NASA's Curiosity rover is a car-sized, nuclear-powered machine built to answer one question: could Mars ever have supported life? The film follows the mission's final six days before landing, with cameras inside mission control as engineers count down to a descent they cannot control once it starts. Mars has swallowed more than half of all missions sent to it, and NOVA lays out why, tracing past failures alongside the $2.5 billion bet NASA is making this time. The centerpiece is the landing system itself: a rocket-powered sky crane designed to lower the rover on cables and fly off before it lands, a maneuver that has to work perfectly on the first try with no chance to test it on Mars beforehand. Engineers and scientists explain the instruments packed into Curiosity, built to analyze soil chemistry and hunt for traces of ancient water inside Gale Crater. The film stays close to the people who spent years on this single landing, and to the minutes when all of that work either succeeds or doesn't.