If all goes well, at approximately 10:30 p.m. Pacific Time, Sunday, NASA’s Curiosity Lander will touch down on the surface of Mars, ending a 352-million-mile journey that began last November.
That’s a big “if.”
NASA engineers have half-jokingly referred to the landing as the “Seven Minutes of Terror,” referring to the time it’ll take Curiosity to decrease its speed from 13,000 miles per hour to zero, while carrying out a breathtakingly complicated landing maneuver to gently deposit Curiosity on the surface of Mars. Watch this video for an explanation:
If the landing succeeds, NASA scientists will have much to celebrate. The nuclear-powered Curiosity is five times as heavy as NASA’s previous landers (hence the elaborate landing gear). And by space standards, the landing will be pinpoint accurate: Curiosity is expected to land somewhere within a 12-mile radius in a deep recess known as Gale crater, roughly the size of the San Francisco Peninsula. That may seem like a lot of wiggle room, but it’s five times as precise as any earlier Mars landings. The crater was chosen because scientists think its geological features may point to the past existence of water.