Curiosity has successfully landed on Mars. It landed on its own, autonomously. The United States has had a robotic presense at Mars (in orbit or on the surface) for the last 15 years. The United States is the only nation that has successfully landed probes on Mars.

This is what happened on August 5, 2012. We tossed a car (Curiosity weighs a ton and is the size of of Mini Cooper automobile) at Mars and it landed safely. And how much did it cost? It cost each American citizen about 7 dollars. Not bad. Cheaper than a movie, and this is real, not fiction!

Landing sequence for Curiosity.

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