Let the Mission Begin - Curiosity and Mars

The Curiosity rover is on its way to Mars after a successful NASA launch yesterday.  In about 8 and a half months the rover will start its exploration of the Martian surface and tell us more about the origins and current state of the planet.  This is a success for NASA after the recent loss of another Mars mission, this one Russian and Chinese, which ended in low Earth orbit. 

NASA's $2.5 billion mission to Mars marks an expensive recovery from the space agency's unreadiness in 2009, which led to more than a 50 percent increase in the mission's cost.  But all of that is behind us as we watch the mission from here on Earth and learn about more than 1 billion years of Martian history once Curiosity starts crawling around Gale Crater. And while Curiosity is probing one part of Mars, the earlier rover Opportunity is continuing a separate mission elsewhere on the planet's surface.  So two U.S. rovers are crawling across the planet while we determine our future plans to send humans to the Red Planet.  This is one small step that will hopefully engage the American public (as well as the President) for such a mission.