NASA Visits Mars (Again)
Attempts to Seek Out Past, Present Conditions for Life

(Gale Crater, Mars) — The Curiosity rover, a $2.5 billion probe sent to Mars by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), successfully landed on the Red Planet on August 6.

Having completed its 352 million mile journey, Curiosity will use its vast array of scientific equipment to sample Martian soil and air not just to look for current life, but to see if the planet is capable of supporting life – or was capable of supporting it in the past.

Weighing a ton, Curiosity landed using parachutes and hovering rockets from the spacecraft that brought it there. NASA officials dubbed the plunge from orbit to the planet's surface as "7 Minutes of Terror."

"I'm not sure how 'terrorizing' it was for Curiosity, since she's unmanned," said a space industry analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity. "And I'm not sure I would have used that phrase. Now, using the phrase '3 Minutes of Terror' to describe the crew of the [space shuttle] Challenger, who were alive for that amount of time until they hit the water at 200 mph, would be acceptable."

In other news, millions of miles away on Earth, another seven minutes of terror unfolded as 40-year-old white supremacist Wade Michael Page shot his way into the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek, killing six and critically wounding three. The massacre, taking place on August 5, was buried as a news item as the "good" news about Curiosity hit the mainstream media.

At an Iowa fundraiser on August 7 for presidential hopeful Mitt Romney (R-MA), the candidate "mistakenly" switched the words "Sikh" and "sheikh" during a stump speech. Sheik is an Arabic honorific, whereas Sikh is a religion with roots in South Asia.

"Mr. Romney will shake the sheikh mix-up and seeks to have a successful campaign," said a Romney spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity.