Today one of the most iconic explorers in human history was laid to rest during a private ceremony in his home state of Ohio.

In attendance to bid Neil Armstrong farewell was a small group of family and friends including his Apollo 11 crewmates Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins as well as John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.

During the course of his career Neil Armstrong was a distinguished engineer, aviator, test pilot, professor, and astronaut, a loving and beloved family man.

He will of course be best remembered, indelibly throughout history, as the first human to step onto soil other than Earth’s, at 2:56 UTC, July 21, 1969. Despite that grand accomplishment he remained throughout his life what he had been before, a man of great grace and humility who recognized that his achievements were only possible because of the extensive labors of a very large, dedicated team.

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As noted in yesterday’s post, Curiosity, piloted by NASA engineers, has successfully landed on the surface of Mars. The rover’s two-year mission is to investigate whether conditions on Mars are favorable for microbial life and to seek clues in Martian rocks about possible past life on and beneath the surface of the planet.

Curiosity’s new home.

Launched from Earth on November 16, 2011, the robotic lab sailed through space for more than eight months, covering 352 million miles (566 million km). It pierced Mars’ atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour, which is 17 times the speed of sound. A complex process involving a supersonic parachute, sky crane, retro-rockets, and retracting cables was employed to slow descent and then lower Curiosity onto Martian soil. The rover came to rest near the foot of a huge mountain (three miles tall and 96 miles in diameter) inside Gale Crater.

Ecstatic engineers celebrate as Curiosity rolls onto Martian soil and sends back its first pic.

A computer-generated image of Curiosity on Mars.

About the size of a car and weighing more than a ton, Curiosity has six wheels, 17 cameras, and 10 sophisticated scientific instruments. All in, it’s more than 15 times larger than its predecessor Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.  Some of the Curiosity‘s scientific tools are the first of their kind on Mars, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking rocks’ elemental composition from a distance.

This gives you a better sense of how big Curiosity really is (larger than my last Pontiac).

NASA plans to put Curiosity and its various instruments through several weeks of engineering checks before driving it beyond the landing site. Once certified fit to ramble, Curiosity will be able to move at a rate of approximately 660 feet (200 meters) per day on Martian terrain. It will stop here and there to drill into rock, scoop soil, and feed samples into particular laboratory instruments inside itself, and it will transmit data and photos back to Earth.

Curiosity, photographed by an orbiter as it was landing on Mars.

Curiosity is important for several reasons. It’s the first astrobiology mission of any sort since the 1970s, as well as the first rover designed to search for life on Mars. In terms of size and weight, the vehicle is huge by comparison with prior probes, and its successful landing demonstrates the feasibility of delivering heavier loads to the Martian surface, paving the way for eventual manned Mars missions. (As Ambassador Bleich noted yesterday, the President has challenged NASA to land humans on Mars by 2025.)

One of the first pix of Mars taken by Curiosity, as its front wheel rolls onto Martian soil.

NASA’s long-term Mars program is a science-driven enterprise that seeks to determine whether Mars was, is, or can become a habitable world. The four key goals are to understand the climate of Mars, understand the geology of Mars, determine whether life of any sort ever existed on Mars, and to prepare the way for in-person human exploration.

My friends at NASA say that Mars seems strangely familiar (with polar ice caps, clouds, and seasonal weather patterns) yet different enough to challenge our perceptions of what makes a planet work. New discoveries regularly shake up their understanding and send them back to the drawing board to revise existing theories. Most tantalizing are hints that the seemingly sterile Martian wasteland once raged with volcanoes, thunder storms, flash floods, and ocean tides.

Earth and Mars side by side, to compare size.

NASA has been studying Mars for a long time. Our first close-up picture of the red planet was snapped almost 50 years ago, in 1965. Fly-by and orbiter missions have regularly photographed and mapped the planet from above. And then, on July 4, 1997, Sojourner rover successfully landed on the surface and explored Mars for approximately three months before communications contact was lost. It was Sojourner whose findings suggested that Mars may once have had liquid water on its surface and a thicker atmosphere.

Sojourner rover on Mars.

In January of 2004 twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity landed on different sides of the planet. Those two rovers focused on investigating Mars’ environmental history by examining geological formations. Both were highly successful and functioned long after their expected lifetimes. Spirit operated until communications were lost in March 2010, and Opportunity still continues to send back valuable information.

This gives you a sense of the evolution of rovers in size and complexity. Clockwise from lower left: Sojourner, Opportunity, humans, Curiosity.

So, what’s next? The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission, or MAVEN, is scheduled to launch in 2013. Selected from 26 competitive proposals in 2007, MAVEN will explore the planet’s upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and interactions with the sun and solar wind.

Basically, the mission will try to determine what might have happened to Mars’ ancient water. More technically, scientists will use MAVEN data to determine the role that loss of volatile compounds (such as carbon dioxide and water) from the Mars atmosphere to space has played over time, which in turn will provide insight into the history of the planet’s atmosphere, climate, and prior and future habitability.

The surface of Mars.

In addition, NASA is considering a robotic surface mission for later this decade that would focus in part on improving and testing technologies necessary to facilitate direct human exploration of Mars. The effort is part of NASA’s ongoing outreach to and collaboration with international and private-sector partners.

In response to NASA’s solicitation of outside ideas, more than 400 concepts and abstracts were presented at a public conference in June at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. The Institute will submit to NASA later this summer a report on the best of those ideas, which will help NASA plan, calibrate, and sequence future steps in the Mars Exploration Program.

