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Like an Olympic gymnast who attempts the riskiest maneuvers to score maximum points, NASA staged a brilliant engineering feat 154 million miles from Earth early Monday. And the space agency definitely stuck the landing – an elaborate seven-minute sequence that slowed the one-ton space lab Curiosity from 13,000 mph to a soft touchdown on Mars.

Most amazing fact: The landing sequence could not be tested from start to finish on this planet because scientists could not simulate all conditions on Mars. So the landing system either had to work the first time, or Curiosity would join the 1999 Mars Polar Lander as an expensive, embarrassing space flop.

As the spacecraft landed, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., whooped and hugged. And John Holdren, the president’s science adviser, crowed that “if anybody has been harboring doubts about the status of U.S. leadership in space, well, there’s a one-ton automobile-size piece of American ingenuity, and it’s sitting on the surface of Mars right now.”

After the mothballing of the uninspiring space shuttle program and the outsourcing of some spacecraft business to nimbler commercial companies, NASA couldn’t afford a Mars fiasco. The drama of the landing, however, now gives way to the tedium of the science.

Prepare to wait a couple of weeks while scientists check out Curiosity’s systems. Then more weeks while the rover drives to its target site, Mount Sharp, a taller peak than any in the continental U.S. Scientists think Mount Sharp’s walls were eroded over millions of years by wind or water, and contain the ultimate treasure trove: a record of Mars’ ancient geologic history and evolution.

Then … who knows?

Curiosity isn’t the first probe to trundle around on Mars hoping to find proof the Red Planet once was warm and wet enough to sustain life. Its predecessors, the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, have sent back evidence strongly suggesting that water once flowed and pooled on the planet’s surface. Curiosity, the largest and most advanced machine ever dispatched to another planet, takes the next giant leap: It has lasers that can vaporize rock looking for hints of past organic life. And it can drill and scoop soil to test for the presence of minerals and organic chemicals.

Water alone isn’t enough to sustain life. Curiosity will now seek to build a picture of “the overall Mars environment,” NASA program executive David Lavery tells us. “It will not be looking directly for signs of life, but will help us put together the pieces of the puzzle to ask, did Mars ever have an environment that is able to support life as we understand it?”

That’s a question that intrigues, well, just about everyone.

Remember 1996, when NASA scientists stoked a worldwide hullabaloo after they waved photos of a pockmarked, potato-size rock – found on Earth – and declared that they had found circumstantial evidence that life had once existed on Mars? That claim has largely evaporated upon further investigation.

Was there – is there – life on Mars? Curiosity, the aptly named probe, should bring us closer to answers.