Today the world waits and watches for the final moments of Curiosity’s interplanetary trek: the crucial landing. But how will word of this landing – successful or otherwise – make its way back to Earth? In the video below, NASA explains how messages from Curiosity will be transmitted throughout its final approach, and how long that will take. These communication constraints would be the same ones to face a crewed Mars mission – constraints that put the landing party on their own in event of last minute or emergency situations, much like Curiosity.
![A trajectory analysis that used a computational fluid dynamics approach to determine the likely position and velocity histories of the foam (Credits: NASA Ref [1] p61).](http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/fluid-dynamics-trajectory-analysis-50x50.jpg)
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