Earth to Mars rover, Curiosity: Have you landed?

Tune in to the Yahoo! live-stream on Sunday, August 5, at 10:31 p.m. PT or 1:31 a.m. ET.

On Sunday night, millions of miles away, a nail-biter of a landing will be executed—or not—on Mars. The Mars rover, Curiosity, which has been traveling to the distant planet for the past eight-and-a-half months, will land on the red planet by remote control.

To stick the landing, the car-size rover must successfully slow down from 13,000 mph to zero in seven minutes, or "Seven Minutes of Terror," as the wildly popular video from NASA explains—which you can watch above.

Due to the long-distance signal from Mars to Earth, researchers won't know for an agonizing 14 minutes if the landing, programmed from Earth, is a success or an epic fail. The event has gotten so much attention that it will be broadcast live in Times Square.

During the short but tense wait, a sequence of events must fall into place for the landing of the 1,982-pound spacecraft to be successful, including using a parachute to slow it down, firing rockets to prepare for the landing, and carefully setting it in a crater to avoid a dust cloud. If all goes well, the craft will send out a signal that its landing was successful.

The Mars rover has already become somewhat of a celebrity, with its own Facebook page, and messages posted on its wall like this one from Issam Motawaj: "Very excited. We hope you will be a safe landing. Good Luck." And from Jeff Baber "I'm be watching!!! Love it!!!"

But the landing is just the beginning of what's hoped to be a two-year mission to explore signs of life on the planet. The rover, essentially a moving science lab, cost NASA $2.5 billion to build and comes equipped with 17 cameras, a 7-foot-long robot arm, and state-of-the-art science experiments and sensors weighing 125 pounds.

Bing Quock, assistant director of Morrison Planetarium at California Academy of Sciences, calls this "exciting times." He wrote in an email to Yahoo! News, "There are so many things that could go wrong, but it's not like NASA's engineers haven't thought it through. They have a way of performing the impossible, so I'll be watching the feed on the Internet that night with fingers crossed, hoping for the best. "

Curiosity rover landing: This time in HD

You've seen the $2.5 billion Mars rover Curiosity flawlessly land on the Red Planet. But you haven't seen it like this.

Folks, this is not your grandparent's moon landing video. Grainy, it's not. Instead, we've got full-resolution images, courtesy of the Mars descent imager that cataloged the landing from the jettison of the heat shield until touchdown.

It's the geek equivalent of a victory lap. The  high-resolution images from NASA form this unofficial video made by visual effects producer Daniel Luke Fitch of the rover's landing. The highlight reel of high-definition images has captured the public's attention, with more than 500,000 views online so far.

And viewers just can't get enough of Mars madness, from their marriage proposals to NASA's Mohawk guy to their following Curiosity on Twitter.

In the hi-res video, the supersharp images show first the heat shield being jettisoned. Then Curiosity hovers over the planet, and you get a window seat as the surface of Mars grows larger as the craft nears the planet. Finally the rover sets down in the Gale Crater, creating a cloud of Martian dust.

For audio play-by-play, check out NASA's official hi-res video mashup from Curiosity, posted on Twitter: