// block 192529 · space · 6 August 2012
Curiosity lands on Mars
The moment this block marks: the confirmation of the landing received at JPL, 22:32 on 5 August in Pasadena, 6 August 2012, 05:32:00 UTC. The first block mined after it is block 192,529, 6 August 2012, 05:38:03 UTC.
After a flight of 36 weeks, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory reached Mars on the night of 5 August 2012, Pacific time. Its rover, Curiosity, weighed about a ton, five times as much as the earlier rovers Spirit and Opportunity. In the last moments of the descent, a rocket-powered stage lowered it on cables to the ground, then flew away.
The descent through the atmosphere lasted about seven minutes, and no one on Earth could intervene: at that distance a signal from Mars took about fourteen minutes to arrive, so by the time JPL saw the spacecraft enter the atmosphere, Curiosity had already been on the ground, safely or not, for several minutes. At 22:32 Pacific time, relayed by the orbiter Mars Odyssey and received at the antenna station in Canberra, Australia, the confirmation came: the rover was down, near the foot of a mountain about five kilometres high inside Gale Crater.
It soon sent its first image, a wide view of rocky ground in front of the rover. It carried ten science instruments, among them a laser to analyse rocks from a distance, to find out whether the region had ever offered conditions suitable for microbial life.
Because of that delay, this page marks the moment the news reached Earth, not the touchdown itself, which JPL's timeline places about fourteen minutes earlier. Block 192,529 was mined at 05:38 UTC, six minutes after the confirmation and some twenty minutes after the wheels touched Mars. Its hash, like every hash, can be checked on any node.
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