This video has been out for awhile, but I still find it entertaining. It’s a bunch of NASA folks explaining all the things that have to happen exactly right in order to get the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), a/k/a Curiosity, safely from space to the Martian surface. It’s way more complicated than the landings of earlier rovers: this one is the size of a small car, weighs about a thousand pounds, and is (per the device’s full name) chock-full of chemical-analysis and other testing instruments.

One of the cooler items on board: a rock-blasting laser. It can focus in on a rock several meters away, and vaporize it — filming the dust, which will tell it [something or other] about the material the rock was made of.

(On the other hand, I have a little science-fiction scenario in my head: say there are two single-celled organisms remaining on Mars, on the whole planet, following eons of extinction. Say these two have just successfully mated, and reproduced single-celled organism #3. The happy family is all excited, of course, and starts to plan for the future of their species on, oh no!, on exactly the wrong pebble…)

As you probably know by now, the landing seems to have gone off without a hitch. So, so cool.

Update, 2012-08-08: Just saw this cartoon in the e-newsletter for The Funny Times, which pointed out that both Gabby Douglas and Curiosity stuck their landings.