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Launch Commentator George Diller: This is Atlas Launch Control, 50 minutes,

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50 seconds into the flight of the Atlas V with Mars Science Laboratory and Curiosity.

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We're standing by shortly for spacecraft acquisition through the Canberra deep space network tracking station.

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We have our NASA Launch Director Omar Baez here with us in the control room and he's going to give us a brief

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indication of how the countdown went and how the flight looked to him. So, Omar, tell us how it looked.

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NASA Launch Director Omar Baez: George, the countdown went very smoothly.

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We worked a couple of minor issues, but none really on the launch vehicle or spacecraft.

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More dealing with communications and really fretting the weather or clouds coming in

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because it was one of the constraints for this one.

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And the count went very smoothly. We got off on the first opportunity at 10:02 in the morning,

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right on the money, and the flight looked great.

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Our parameters looked great and we separated on time and we had some spectacular video I'm sure went out that

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confirmed that we did separate the spacecraft and it looked to be in good shape.

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I know that they were power-positive even before separating,

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so the MSL spacecraft has what it needs to survive in the next couple of hours and we're just waiting for acquisition from DSN now.

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Launch Commentator George Diller: So spacecraft separation appeared to be clean from what we could tell?

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NASA Launch Director Omar Baez: From what I saw of it, visually and on telemetry, that was a clean separation.

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Launch Commentator George Diller: Well, we seem to have had a very successful flight of this Atlas V and I think we

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have just had initial acquisition of the spacecraft through the Canberra tracking station,

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that's just been confirmed to us, so that's very good.

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So we've got it. And, Omar, I guess we have another Atlas launch coming up sometime this summer, I think.

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NASA Launch Director Omar Baez: Yeah, the next Atlas coming up for us would be the RBSP,

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or radiation belt solar probe and that will be our next Atlas V, currently scheduled for Aug. 30.

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Launch Commentator George Diller: Alright. Omar, thank you very much and congratulations on having a

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very happy flight and a very happy spacecraft on the way to Mars.