Like Tears in Rain: Our Scars on Mars Fade

When the Curiosity rover landed on Mars, it wasn't alone. On its way in it also dropped its heat shield, its backshell and parachute, and the rocket-powered sky crane. That last piece of hardware was pretty much what it sounds like: A platform that used rockets to hover over the surface of Mars, lowered the over down, then blasted away to a safe distance once Curiosity was firmly down. The sky crane rose in a parabolic arc, then impacted the ground, hard, about 650 meters away. It was still movi...