Curiosity might join Opportunity tonight!

The NASA spacecraft to Mars, appropriately named Curiosity, will land tonight, if all goes well. This is exciting on many levels.
For one thing, our nearest neighbor has a lot more stories to tell than we originally expected, as the data collected by NASA's previous spacecraft, Opportunity, indicates. Mars used to have water, and therefore might have once contained life (as we know it). Curiosity, in fact, has been targeted to one of the sites that scientists consider likely to have harbored water and life aeons ago.
For another thing, Curiosity is an engineering marvel. When the rover Opportunity landed on Mars 5 years ago, it was dropped by its spacecraft cucooned in a nest of airbags. It hit the ground and bounced to a stop, still packaged in its protective airbag covering, intact, shaken but not stirred, for which NASA no doubt was fervently thankful for. Curiosity packs a lot more punch: it is nuclear powered and carries an impressive number of instruments including an atomic spectrometer, an X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence machine, a large suite of instruments to analyze gases and solid matter, metereological package and ultraviolet sensor and a total of seventeen cameras, not to mention its array of devices for communication with Earth. It is understandable that NASA feels leary of using its trusty old airbags to protect this giant.
Hence, NASA engineers have come up with a pretty darn ingenious system of lowering the rover onto Mars (Mission Impossible-style):
The spacecraft itself will use heat shields and parachutes to slow down its descent. About a mile from the ground, it will lower the rover down by unspooling a set of cables until the rover's wheels touch the surface.

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This was on Sunday. I couldn't complete this post or publish it because I was interrupted by my son who woke up crying when a bolt of lightning hit close, Sunday being a day of thunderstorms in Pittsburgh.

Anyway, as all the world knows now, Curiosity did land beautifully and has already sent a bunch of images! Hurray for science! Hurray for NASA!

No matter how bad the budget deficits and bureaucracy, it is reassuring to know that NASA is still at the top of its game.