Flight Director Jason Willis reporting, we are currently six minutes away from hitting the top of the Martian atmosphere.

We are expecting that the weather today is a landing site.

20 years ago, a group of scientists and engineers assembled in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to watch history being made.

Spirit, the first rover designed to roam Mars, was dropping down on the red planet after a

300 million mile journey.

Its twin rover opportunity was scheduled to land a few weeks later.

At this time, we are roughly 11 minutes, 48 seconds from landing at the Goosef Crater in the

southern hemisphere of Mars.

For the last three years, this team had worked to anticipate and mitigate every single problem that might crop up.

But in this moment, they were just spectators.

We, in our control room, we had no control at all.

This is Steve Squires, the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover mission.

Because Mars is so far away, it takes a long time for a signal to get back to Earth.

When the speed of light gets involved, even simple words like now don't really quite have the same meaning, right?

So everything that they're seeing in this moment had already happened.

So I'm sitting in the control room,

looking at the Doppler signal from the spacecraft,

starting to feel the Martian atmosphere.

The vehicle is now hit the top of the Martian atmosphere.

The reality is it's been on the surface of Mars for four minutes,

either bouncing happily or a smoking

hole in the ground. We don't know. Still awaiting signal that we are on the ground. It wasn't just

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