The Craziest Landing in the History of Space

For seven minutes, a one-ton rover fell toward Mars alone, and everyone who built it could do nothing but wait.

Mars was so far that radio took about fourteen minutes to reach Earth. By the time NASA heard the rover touch the atmosphere, it was already alive or dead on the ground.

Curiosity hit the Martian air at around 21,000 kilometers an hour, a heat shield glowing past 2,000 degrees Celsius. A supersonic parachute snapped open, the shield fell away, and a rocket-powered platform took over. Too heavy for airbags, the rover was lowered the last few meters on cables, like a crane in the sky. Every step had to fire in perfect order, automatically. Engineers called it the seven minutes of terror.

It all worked on the first try, run by the rover's own computer. Then the cables cut, the platform flew off to crash a safe distance away, and Curiosity was home.

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