After seven unmanned minutes spent in terror, waiting for the culmination of decades of work, a scream of excitement shook the Curiosity rover's control room on August 5.

"Touchdown confirmed, we are safe on Mars," engineer Allen Chen said over the radio, eliciting tears of joy and congratulatory hugs between all the blue-shirted Jet Propulsion Laboratory staff. After 350,000,000 miles and 253 days of travel since she took off from Earth, Curiosity was finally safe and sound in Mars' Gale Crater.

With that, the NASA team that watched her land knew they had just pulled off a daring and nerve-wracking touchdown on the Red Planet unlike any ever attempted before. A rocket-powered sky crane had lowered the 1-ton rover to the Martian surface on cables, after parachuting through the planet's thin atmosphere.

See Curiosity's travels so far >

"I am terribly humbled by this experience," the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Adam Steltzner, the leader of the rover's entry, descent and landing team said at a press conference after the landing. "In my life, I am and will be forever satisfied if this is the greatest thing that I have ever given."

Curiosity is on Mars to investigate several things, including studying the climate and geology, searching for signs of life and water, and determining if the planet could ever be made habitable for humans. She was made to last for a two-year mission, but with any luck (and judging by the hearty 9-years-and-still-going run of the Opportunity Mars rover) she will far outlast that.

Sadly, she's likely to be stuck in Gale Crater forever, since there are no plans to bring her back to Earth, though future humans who may visit Mars may pay her a visit. Currently, she is in the 123rd Sol, or Martian day, of her mission.

The total cost of building, designing, launching and roving with this one-ton science lab on wheels? $2.5 Billion. Divided by the population, that cost each American $8. Money well spent.

The project was named Curiosity by Clara Ma, winner of a 2008 contest. Her official name, however is the Mars Science Laboratory. She's called a science laboratory because she is loaded with science-doing tools. These include:

• The Chemistry and Mineralogy, or CheMin, instruments that use X-ray diffraction to identify and quantify the abundance of the minerals on Mars.
• The rover's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument that analyzes the soil and atmosphere around the rover using a mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph and a tunable laser spectrometer to detect oxygen and carbon isotopes in carbon dioxide and methane samples to see if they are biochemical in origin.
• The Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer, or ASPX, that irradiates samples of Martian soil to determine the elemental composition of the soil.
• The Rover Environmental Monitoring System, or REMS, which watches the temperature, humidity, pressure, wind speeds, and UV radiation around the rover.
• The Radiation Assessment Detector, or RAD, that has been monitoring the radiation on the surface of Mars since she first sat down there. This will help NASA learn if it would be safe for humans to roam the surface of the planet.

Curiosity is also decked out with several cameras, which she uses to take amazing pictures of the surface of the planet. The Mastcam takes true-color images; the Chemcam can take high resolution images; NavCams and Hazcams take images all around the rover to make sure she doesn't run into anything; the Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI, hangs out on the Rover's robotic arm and can take high resolution images of microscopic rock and soil samples; and finally, the Mars Descent Image, or MARDI, takes images under the rover, especially important when analyzing the EDL.

Curiosity isn't just a hunk of metal: She has an energetic (and honestly adorable) personality conveyed through a Twitter account. She's spawned multiple memes, and even the @sarcasticrover twitter account which follows her every move with snarky commentary.

Her team did a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) to answer questions about the rover and her mission, and some of the more unique members of the team — Mowhawk Guy I'm talking to you — received marriage proposals after her successful touchdown.

We don't know who is more impressive, actually: the rover herself or the team that runs her? One doesn't work without the other that's for sure. Click through to see what they've been accomplishing.

The entry, descent and landing of the rover on the surface of the Red Planet went off perfectly. See the video below to relive it or experience it for the first time. It's hard not to get caught up with the team's excitement.

Relive The Excitement And Exhilaration Of Curiosity's Landing With This Video

During the descent, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was able to get a picture of the rover while she was falling to the surface. You can see the parachute slowing her descent in this image.

Here's what the landing looked like from the rover herself. The video starts with the heat shield (which protected Curiosity while she was falling through the atmosphere) being jettisoned and ends with the sky crane blowing up dust and the rover touching down on Mars. The camera, called MARDI, is on the bottom of the rover.

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