The Mars rover's '7 minutes of terror': A guide to the planned landing

The $2.5 billion Curiosity rover has mere moments to go from 13,000 miles per hour to zero — and one small error could ruin everything

An artist's concept of Curiosity on Mars
(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA's $2.5 billion Curiosity rover isn't set to touch down on Mars until Aug. 5, after a 354-million-mile journey that began inside a rocket last November, but its creators are already biting their nails in anticipation of the extraordinarily tricky landing. The odds aren't great: 60 percent of NASA's missions to the surface of the red planet have fallen apart. NASA experts have dubbed Curiosity's planned descent "seven minutes of terror," and just released a blockbuster new video explaining the obstacles that the car-sized mobile lab must overcome. (Watch the rather heart-pounding clip below.) Here, a guide:

Remind me: What exactly is the Curiosity?

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