If all goes according to plan, at 1:31 a.m. on Aug. 6 a signal announcing the landing of NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars will have made its way across 160 million miles of space to the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, Ca., and then ricocheted around the Internet to the Centergy Building at Georgia Tech where a crowd of space fans, science enthusiasts and planetary science researchers will have gathered.

The mission, officially called the "Mars Science Laboratory," has been on its way to the Red Planet since its launch from Cape Canaveral late last November. A presentation by local NASAJPL Solar System Ambassador Ginny Mauldin-Kinney in January put the robotic spacecraft on the radar of the Atlanta Science Tavern, a grassroots public science forum with almost 2,300 members, and initial plans for a party to celebrate Curiosity’s landing began to take shape.

The resulting Atlanta Mars Landing Party has since joined the ranks of science and aerospace museum-based gatherings around the world, including the two-day Planetfest 2012 organized by the Planetary Society. The feature research scientists from Georgia Tech speaking on

• the chemical origins of life here and elsewhere,
• future space science missions to the Moon, Mercury and Jupiter’s icy moons,
• and an assessment of what we have learned from Mars exploration so far.

It will conclude with Mauldin-Kinney presenting an up-to-date overview of the Mars Science Laboratory mission, including a detailed look at how Curiosity will go about exploring the terrain in the vicinity of her landing site searching for telltale signs of the preconditions for life on that other marvelous world.

At midnight the researchers turn into revelers as live NASA-JPL coverage of Curiosity’s entry, descent and landing begins and the real party kicks off. Plans are to have an Xbox video game console on hand equipped with NASA’s recently released Mars Rover Landing game so that partygoers can try their hand at landing the rover before Curiosity takes her turn at bat.

Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. with the program getting underway at 7 p.m. A contribution of $5 is requested for admission. Beverages and light snacks will be provided while supplies last.