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For the Curiosity rover, it's just another day on Mars - but back on Earth, Tuesday marks the start of a second year of unprecedented exploration.
The "seven minutes of terror" leading up to the rover's landing in 2012 turned into 12 months of triumph - and the way Curiosity's team sees it, the best is yet to come.
The six-wheeled, car-sized rover passed the one-year mark at 1:32 a.m. ET Tuesday, exactly one Earth year after the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft executed a so-crazy-it-actually-worked entry, descent and landing sequence that had the $2.5 billion rover dangling from a tether beneath a rocket-powered "sky crane."
"Touchdown confirmed," said Allen Chen, the in-house commentator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We're safe on Mars."
Scoopfuls of discoveriesA year later, Curiosity is still safe on Mars, with scoopfuls of discoveries to its credit. The biggest find was geological evidence that Mars once had an environment that would have been hospitable to life as we know it - not just extremophiles, but the kind of garden-variety bacteria you'd find in a typical earthly stream.
"The stunning thing is that we found it all so quickly," Reuters quoted Caltech's John Grotzinger, the mission's project scientist, as saying on Monday during a ceremony to mark the anniversary.
The sobering thing is that Curiosity is really just getting started. Its odometer just turned over the first mile (1.6 kilometers) of travel a few days ago, and over the next year it has to roll roughly five miles (eight kilometers) to get to its main destination, a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain known as Aeolis Mons or Mount Sharp. That's where Curiosity's scientists hope to pin down exactly how long ago Mars was habitable, and perhaps find molecular traces that could have been left behind by ancient life.
Birthday party on EarthIn the midst of Curiosity's trek to Mount Sharp, NASA is taking more than a moment to mark the anniversary: The party hits its prime beginning at 10:45 a.m. ET with a streaming-video replay of Monday's reminiscences at JPL. Then, at noon ET, NASA Headquarters will host a live video event in Washington. Space agency officials and crew members on the International Space Station will reflect on the anniversary. They'll also discuss how Curiosity and other robotic missions are clearing the way for meet-ups with an asteroid - and eventually, Mars.
The time line for future exploration includes this autumn's launch of the Maven orbiter to Mars, the 2016 launch of NASA's InSight Mars lander, a 2020 Mars rover follow-up, a mission in the 2020s to get up close and personal with a near-Earth asteroid (or at least a piece of the rock), and journeys to Mars and its moons in the 2030s.
To keep tabs on Tuesday's party, keep an eye out for the Twitter hashtag #1YearOnMars, or follow @MarsCuriosity. You can send in a question by using the hashtag #askNASA. And for something completely different, check out the tweets from Curiosity's wisecracking alter-ego, @SarcasticRover. Check back here for updates as Mars Day unfolds.
More about the Curiosity anniversary: Curiosity's first year on Mars is the subject of this week's "Virtually Speaking Science" talk show, which airs at 8 p.m. ET Wednesday on Blog Talk Radio and in the Exploratorium's auditorium in the Second Life virtual world. Tune in via the Web, join us in Second Life, or listen to the archived podcast anytime by downloading it from Blog Talk Radio or the iTunes archiveAlan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding +Alan Boyle to your Google+ circles. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. . Last month's show featured NBC News space analyst James Oberg, talking about the Apollo 11 legacy.
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