Curiosity was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011, at 10:02 EST aboard the MSL spacecraft and successfully landed on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars on August 6, 2012, 05:17 UTC.
Link to awesome descent video
I want you to think about that for a moment. Think about the fact that we as a species now have the technological capability--the sheer power--to hoist a one-ton machine out of our atmosphere and into orbit, and then lob that machine across tens of millions of kilometers' worth of hostile, unforgiving void and land it in fully working order on the surface of an alien planet...within a thousand or so meters of the actual planned landing site. I want you think about the fact that this isn't the first time we've done it, either--we successfully landed not one, but two working rovers on that planet, a place of thin air, killing cold, blowing sand, and electronics-frying radiation, one of which is still fully operational as of this writing a full decade later.
Curiosity was out of contact with Mission Control for more than seven minutes during landing, and had to perform a very specific set of operations--something like 75--in exactly the right order at exactly the right time in order to land safely. The vehicle had to be capable of making its own decisions based on data from its sensors, and following it to the letter--our engineers successfully constructed a machine capable of that level of decision-making, in order that it be able to find its way to the landing site and actually descending safely, and it had to be able to do this without any input from humans.
What happened on August 6, 2012 was as spectacular as the first Apollo moon landing. And if you'd been paying attention, we've been doing fuckawesome stuff for a very long time. We sent a spacecraft to Jupiter years before that lobbed a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere.
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We sent another spacecraft to Saturn, and THAT one dropped a working lander on Titan. Remember this?
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Awesome video of Huygens descent from the POV of the spacecraft
Whether it impresses you or not, these represent a feat unmatched in human history--the first closeup views from the surface of a moon in the outer solar system. And as if that weren't enough, we've finally reached interstellar space, or will very shortly:
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This is what we can do now. And this is nothing compared to what we WILL be able to do one day soon. If this doesn't amaze you, if this doesn't inspire awe, then your soul is fucking dead.
To quote Patton Oswalt: You are going to miss everything cool and die angry.
