Rover must "stick the landing" on Mars in 6 days

It's NASA's most ambitious and expensive Mars mission yet - and it begins with the red planet arrival late Sunday of the smartest interplanetary rover ever built. Also the most athletic.

Like an Olympic gymnast, it needs to "stick the landing."
It won't be easy. The complicated touchdown NASA designed for the Curiosity rover is so risky it's been described as "seven minutes of terror" - the time it takes to go from 13,000 mph to a complete stop.
Scientists and engineers will be waiting anxiously 154 million miles away as the spacecraft plunges through Mars' thin atmosphere, and in a new twist, attempts to slowly lower the rover to the bottom of a crater with cables.
By the time Earthlings receive first word of its fate, it will have planted six wheels on the ground - or tumbled itself into a metal graveyard.
If it succeeds, a video camera aboard the rover will have captured the most dramatic minutes for the first filming of a landing on another planet.
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