NASA scientist: Successful rover landing 'kind of like winning a gold medal in the Olympics'

After traveling for more than eight months and traversing 352 million miles, NASA's Curiosity rover is now on Mars.

From conception to landing, the rover mission took eleven years to complete and cost an estimated $2.6 billion.

NASA scientist Jim Garvin appears on Starting Point this morning to discuss the significance of the mission and to explain what scientists hope to accomplish with the rover.

"We'd like to find the kind of chemical fingerprints that show that Mars may have been a habitable world [...] and that would maybe tell us that we're not alone" Garvin explains. "So this mission is all about understanding the rocks and soils on Mars as if we were chemical fossil hunters so we have to do a lot of exploring to address that question."