The folks in mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory ate a lot of peanuts in the minutes leading up to the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars. Peanuts have been the order of the day at JPL when a spacecraft is preparing to land ever since July 31, 1964, when the Ranger 7 probe was making its final approach to the moon. The Ranger's job was a simple one: to crash-land on the lunar surface, on the way down snapping a few thousand pictures to beam back home. Still, six Rangers before it had failed, and the JPL engineers...
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