5 Questions (and Answers) About Tonight's Mars Rover Landing
After eight months traveling millions of miles, NASA’s largest
and most complex rover ever will attempt a difficult and
complicated Mars landing tonight, August 5. The landing—or the
crash—should be confirmed by about at 10:31 PDT (that’s 1:31 EDT
on August 6). Here's what you may want to know about this
venture. What’s Happening Tonight? The rover, named “Curiosity,”
and its spacecraft will plummet into the Martian atmosphere at
13,000 mph, then use a huge parachute to slow its decent to
about 200 mph. The spacecraft will deploy a kind of hovercraft
with retrorockets that will lower Curiosity down to the surface
at Gale Crater, then whisk itself away from the rover landing
site to crash elsewhere on Mars. Curiosity will unfold itself
and begin roving on the surface of Mars to search for evidence
that the planet is or ever has been capable of supporting
microbial life. The rover actually is expected to land around
10:17 p.m. PDT, but it takes about