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million-mile cruise -- information that should help its handlers back home determine the radiation risk to astronauts who eventually travel to the red planet.
• Curiosity's journey has been fraught with bumps. Since NASA had never built such a complicated machine before, work took longer than expected and costs soared. Curiosity was supposed to launch in 2009 and land in 2010, but the mission -- already $1 billion over budget -- was pushed back two years.
• The delay created a cascade. Burdened with budget woes, NASA reneged on a partnership with the European Space Agency to land a drill-toting spacecraft in 2018. The space agency is in the midst of revamping its Mars exploration program that will hinge heavily on whether Curiosity succeeds.
• The extra time allowed engineers to test and re-test the rover and all its parts, taking a spacecraft stunt double to the Mojave Desert as if it were Mars. For the past several months, engineers held dress rehearsals at the sprawling JPL campus 10 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles in anticipation of landing day when they will carry on a decades-old tradition of passing out "good luck" peanuts.
• Practice is over. It's show time. To Mars or bust.
•

day on Tuesday amid growing international condemnation of the Syrian government's crackdown on a tenacious rebellion that has lasted 17 months.
• Activists reported renewed bombardments of rebel-held neighborhoods and clashes in many parts of Aleppo as the army pushed on with its offensive to retake this key northern city. The battle for Aleppo, Syria's commercial hub with around 3 million inhabitants, has now lasted longer than the rebel assault on the capital Damascus that regime troops crushed earlier in July.
• Despite regime claims of success and repeated forays by tanks and ground forces into rebel-controlled areas in the northeast and southwest of the city, the rebels appear to have held their ground, prompting government forces to resort to more shelling by artillery and mortars. Rebel positions are also being attacked with helicopter gunships.
• Even as the fighting raged inside the city, rebel forces reported a number of victories in the surrounding countryside, including the town of al-Bab and a key army

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