I got up early especially to see the landing.

Just take a moment to let this sink in...this thing is sending us pictures from another friggin' planet!
An entire new world!

I've been following Curiousity for about 5 years now.

They even had a live web cam set up in the lab so you could see her being built.

I was terrified at the launch 8 months ago as anything could have gone wrong and then on Monday morning I was like an anxious father waiting for his child to be born!

So many things could have gone wrong during that landing but everything went without a single hitch!

Check these pics out http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html

There was competition to name the rover and it was won by this 8th grader

http://www.todaysthv.com/news/watercooler/221190/70/Kansas-6th-grader-picked-to-name-Mars-rover

She got to sign the rover and was invited to the launch!

Peace dudes

I remember all of that! Dude I'm old!!!

Yep this time we are going to get HD I mean HIGH FUCKING DEFINITION pictures of every time Curiosity moves an inch or looks at a new type of rock.

She's got a Nuclear battery pack and a LASER and a whole fucking science laboratory FFS!

This is the best 2.5 Billion Dollars the US have spent in a long long time! They spend something like that every day on war!

I fully expect Curiosity to find microbacterial life or signs that it once existed. There is an unexplained source of methane in the Martian atmosphere that keeps being replenished.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/news/marsmethane.html

It has to be coming from somewhere!!!

I'm as much of a science nerd as anyone else, and enjoy the explorative aspect of all this, but I wish the money went to saving our own planet rather than peeking down the blouse of another's.  Call me a wet blanket, but we have far more important issues to deal with on our own terra firma.. Let's clean up our own back yard before fucking up someone else's. The only legacy we've left of ourselves on the moon is discarded junk. Hm. Typical, right? And don't think the US of A doesn't have military interests regarding both our own moon and Mars.

I can hear the arguments... that we've garnered scientific and medical benefits from these excursions...  from a global conciousness standpoint, I'm all about Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  Feed the starving first. THEN play...

Good points, but here is possibly, IMHO, another perspective on the argument of "let's clean up our own house before looking around at others."

- First, for every dollar spent on space exploration it is estimated that between 5 to 10 dollars is generated back into the economy that could be used to solve problems. Space exploration creates new products, new employment, new ways of doing things and if it were not for space exploration in the 20th century, there are a considerable amount of things we would not have such as the internet, GPS, advanced medicine, weather satellites, communication, etc. and on and on almost ad infinitium.

- Second, space exploration has pushed forward many technological advancements such as the computer you are looking at this on, your smart phone or your maybe your iPad. Computer advancements are only one small contribution space exploration has made to a better world.

- Third, it could be argued that learning about the world around us (i.e., space) may one day be important in saving humanity by giving us the means to spread our race off Earth to other planets. To do so we need to develop the technology we will need and have an understanding of our space environment including that of other planets. In the centuries to come it will seem totally normal to travel to other planets when humanity becomes a space bound race. If we don't begin now, then when?

- Fourth, fortunately human beings are naturally curious and want to know what is over the next hill, that has been important in the creation of diverse civilizations.  We cannot stay ignorant forever and space (other planets) is our next hill. We must explore. Earth is humanities' cradle, we can't stay in the cradle forever.

- Fifth, there is something about space exploration that lifts the human spirit like nothing else; look how the world stopped, all at once, all over the planet to watch Neal Armstrong set his first foot on the moon...fabulous stuff, man! Mind bogglingly cool! Just think how much less of a people we would be if we had not gone to the moon when we could have. But we did go and that adds greatly to the human experience.

All IMHO.