[caption id=“attachment_210” align=“alignleft” width=“300”] Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech[/caption] This weekend was fabulous! The NASA Mars rover Curiosity landed last night successfully after 7 minutes of abject terror. The landing was a success and now we can look forward to lots of new images from Mars. I love that this is not fiction but fact! We are exploring Mars in my lifetime! I have read books like Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson and thought they were amazing, but not likely something I would see. But with these successful rover landings it seems so much more likely! Curiosity’s landing will generate a lot of geological and chemical data about the makeup of Mars, but it also paves the way for getting larger landers and landers that can land on Mars and then return, and finally landers that can bring people to Mars. I love it when science fiction becomes science fact!