The collapse of the New Zealand Banking Corporation in 1866 meant that Richard Proctor, the corporation's second-largest shareholder, found himself with debts of over £13,000. A fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and author of Saturn and Its System (1865), critically acclaimed but scarcely a page-turner, Proctor turned to churning out works of popular science to escape his plight. And, as he discovered with Other Worlds than Ours (1870), no subject was more popular with his readers than the plurality of worlds. Proctor's finances suddenly improved and a stream of similar works flowed from his pen, with Mars given particular emphasis.

Some 126 years later, in 1996, the US space agency NASA transformed the prospects of its floundering planetary science programme with the help of a claimed finding (now widely regarded as highly controversial) of microbial fossils in a Martian meteorite that had been found in Antarctica. This supposed evidence of earlier Martian life led President Clinton, with subsequent Congressional support, to step up NASA's exploration of Mars. Just as the Victorian reading public happily paid to read Proctor's writings on the possibilities of life on Mars, so US taxpayers bankrolled an expanded effort for spacecraft to investigate the planet's history. The big goal of the Mars programme would become to ‘follow the water’; that is, to address how past water activity on Mars had shaped the planet's environment over time, which meant investigating the Martian rocks, minerals and geologic landforms.

The two Mars exploration rovers Opportunity and Spirit were products of this enterprise. Robotic spacecraft armed with an array of scientific instruments, including cameras to obtain digital images, they were launched in 2003 and both landed successfully on Mars the following year. The two robots then began the exploration programmes that saw them directed by their earthbound controllers to various locations on the Martian surface and send back a stream of images. Contact was lost with Spirit in 2010, while Opportunity, though ailing, is still active at the time of writing and continues to return scientific data.

Janet Vertesi's Seeing Like a Rover is an ethnographic study of the approximately 150 scientists and engineers who comprised the Mars exploration rover team during the years of Vertesi's fieldwork. That team determined the activities of the two rovers and, in particular, the selection, interpretation and then circulation of the digital images secured by the rovers. Vertesi centres her attention on the work of scientific representation, and one of her chief claims is that the labour involved in planning and ‘handling’ these digital images creates new ways of seeing and interacting with the planet such that the scientists, engineers and robots coalesce into a single collective team. In other words, the book is about how team members took on the characteristics of the rovers and learned to see like a rover, with team members even feeling the mechanical problems of the robots as bodily aches and pains.

Each chapter in the body of the book deals with a different aspect of the images: their acquisition, their calibration, how they are crafted for scientific ends, how annotating images leads to maps of Mars and shapes the team's interpretations and decisions on the activities of the robots, how team members become attuned to the capabilities of the rovers, and the norms and constraints to which images are subject as well as the earthbound work of scientists to fashion trustworthy claims. In the last major chapter before a very short conclusion, Vertesi shifts her focus to the construction of the kinds of image of Mars employed for press releases. Many scientists used to deride such images as ‘pretty pictures’ but they are now generally seen as essential to a big US project's continued public support and so crucial to the flow of dollars that enables a project to continue.

Vertesi was ‘embedded’ with the rover team for two years, and for a period worked on image calibrations herself. It nevertheless does seem odd to this historian that the people who are discussed in the book are given by their project position or pseudonym. Thus, for example, we read about the PI (or principal investigator). Yet anyone can check within seconds that the PI referred to is Steven Squyres of Cornell University, who has even provided a blurb for the back of the book. Are the team members themselves unable to work out the identity of ‘Liz’ and the others mentioned?

But these are minor puzzlements over ethnographic methodologies. Vertesi has written a compelling account of how the images of Mars secured by the rovers were planned and then transformed into scientific artefacts together with the host of conversations, meetings and decisions that went into these activities. She also has very interesting things to say about scientific images in general, so that, overall, Seeing Like a Rover is an important addition to the growing literature on this subject. The University of Chicago Press too has done an outstanding job of production and the book contains many colour images, as well as black-and-white ones. It is very appropriate that while there are many images of Mars, there are also numerous ones of, among other things, the computer screens of team members.