NASA's control room flooded with Macs during Mars Curiosity landing

Slash Lane |

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Sometimes pictures are worth a thousand words, like those that appeared over NASA's live feed showing a control room riddled with Macs and other Apple products during the historical landing of the Curiosity rover on planet Mars last night.

The photos, captured from the live stream by Reddit users (via TMO), show nearly a dozen Macs — in addition to iPhones and even iPads — in use by the space agency's Entry, Descent and Landing Operations (EDL Ops) team at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California Sunday evening.

NASA engineers can be seen fixated on their MacBook Pro screens and incoming data as the $2.6 billion Curiosity made a dramatic arrival on the Martian planet during what NASA scientists have dubbed "seven minutes of terror."

One closeup photo confirms that these Macs were indeed running Mac OS X and not a flavor of Windows, while a second shows a lone IBM ThinkPad looking a bit out of place among the Apple-dominated lab.

The two thousand pound car-sized rover set off from earth on November 26th, equipped with 17 cameras and a laser that will help NASA engineers survey the planet and its terrain from the Jet Propulsion Lab in an effort to determine whether Mars ever had an environment that was able to support life forms.

For some of the latest photos coming from Curiosity, check out this page over at NASA.