On August 6, 2012 at 05:14 UTC NASA's "Curiosity” Mars rover, loaded with the most-sophisticated instruments ever used to explore another world, touched down on the Red Planet after an eight-month voyage across 352 million miles of interplanetary space. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the mission, received a radioed confirmation of touchdown sent by the Mars Science Laboratory from Mars, 154 million miles away and 13.8 minutes after the fact. The target landing zone was Gale Crater near the base of a three-mile-high mound of layered rock that represents hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of years of martian history, a frozen record of the planet's changing environment and evolution.
