So Grotzinger cropped out a hundred and fifty square miles around the landing area and divided it into quadrangles of about a mile on a side.
This jaw-dropping landing process, involving a sky crane and the world's largest supersonic parachute, allowed the spacecraft carrying Curiosity to target the landing area that scientists had meticulously chosen.
But, chiefly, the Admiral extolled the might of naval gunfire, whose concentration on the landing area, he said, gesturing heavenward with his meerschaum, would be the heaviest ever to support American troops.
Constructed around a fable involving an alien spaceship which hailed a group of hackers and touched down for repairs to their damaged computers, the camp featured a sculpted spaceship and a "landing area" illuminated by ghostly neon pillars.
Air traffic control contacted the flight crew and when the captain asked the senior stewardess to inspect the right landing gear area, she was then told of the loss by passengers.
Asked for specific structures that have inspired him, Mr. Payne e-mails 13 photos of old parks, giant industrial pipes, public benches and the whimsically shaped "Seuss Landing" area within Universal's Islands of Adventure theme park.
This duo have spent the past decade landing homes for startups in the Bay area.
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Cyprus Airways flight CY 332 from Larnaca exited the taxiway onto a grass area, having made a safe landing before the runways were closed.
In a nutshell, we purchased the domain name LasVegasWebDesign.com and redirected it to a landing page for Web design services targeting the area.
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We can pounce down with a killing blow when landing, or we can swoop around the area (think Batman in Arkham Asylum), alternately avoiding and returning fire with police gondolas.
Precision in landing was important because NASA chose a relatively tight area for Curiosity's arrival: The Gale Crater, which contains an 18, 000-foot high mountain about 7.5 miles south of the landing site.
Nasa also said it was considering sending a second landing probe at the same time to explore a different area of Mars.
"We counted four planes landing, and there was one circling in that smoky area right over the crash site, " Bill Edwards said.
Tail winds might account for some of the off-target distance, NASA's Gavin Mendeck said, but the actual landing spot was well within the expected range of uncertainty, or the area where the rover could well have ended up.
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