Australia's role in the Mars Curiosity landing

After travelling a distance of over 567 million kilometres from Earth for 8.5 months NASA's Mars Curiosity rover landed safely in Gale Crater yesterday. The successful landing sparked euphoric celebrations not only at NASA but across the globe and Australia played a crucial role in making it happen.

Mars Curiosity is “the most sophisticated roving laboratory sent to another planet”. For the next 23 months Curiosity will analyse dozens of samples drilled from rocks or scooped from the ground with the overall mission of investigating whether conditions on Mars in the past had been conducive to allow “microbial life and for preserving clues in the rocks about possible past life”.

By surviving the ‘seven minutes of terror' Curiosity has essentially allowed NASA to keep its space program alive. With the purse strings already tight a costly failure would have certainly consigned further exploration of Mars into the bin for a decade or so. Fortunately, the mission has been an unqualified success.

At a press conference an hour after the landing, NASA administrator Charles Bolden opened his speech by mentioning that the team at NASA's Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex (CDSCC) couldn't be there at JPL but they were crucial to the success of Mars Curiosity.

 The CDSCC located in Tidbinbilla, 35 kilometres south of Canberra, is one of NASA's three ground based stations which communicate with deep space missions.

The others stations located at Goldstone, California and Madrid, Spain share communications tasks with the CDSCC for roughly one third of the day each but CDSCC was the station on duty as Mars Curiosity approached and landed safely on the red planet.

The Mars Curiosity mission has been dubbed the “moon landing” equivalent for today's youth and the ways NASA communicated with the world reflected that. The NASA JPL mission control for Mars Curiosity was viewed around the world via NASA streaming TV Ustream, photos were released in web galleries and throughout the journey the @MarsCuriosity twitter account sent out cheerful, confident messages.