You say the sky crane launches off in the distance; is that because you want to avoid damaging the rover?

Mischna: Exactly. You want to make sure that it lands sufficiently far away so that nothing happens to the rover. The gravity on Mars is about one-third of the gravity we have here on Earth, which means you don't need as much rocket power to make the spacecraft hover -- but it's still a lot of power. To get something of this size to the Martian surface, you have to come up with a whole new landing system because the air bags, which we used on previous rovers, just aren't going to work. It would be like dropping a piano wrapped in bubble wrap and expecting it to land without damage. We had to completely rethink our approach to landing, but that's a good thing, because we hope this will be the first of many projects like it, eventually leading to human exploration on Mars. And if you're going to send humans to Mars, you're going to need to bring a lot of heavy equipment -- places to live, food, water, etc.

Curiosity is about 10-15 feet long, roughly the size of a Mini Cooper, and yet it has a wide range of scientific instruments onboard. In fact, the official name of this rover is the Mars Science Laboratory. What are its most impressive instruments?

Mischna: The remote sensing mask is really extraordinary. It has two rectangular eyes -- a primary imaging camera with a bunch of different filters and focal lengths, and another large, circular camera that can fire a laser that turns rock into vapor, which is picked up by another camera that interprets its composition. So, yeah, this rover can go around firing laser beams at rocks and other materials to find out what they're made of; I'd say that's one of its most impressive instruments.

It also has a meteorology station that will measure the temperature, pressure, wind and relative humidity of the Martian surface. It has a 7-foot robotic arm with a number of different components at the end of it, including scoops and percussion drills that allow it to chip off and pick up rock samples. It also has an alpha proton x-ray spectrometer, which can identify minerals in surface rocks by firing x-rays into them. It has a microscopic camera called MAHLI, the Mars Hand Lens Imager, that images microscopic features in the soil, which can tell you how it evolved over time. There is another instrument called DAN that fires neutrons into the surface, in order to detect water underneath it. Last but not least, there's SAM, which is an acronym for Sample Analysis from Mars. This is the rover's real workhorse; it takes soil samples, drops them into an oven where they are baked to over 1000º Celsius and then senses the gases that leach off, which can tell you the composition of the rock.

Altogether this rover has an order of magnitude more science instrumentation than anything we've ever sent to Mars, and it's all designed to be a comprehensive habitability investigation. It's meant to find out out whether Mars was ever conducive to life, whether life existed in the past on Mars, and whether life could exist there now.