Watch NASA's live coverage of Mars rover landing

The big Curiosity rover, on a $2.5 billion science mission, arrives on the Red Planet Sunday evening with a most audacious maneuver.

The final stage of Curiosity's descent to the surface of Mars will involve being slung on tethers below the spacecraft's landing stage.

(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The arrival of the Curiosity rover on Mars may well be the biggest, boldest extraterrestrial landing for NASA since Apollo 11 settled down on the moon on a summer's night in 1969.

Curiosity is scheduled to land in the Red Planet's Gale Crater late Sunday or very, very early Monday, depending on your Earthbound time zone. Confirmation of the landing should come at about 10:31 p.m. PT Sunday for folks on the U.S. West Coast, or 1:31 a.m. ET Monday for those on the East Coast. The rover will have actually touched down before that, but there's a 14-minute communications lag time for signals traveling the 154 million miles from Mars.

The space agency will begin its live coverage Sunday evening at 8:30 p.m. PT / 10:30 p.m. ET on the NASA TV site and will also show the coverage via UStream:

Streaming video by Ustream