This week’s awe-inspiring landing of the newest Mars rover, aptly dubbed Curiosity, put a spotlight on two seemingly divergent facts. One is the vast distance that space programs must bridge, and the other is the closeness of the scientific community engaged in this work.

Sunday evening Hawaii time, a room full of engineers and other scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory exploded with exultant cheers as a complex series of maneuvers and triggers unfolded flawlessly. Curiosity touched down inside Gale Crater, a bull’s-eye hit. The landing site in the ancient impact crater is a little more than six miles from the foot of Mount Sharp, a formation of sedimentary rock. Both formations will provide rich zones of exploration for the rover in its quest for data about Martian geology and life signs.

It took eight months for Curiosity to make the trip; that’s the vastness-of-space part of what makes this story so fascinating. But closer to home, isle observers can take a special interest because of the research opportunities that should be afforded to University of Hawaii’s own scientists and students.

Peter Mouginis-Mark, director of the UH Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, said the mission will likely summon UH faculty members to work with various instrument teams contending with what Curiosity sends back.

One of those already selected is UH geologist Scott Rowland, named to a select camera team to analyze data. Rowland leaves for JPL in Pasadena tomorrow to establish daily research routines with his teammates. The volcanologist will return after a few months but will deliver his part of the project remotely over the next few years.

He watched the transmissions of the landing with understandable excitement, but the larger Hawaii community should share in the enthusiasm. With its prime location and world-class telescopes, Hawaii already plays an important role in astronomy research. Curiosity reminds us that Hawaii’s scientific community — whether on the college campus, through a Mauna Kea telescope or elsewhere in the field — has much to contribute of humanity’s understanding of our world and the cosmos.

It’s also worth cheering the successful landing as a sorely needed morale boost for NASA, which has been pressed into a back-seat position where space flights are concerned. Fiscal worries are largely to blame for this: President Barack Obama recently cut the Mars exploration budget for 2013 from $587 million to $360 million.

It was at least encouraging that Obama’s prepared statement issued after the landing had a ring of endorsement for the program.

"The successful landing of Curiosity — the most sophisticated roving laboratory every to land on another planet — marks an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future," he said.

The hope is that such expressions of pride translate into greater U.S. investment, from both public and private funding sources, in space initiatives. Curiosity is a human trait; the triumph of its namesake shows why such endeavors must not recede in the national memory.