On Monday morning, a few seconds after 6.30am London time if all goes to plan, Nasa will know whether a $2.5bn (£1.67bn) gamble on a heat shield, a set of eight retrorockets and three nylon lines has paid off.
For the first time, a landing vehicle will be gently lowered to the surface of another planet using nylon tethers suspended from a mother spacecraft hovering precariously overhead.
A safe landing will be the culmination of a hair-raising journey through the thin Martian atmosphere which will have begun seven minutes earlier as Nasa's Mars Science Laboratory mission begins its entry and descent to
