Constructed around a fable involving an alien spaceship which hailed a group of hackers and touched down for repairs to their damaged computers, the camp featured a sculpted spaceship and a "landing area" illuminated by ghostly neon pillars.

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Cyprus Airways flight CY 332 from Larnaca exited the taxiway onto a grass area, having made a safe landing before the runways were closed.

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So Grotzinger cropped out a hundred and fifty square miles around the landing area and divided it into quadrangles of about a mile on a side.

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Nasa also said it was considering sending a second landing probe at the same time to explore a different area of Mars.

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In a nutshell, we purchased the domain name LasVegasWebDesign.com and redirected it to a landing page for Web design services targeting the area.

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Precision in landing was important because NASA chose a relatively tight area for Curiosity's arrival: The Gale Crater, which contains an 18, 000-foot high mountain about 7.5 miles south of the landing site.

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We can pounce down with a killing blow when landing, or we can swoop around the area (think Batman in Arkham Asylum), alternately avoiding and returning fire with police gondolas.

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This jaw-dropping landing process, involving a sky crane and the world's largest supersonic parachute, allowed the spacecraft carrying Curiosity to target the landing area that scientists had meticulously chosen.

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