Congratulations, Curiosity!

Humanity reached another milestone on August 5 when our newest Mars rover, Curiosity, landed only 8 feet from its target on a planet 140 million miles away.  There’s obviously not much we can add to the story from here, but if you want to keep up on this amazing achievement we have some links to share with you.  Curiosity landed in a totally different way from any past planetary probes.  How different?  This amazing video from JPL shows you a landing system that would make Rube Goldberg blush but worked flawlessly in action.  Here’s a link to the locations of all 7 NASA Mars landings, plotted on a globe of Mars so you can see their relative locations.  This link will give you the lowdown on some of Curiosity’s hardware.  If you want to stay up on the mission, NASA has at least two web pages dedicated to Curiousity.  This link goes to their page for the rover itself, and this one takes you their page about JPL (which is currently all about their flagship mission).  If you’re on Facebook you can ‘like’ the JPL Facebook page, or even get posts from Curiosity itself by liking the Curiosity Facebook page.  Finally, this link will plug you into the Mobile App, Flickr, and even more.  Geek out!