So I must confess that I missed the conference this year, but I have a good excuse. On August 5, 2012, I, along with hundreds of my science colleagues (the VIPs were in another room), crowded into a small auditorium at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and anxiously watched the huge screens lining the wall. We were living the "Seven Minutes of Terror," the approximately seven minutes that it would take the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft to complete entry and descent through the martian

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... re, going from 13,000 mph to zero in that time, firing up a descent system never before tried on another planet, landing a rover wheels first. Honestly, most of us were terrified. Many of my engineering friends gave the rover no better than even odds of surviving. But she did. And I, along with the Curiosity rover, survived the seven minutes of terror. And now we have a half-ton avatar on Mars, big and beautiful, strong and capable, returning the most glorious science data nearly every day.