NASA / JPL - Caltech
One week from today, the Curiosity rover will make its much-awaited landing at Gale Crater on Mars. Around this time on August 5, NASA will either celebrate another triumph in its Mars exploration program—or it will face a major setback that validates the Obama Administration's proposal to reduce funding for NASA's planetary science division (which manages the Mars program) in the 2013 U.S. federal budget. God forbid on that one...
Want to know just how intense Curiosity's entry, descent and landing at the Red Planet will be in seven days? The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission that Curiosity is a centerpiece of, uploaded this much-publicized video about the "Seven Minutes of Terror" JPL scientists and engineers will experience once the MSL spacecraft carrying Curiosity hits the Martian upper atmosphere around 10:11 PM next Sunday. We won't know what the rover's fate ends up being till twenty minutes after that.
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