Planet Mars met NASA’s rover Curiosity early on Monday after it successfully carried out a highly challenging landing, transmitting images back to Earth after traveling hundreds of millions of miles through space in order to explore the Red Planet. The Curiosity, which cost about $2.6 billion, made a dramatic landing on Martian terrain in a spectacle popularly known as the “seven minutes of terror.”
The mission control in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California erupted in cheers, high-fiving and hugging one another as the rover touched down. In a statement congratulating the NASA employees who worked on the project, President Barack Obama said, “The successful landing of Curiosity — the most sophisticated roving laboratory ever to land on another planet — marks an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future.” In the scientific community, professors such as James Wray of Georgia Institute of Technology, who is affiliated with the science team of Curiosity, reacted to the achievement with a mixture of relief and joy. “Rationally I know it was supposed to work all along, but emotionally it always seemed completely crazy,” Wray said. “So to see all those steps being ticked off and actually working, it’s a huge relief.”
