On Aug. 6, 2012, NASA's Curiosity rover successfully touched down on the Martian surface.
Curiosity is NASA's biggest and most ambitious Mars rover ever launched. Its landing involved a new kind of maneuver that had never been tried before using something called a "sky crane." Like previous rovers that have landed on Mars, Curiosity used a parachute and rocket engines to slow down. But while other rovers used airbags to cushion the last part of the fall, Curiosity's rocket-propelled sky crane hovered over the ground and gently lowered it with cables.
