Explore Mars with NASA Rover Curiosity

(Photo credit: NASA)NASA Rover Curiosity will be on the red surface by Monday, August 6th at precisely 1:31 am daylight savings time. It’s an ambitious attempt to land a spacecraft on the surface of Mars, but engineers are extremely confident it will go without a hitch. Unlike other missions, Curiosity is very heavy weighing about a ton, so engineers are going to use retro rockets to bring the whole craft down to 25 meters above the surface before reeling the object down to to the ground. This process has never been attempted before. You can get a sense of what this will really be like with 7 minutes of Terror, a  video created by NASA. If all goes well it will land at Gale Crater with the purpose of chasing water and potentially finding evidence that there was life on Mars at one time.  Follow along with the latest developments at the NASA website — or download the app called Mission Clock. All this and more on this week’s Sky Talk.