Space.com by Mike Wall 8/5/2019
Curiosity aced its crazy sky-crane landing on Aug. 5, 2012Time flies, on Mars as well as Earth.
It's been seven years since NASA's Curiosity rover aced its Red Planet touchdown, a harrowing and seemingly improbable maneuver that had people around the world glued to their phones and laptop screens.
On the night of Aug. 5, 2012, a rocket-powered sky crane lowered the car-size Curiosity rover onto the floor of Gale Crater on cables, then detached and flew off to crash-land intentionally a safe distance away. When the success of this unprecedented move became apparent, mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, erupted in raucous cheers, which in some cases transitioned to tears of joy and relief.
And Curiosity has been going strong, and making exciting discoveries, ever since. For example, the rover quickly determined that the 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) crater had hosted a lake-and-stream system in the ancient past. And further observations suggested that this environment was habitable for long stretches, perhaps hundreds of millions of years at a time.
Curiosity has also detected several surges of methane in Gale Crater's air. These spikes intrigue astrobiologists, because the vast majority of Earth's atmospheric methane was produced by microbes and other organisms. The Mars methane is not a definitive sign of life, however, because the gas can be produced abiotically as well. This can happen via reactions between hot water and certain types of rock, for example.
More:
https://www.space.com/nasa-mars-rover-curiosity-landing-anniversary.html
