele-conferences that drove what these interplanetary robots discovered. I’m glad to have come to know them even better through this book."