Admission is Free!
NASA’s latest Mars rover, the Mars Science Laboratory named Curiosity, is scheduled to land on Mars at approximately 10:30 p.m. PDT on the evening of Aug. 5 Earth time. Beginning at 6:30 p.m. at the Museum, MarsFest 2012, is a free landing party that allows the public to share the experience of NASA’s most ambitious Mars mission with some of the people who helped make it happen. The evening will include Mars-related family activities and games, Mars exploration and spaceflight engineer speakers, and a live link-up with The Planetary Society’s Planetfest 2012 in Pasadena, Calif., starring Bill Nye.
Topping the evening is big-screen, live NASA TV coverage of the spacecraft’s final approach to the surface of the planet, when it undergoes such complicated, must-make-it maneuvers that NASA spaceflight controllers have dubbed the descent as “the seven minutes of terror.” MarsFest 2012 will end at about 11:30 p.m., depending upon the NASA broadcast’s updates.