NASA Has Plenty to Celebrate After Mars Rover Curiosity's Perfect Landing

Monday, August 6, 2012 - 03:50 in Astronomy & Space

Celebration After a Perfect Landing Members of the Mars Science Laboratory team in the MSL Mission Support Area react after learning the the Curiosity rover has landed safely on Mars. NASA/JPLObama calls it a proud moment for the space program and the country PASADENA, Calif. -- Long minutes of thunderous applause greeted the managers and engineers who paraded into an auditorium here Sunday night, triumphant after a perfect landing on another world. The Mars rover Curiosity sent a picture from the Martian surface just moments after its self-piloted descent and airdrop, and everyone assembled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory could not help but cheer. It's a huge moment for NASA, which delivered the rover over budget and two years late -- but delivered it, and beautifully. Nothing is harder than landing on Mars, and no one does it better than the United States, said Charles Bolden, NASA's administrator. In a...

Read the whole article on PopSci

More from PopSci

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net