Imagine the view from the summit of Mt. Sharp on Mars early Monday morning. Atop a mountain taller than any in the continental United States, you look out in all directions at a vast, barren, red landscape, bathed in what seems like a perpetual twilight glow from an oddly distant sun. To the north, a dune field, crawling indeterminably across the surface in a wind 1/100th the density of Earth’s. Beyond it, the rim of Gale Crater, some 20 km away, surrounding you on all sides. Beyond that, the Martian horizon—strangely and unsettlingly near, a consequence of standing on a world barely half the size of Earth.

A desolate landscape, completely devoid of visible life.

And then, out of the corner of your eye, to the northwest, a small grey blob appears streaking over the horizon through the atmosphere. It erupts into a much larger white blob—a parachute. Dangling from it is what appears to be an enormous dinner plate with a cover. The plate falls away, crashing to the surface in a plume of red dust. The plate cover remains suspended from the chute. And then falling out from under it emerges a giant spindly robot—the size of a cargo van—free falling towards the Martian surface.

You hold your breath.

Then, with a weak roar (that reaches you far later than you expect, the sound carrying weakly in the thin atmosphere), retrorockets on the robot burst into action, arresting its fall. It maneuvers like a falling spider on a jetpack, veering off towards the northern side of the crater. As it flies toward your vantage point, you make out what seems to be a second, spidery, six-legged robot the size of a compact car attached to the bottom, like a baby carried by a stork.

The entire apparatus makes a beeline for a spot just north of the dune field, well within the crater rim, some 30 miles away. It comes to a stop, a tiny dot against the horizon, halting its descent in a perfect hover 130 feet above the ground, its retrorockets kicking up a huge cloud of dust.

You squint. Through the dust, you think you can make out something incredible.

The second spidery robot is being lowered on a rope from the hovering mothership onto the surface of Mars.

It disappears into the dust cloud. A few seconds later, the skycrane mothership suddenly launches itself towards the sky and off to the east. Its rockets are spent; its mission is complete. It carries itself on a ballistic trajectory across the crater plain, crashing into the surface over a kilometer away, dying in a giant, sideways cloud of ejected Martian dirt.

Gale Crater is silent again. But now, it’s a little less desolate.

It has a visitor—an interplanetary sojourner from another world sharing the same sun, spinning silently some 150 million miles away. After trekking across the system from one planet to the next, it sits on an alien plain, awaiting commands from the species that created it, a species seeking to know where it lives, ready to search for life, for signals that it is not alone.

Its name is Curiosity.

And we sent it there.

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Watch the entire landing sequence in NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System simulator: http://bit.ly/NCuFdi

You should click that link. Seriously, it’s super cool.