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In Case You Missed It of the Day: The Curiosity Rover made it to Mars late Sunday night, and so far all we’ve got is this single high-res photo.
But it was more than enough to send NASA engineers into ecstasy, since the Curiosity’s landing sequence — coined The Seven Minutes of Terror – requires six vehicle configurations, 76 pyrotechnic devices, the largest supersonic parachute ever built, and more than 500,000 lines of code.
According to NASA administrator Charles Bolden, “new technologies never invented or attempted before were created for this journey,” and that the odds for success were actually just 40 percent.
Curiosity, the most sophisticated Rover ever built is now on the surface of the red planet, where it will seek to answer age-old questions about whether or not life ever existed there on Mars or if the planet can sustain life in the future.
More photos to come, we can be sure of that.
[mashable]