So, there’s lots of excitement ahead. For now, though, I’m just happy to celebrate the safe arrival of Curiosity. In due course I look forward to seeing the rover pass its post-landing systems checks and sally forth across the Martian landscape.

I’ll tweet and blog from time to time as new data or particularly interesting photographs are sent back to Earth from Mars. If you are interested in seeing the full version of the above video of Curiosity’s landing, click here.

Along with millions of other people around the world, earlier today I followed with excitement a great event on the surface of Mars. I toggled among CNN, Twitter, and a NASA feed, but my good friend Jeff Bleich, the American Ambassador in Canberra, had a more up-close vantage point. Below is his Facebook note about what occurred:

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Curiosity — A Moment in History, by Ambassador Jeffrey Bleich

There are moments when, even as they are happening, you know you are witnessing history. 

Today, standing beside a 70-meter dish at the Deep Space Center near Canberra, Becky and I and our Embassy team witnessed one of those moments as the world’s most sophisticated inter-planetary lab landed on the surface of Mars.

Indeed, people all around the world witnessed this moment precisely because of the signals captured on that massive 70-meter dish.

Via satellite link with the Mission Control in Pasadena, California, we held our breath with teams of engineers on both sides of the Pacific for 7 minutes of terror while the lab — nicknamed Curiosity — entered Mars’ atmosphere.

Because the rover is so large and sophisticated, it is far heavier than any other rover, and entered Mars atmosphere at far greater velocity.  In order to prevent it from either burning up upon entry or slamming into Mars’ surface and exploding upon impact, hundreds of dedicated engineers and scientists devised a heat shield, a supersonic parachute, a sky crane with retro-rockets, and a series of retracting cables to lower Curiosity gently to the surface of Mars. 

In addition to their ingenuity, this feat required the teamwork of the communications engineers in Australia to track the lab’s progress and collect its data through the descent. And yet, even with all of this effort, no one knew whether it would succeed. 

To put it in perspective, a safe landing required the equivalent of taking a car going 65 miles an hour and having it somehow stop gently and safely in 2.1 seconds.  Moreover, it needed to be as precise in landing as if that car had been launched from Florida and land perfectly in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on the 50-yard-line on a space the size of a Frisbee.

And yet as the seconds ticked down, we watched the team exult as one task after another was achieved. 

Then, at 3:31 p.m. Canberra time, the room erupted as Curiosity Mars Space Lab — the most sophisticated rover in history – completed its audacious landing in the Gale Crater of Mars and signaled back to Canberra that it was healthy and ready to roll. 

In his remarks immediately afterward, Charlie Bolden, the Administrator of NASA, started off by thanking the team in Canberra for their flawless effort.  As he explained, Curiosity will now be able to explore, photograph, and chemically analyze a vast region of Mars.  It will finally help answer a question that we have wondered about for decades, whether conditions on Mars could support microbial life.  Curiosity’s two year mission will be essential to achieving the President’s vision of sending a person to Mars by the year 2030 and returning that person safely back to earth.

For anyone who wonders if the great years of space exploration are behind us, today’s landing was resounding proof that the best years lay ahead.  Because tonight, approximately 36 million miles away, rests a beautiful American-made car, ready to drive.  And here in Canberra are a team of great partners who can’t wait to come on board and join the ride.

– Ambassador Bleich

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Jeff, I hope you got my email asking permission to republish your post. Relying on something I once saw on Law & Order , I interpreted the past 10 minutes of silence as assent.

Lot’s wife and feline proverbs aside, there is no such thing as too much Curiosity. So, tomorrow I’ll write a bit more more about the mission and salt in a few photos and videos from our friends at NASA.

Early this morning I followed with great interest Elon Musk’s tweets re the countdown, launch, and trajectory of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Falcon 9 has successfully carried the Dragon capsule into orbit, and Dragon will dock with the International Space Station on Friday. This is the first private sector mission to the Station, and a key outcome of SpaceX’s success will be a contract for another dozen supply missions.

Falcon 9 soars into space.

Following this morning’s launch, John P. Holdren, Assistant to President Obama for Science and Technology, issued the following statement:

“Congratulations to the teams at SpaceX and NASA for this morning’s successful launch of the Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Every launch into space is a thrilling event, but this one is especially exciting because it represents the potential of a new era in American spaceflight. Partnering with U.S. companies such as SpaceX to provide cargo and eventually crew service to the International Space Station is a cornerstone of the President’s plan for maintaining America’s leadership in space.

“This expanded role for the private sector will free up more of NASA’s resources to do what NASA does best — tackle the most demanding technological challenges in space, including those of human space flight beyond low Earth orbit. I could not be more proud of our NASA and SpaceX scientists and engineers, and I look forward to following this and many more missions like it.”

SpaceX is the brainchild of Elon Musk, who has also co-founded and driven other game-changing ventures such as Paypal, Tesla Motors, and Solar City. My favorite of Elon’s tweets this morning perfectly conveyed the emotions of an entrepreneurial explorer, going where no one has gone before: “Falcon flew perfectly!! Dragon in orbit, comm locked and solar arrays active!! Feels like a giant weight just came off my back.”

Big congratulations to Elon and his team at SpaceX. And congratulations as well to NASA for taking this innovative and potentially powerful new step in space exploration.