Touchdown!

                                                                                                   IMAGE: NASA JPL Cal-Tech
COMING IN FOR A LANDING: Sunday night, after 352 million miles and 8.5 months, the most sophisticated interplanetary rover ever was set to arrive on Mars. 

All day long we watched updates on Twitter, Facebook and various NASA sites, and with each passing hour, we grew closer to the "seven minutes of terror" (approach, descent and landing) we'd been hearing so much about. 

We used NASA's fantastic "Eyes on the Solar System" to watch the MSL close in on Mars. 

In preparation for the big night, we made Mars pizzas and had beverages ready to make a toast. We also ate peanuts - a tradition in the control room. 

And we were all decked out in appropriate MSL-related attire ...

When Mars began its descent, and the NASA narrator kept reporting readings were 'nominal,, Annabelle started doing a happy nominal dance. When it was announced "We're safe on Mars," our house erupted in cheers. The NASA folks were pretty happy, too, I think, judging by this video. 

Embedded video from
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology

I think I've watched that video 6 times. Just can't get enough of it!

Here is the second shot NASA released last night, taken by Curiosity's fish-eye wide angle lens on one of its Hazard-Avoidance cameras, located at the rover's base. 

IMAGE: NASA JPL Cal-Tech

Bigger and better and color photos will be available in the days, weeks and months to come.

And speaking of color, this afternoon NASA released a self portrait of sorts. It's a during-descent photo taken by the Mars Descent Imager Instrument (MARDI). It was taken about 2.5 minutes before landing and shows the heat shield, which had been jettisoned thee seconds earlier. The heat shield is about 15-feet (4.5 meters) in diameter.

                                                                                   IMAGE: NASA JPL Cal-Tech
Of the handful of photos released so far, I really love this one (below). It's of Mt. Sharp on Mars! 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

You can see Curiosity's shadow and part of a couple of her wheels in the foreground, with Mount Sharp (about 3.4 miles high) rising in the distance. One of Curiosity's goals is to drive the rover to the mountain to investigate its lower layers, which scientists think hold clues to past environmental change. 

SMILE FOR THE CAMERA: Remarkably, an action shot of Curiosity plummeting toward Mars was captured by a camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

In it, you can see the 51-foot wide sonic 'chute as Curiosity descends toward Gale Crater, its landing spot. 

The historic shot was no accident. "If HiRISE took the image one second before or one second after, we probably would be looking at an empty Martian landscape," said Sarah Milkovich, HiRISE investigation scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a NASA press release. "When you consider that we have been working on this sequence since March and had to upload commands to the spacecraft about 72 hours prior to the image being taken, you begin to realize how challenging this picture was to obtain." 

Another epic win for NASA. 

Annabelle was at AstroGals camp today at The Museum of Flight, but CJ was available to write a short review of last night. 

On August fifth, 2012, at 10:31 PM,  the Curiosity rover (Mars Science Laboratory) hit Mars. Before that, in November 2011, the Curiosity rover (that has been in development since 2001) had been launched on Atlas V. During the NASA TV live broadcast, you could see mission control getting really worried about if Curiosity was going to be successful or not.

Also, on August fifth 2012, the website Eyes on the Solar System had a page where you could view a simulation of the Curiosity rover's landing on mars. The 3-D engine used for the simulation was some engine made by NASA. Photo of the Eyes on the Solar System simulation was featured on the NASA TV live broadcast a few minutes before the Curiosity rover landed.