Nasa’s Curiosity rover has beamed back its first images of the red planet after it landed successfully on Mars. President Obama has hailed the mission as an “unprecedented feat of technology”.
The one-tonne vehicle touched down on Mars at 0614 BST to begin a two-year mission to find out if the martian planet has the ingredients to host life.
Mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles said they received signals relayed by a Martian orbiter confirming that the rover had survived a make-or-break landing attempt inside a vast impact crater.
NASA has described the feat as perhaps the most complex ever in robotic spaceflight.
Charles Bolden, Nasa administrator, said it was a “huge day” for everyone who had worked on the programme for years.
“It’s absolutely incredible. It doesn’t get any better than this,” he said, shortly after the landing was confirmed.
It’s absolutely incredible. It doesn’t get any better than this. –Charles Bolden, Nasa administrator
“It’s a huge day for all of our partners, it’s a huge day for the nation. It’s a huge day for the American people. Everybody in the morning should be sticking their chest out, saying ‘that’s our rover on Mars’.”
The Curiosity project, formally called the Mars Science Laboratory, is NASA’s first astrobiology mission since the 1970s-era Viking probes.
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Engineers and scientists cheered at mission control as the rover landed. It will be seen as a major victory for the US space agency which has been hit by huge budget cuts and the loss of its space shuttle program.
Social media networks were buzzing after news of the landing, with many praising Nasa’s Olympic-sized efforts.
As Eugene Byrne put it: ‘The nerds just took Gold in the 560 billion metres’.
— Paul_Cornell (@Paul_Cornell) August 6, 2012
The rover will be used to gather and analyse samples from the red planet, using a robotic arm with a multi-tool “hand” for scooping up soil and drilling into rock.
It also features its own laser gun which can zap rocks more than 20ft away and uncover chemical data.
Curiosity will also use magnifying imaging to reveal details smaller than the width of a human hair.
Speaking after the landing, Dr Bridges said: “The science community has been given a very valuable chance to move forward our understanding of how Mars has evolved. How long did wet conditions last and were there standing bodies of water on Mars?
“I hope the effective combination in MSL of science objectives and space engineering will point the way towards more exploration of the solar system and technological innovations.”
Kind of in love with the fact that the crowd in Times Square chanted “Science! Science! Science!” then, “NASA! NASA! NASA!”
— Ben Lillie (@BenLillie) August 6, 2012