Water-ice clouds, polar ice and other geographic features can be seen in this full-disk image of Mars from 2011. NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover touched down on the planet on August 6. Take a look at stunning photographs of Mars over the years. Check out images from the Mars rover Curiosity.
Editor's note: Simon DeDeo is an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, where he researches theoretical biology and physics.
(CNN) -- On Sunday night, as the Curiosity rover descended through the Martian atmosphere and the HiRISE camera on the Reconnaissance Orbiter caught its parachute deploy, the mood in the NASA Control Room became increasingly electric. As the rover touched down on Mars, the nation seemed to catch the fever and excitement. You would have needed a heart of stone not to get at least a little sentimental in seeing the high-fives and emotional embraces of scientists on live television.
But was the moment a blip? Or are Americans rekindling their romance with science after what seemed like a long and tepid stupor?
Americans have always been taken with the adventure of the "final frontier," but perhaps this is not enough to explain our intense interest this week in a technological marvel.
Mars landing: It could be crazier
With the rover so far from the laboratories that hatched it, it took light itself 14 minutes to reach us back on Earth. During that time span, we could not communicate with Curiosity. What if something went wrong? The waiting seemed like a solar system's game of chess by mail.
The destination only made it more gripping: Mars has been a lodestone for the imagination for at least a century. Percival Lowell's 1890s views of a Martian civilization frantically irrigating its dying world were at last debunked during the Mariner 4 flyby in 1964. But hopes of life on Mars continued. In literature, from Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles to Kim Stanley Robinson's Martian Trilogy, the Red Planet has become the American's Avalon.
Earth loves Mars -- why we're crushing on the red planet
Maybe we saw something deeper in the successful landing of Curiosity. We experienced -- even if vicariously -- a group achieving unambiguous excellence. In a nation where a city like Detroit can nearly collapse, where consensus on important policy issues seems far off, where some of the "best and brightest" minds of finance have built fragile institutions, how is it possible that a large cast of scientists and engineers can pull off such a remarkable task?
Mars rover Curiosity's descent
One of the widely reproduced photographs from the NASA Control Room showed a trio of scientists: the clean-cut, the mohawked and the Gandalf-haired — something unthinkable for the NASA of pocket protectors and ties of 50 years ago. Times have surely changed.
Search for 'building blocks' of Mars life
The Space Age has come of age, and this century has a chance to see us living on Mars. This is also the era when we might finally understand some of the underlying principles of human society.
Curiosity tweets Mars landing
Scientists have long sought to unlock the rules and regularities in the natural world. Likewise, social scientists have long believed in the existence of invisible forces that govern our social world. Aided by today's nearly limitless computer power, we can learn from the traces we leave behind on how we actually live and behave. We can see not only how traffic jams form and markets crash but how courtrooms are more or less just, how wars have changed and how they might end.
While science cannot capture the exhilaration of a successful society, or the misery of a failed one, it can show us the properties that underlie them. As scientists, my colleagues and I are inspired every day to put theories of both nature and human kind to the test, in hopes of answering their whys and hows.
So is science cool again? Those of us in the laboratories, universities and institutes could be forgiven for not knowing it was ever uncool. Topics may fall out of fashion, and some can become political battlegrounds. What the immense interest in Curiosity's landing shows, however, is that the curiosity that drives all scientific endeavors persists in the nation as a whole.
When a rover millions of miles away can light our hearts, it's hard to say whether we wanted to know more about Mars, or space colonies, or Earth, or ourselves.
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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Simon DeDeo.
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This image was captured in 1976 by Viking 2, one of two probes sent to investigate the surface of Mars for the first time. NASA's Viking landers blazed the trail for future missions to Mars.
The Valles Marineris rift system on Mars is 10 times longer, five times deeper and 20 times wider than the Grand Canyon. This composite image was made from NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which launched in 2001.
The Nili Fossae region of Mars is one of the largest exposures of clay minerals discovered by the OMEGA spectrometer on Mars Express Orbiter. This image was taken in 2007 as part of a campaign to examine more than two dozen potential landing sites for NASA's new Mars rover, Curiosity, also known as the NASA Mars Science Laboratory.
NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander descends to the surface of Mars in May 2008. Fewer than half of the Mars missions have made successful landings.
Phoenix's robotic arm scoops up a sample on June 10, 2008, the 16th Martian day after landing. The lander's solar panel is seen in the lower left.
In 2006, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured a 360-degree view known as the McMurdo panorama. The images were taken at the time of year when Mars is farthest from the sun and dust storms are less frequent.
The European Space Agency's Mars Express captured this view of Valles Marineris in 2004. The area shows mesas and cliffs as well as features that indicate erosion from flowing water.
This view is a vertical projection that combines more than 500 exposures taken by Phoenix in 2008. The black circle on the spacecraft is where the camera itself is mounted.
A portion of the west rim of the Endeavour Crater sweeps southward in this view from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity in 2011. The crater is 22 kilometers (13.7 miles) across.
A photo captured by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor in 2000 offers evidence that the planet may have been a land of lakes in its earliest period, with layers of Earth-like sedimentary rock that could harbor the fossils of any ancient Martian life.
A U.S. flag and a DVD containing a message for future explorers of Mars, science fiction stories and art about the planet, and the names of 250,000 people sit on the deck of Phoenix in 2008.
A rock outcrop dubbed Longhorn and the sweeping plains of the Gusev Crater are seen in a 2004 image taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit.
Although it is 45 kilometers (28 miles) wide, countless layers of ice and dust have all but buried the Udzha Crater on Mars. The crater lies near the edge of the northern polar cap. This image was taken by NASA's Mars Odyssey Orbiter in 2010.
NASA's Opportunity examines rocks inside an alcove called Duck Bay in the western portion of the Victoria Crater in 2007.
Pictured is a series of troughs and layered mesas in the Gorgonum Chaos region of Mars in 2008. This photo was taken by Mars Orbiter Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor.
An image captured in 2008 by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows at least four Martian avalanches, or debris falls, taking place. Material, likely including fine-grained ice and dust and possibly large blocks, detached from a towering cliff and cascaded to the gentler slopes below.
This 2008 image spans the floor of Ius Chasma's southern trench in the western region of Valles Marineris, the solar system's largest canyon. Ius Chasma is believed to have been shaped by a process called sapping, in which water seeped from the layers of the cliffs and evaporated before it reached the canyon floor.
Pictured is the Martian landscape at Meridiani Planum, where the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity successfully landed in 2004. This is one of the first images beamed back to Earth from the rover shortly after it touched down.
An image from the Mars Global Surveyor in 2000 shows potential evidence of massive sedimentary deposits in the western Arabia Terra impact crater on the surface of Mars.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captures a dust devil blowing across the Martian surface east of the Hellas impact basin in 2007. Dust devils form when the temperature of the atmosphere near the ground is much warmer than that above. The diameter of this dust devil is about 200 meters (650 feet).
Soft soil is exposed when the wheels of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit dig into a patch of ground dubbed Troy in 2009.
An image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the floor of the Antoniadi Crater in 2009.
The larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos, is seen in 2008 from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Earth and the moon are seen in 2007 from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. At the time the image was taken, Earth was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles) from Mars.
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