Touchdown! NASA's Curiosity Rover Lands Safely On Mars
Aug. 5 2012, Published 12:00 p.m. ET
By Debbie Emery - Breaking Celebrity News Reporter
It was a small step for a machine, but a giant leap for mankind when NASA's Curiosity rover successfully landed on the surface of Mars in the early hours of Monday morning and transmitted the first images from the Red Planet back to Earth.
After traveling for eight months over 352-million miles, the rover plunged through the Martian atmosphere in what is known as the "seven minutes of terror" to make a dramatic touchdown that involved a sky crane and the world's largest supersonic parachute to safely place it on the landing area meticulously chosen by scientists, reported CNN.com.
Back home on Earth, the mission control in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California exploded into celebration when the rover landed, with team members bursting into cheers, hugging, high-fiving, and even shedding some happy tears.
NASA'S $2.5-billion mission involved the work of more than 5,000 people from 37 states, some of whom had worked on the project for 10 years, and their labor did not go unnoticed by the president, who offered a personal message of congratulations to them all.
"The successful landing of Curiosity -- the most sophisticated roving laboratory ever to land on another planet -- marks an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future," said President Barack Obama said in a statement.
The aptly-named Curiosity is expected to revolutionize deep-space science, not only searching for indications that Mars is or was habitable, but paving the way for the next critical steps in exploration — soil-sample returns, sending astronauts to Mars, even, per