Three weeks from tonight, an amiable, whip-smart engineer named Ray Baker will be staring into his computer screen at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, hopeful and helpless — or, as he puts it, "sweating blood."

The night will have been 10 years and $2.5 billion in the making, incorporating the work of 5,000 people in 37 states. And then, 154 million miles from home, the fate of the most ambitious machine humans have sent to another planet will rest on a seven-minute landing sequence so far-fetched it looks like something Wile E. Coyote devised to catch the Road Runner.

After a journey of nearly nine months, the six-wheel laboratory NASA has dubbed Curiosity is scheduled to touch down on Mars at 10:31 p.m. PDT on Aug. 5.

Fotos: NASA

21 Tage 20 Stunden 15 Minuten bis zur Landung auf Mars...