Dennis and I had Popeye’s chicken and watched the countdown and landing of the Curiosity just moments ago. It was exciting to see the people in the control room, clap for each step, cry, hug. I felt my eyes mist with tears when I heard the calls come back that the parachute opened and then to see the first photographs come back. I thought seeing the one of the horizon with the shadow of the rover was pretty exciting.
I wasn’t alive during the moon missions so I want to be part of the excitement for this one. After all, we are exploring another planet! Due to the complexity of designing interplanetary missions, exploration of Mars has had a huge failure rate, but this one landed only 227 meters off the landing site.
I am interested to see what the Mars Science Laboratory discovers. The Mission goals include determining whether Mars could ever support life, study the climate and geology and plan for a human mission. The idea that I could see astronauts doing a Mars walk in a decade or so is simply mind boggling.
For more information:
ZB's Blog of Awesomeness 
Posted by Michelle Proulx on August 6, 2012 at 1:50 pm
The thing that really got to me was that the Mars lander took 14 minutes to send back the data that it had had a successful launch. So it could be lying on the Martian soil in a fiery heap for 14 minutes and we wouldn’t even know about it. Space travel is awesome.