At Discover Magazine, Phil Plait comments on the photograph of Curiosity descending to Mars:
The simple and sheer amazingness of this picture cannot be overstated. Here we have a picture taken by a camera on board a space probe that's been orbiting Mars for six years, reset and re-aimed by programmers hundreds of millions of kilometers away using math and science pioneered centuries ago, so that it could catch the fleeting view of another machine we humans flung across space, traveling hundreds of million[s] of kilometers to another world at mind-bending speeds, only to gently - and perfectly - touch down on the surface mere minutes later.
Plait goes on to celebrate the unifying impetus of science. (Via Ophelia.)