More on Curiosity

 
NEWS SPECIAL – “Curiosity” Sees Its Shadow
Monday – August 6, 2012
 
NASA TV:
·      6 pm Central (7 EDT) – MSL/”Curiosity” post-landing Brief - Sol 1 Mid-Day Update
·      Noon Central TUESDAY (1 EDT) – MSL/”Curiosity” post-landing briefing - Sol 2 Update
·      Noon Central WEDNESDAY (1 EDT) – MSL/”Curiosity” post-landing briefing - Sol 3 Update
·      Noon Central THURSDAY (1 EDT) – MSL/”Curiosity” post-landing briefing - Sol 4 Update
·      Noon Central FRIDAY (1 EDT) – MSL/”Curiosity” post-landing briefing - Sol 5 Update
 
KYLE NOTE:
There are hundreds of articles covering events surrounding this morning’s landing of “Curiosity” on Mars. Feel free to check out more news by searching NASA Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity. One such site is www.spacetoday.net
 

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image of Curiosity descent from 211 miles away
 

One of the first images from “Curiosity” after landing was its own shadow
 
HEADLINES AND LEADS
 
Curiosity lands on Mars
 
William Harwood - CBS News
 
In an unparalleled technological triumph, a one-ton nuclear-powered rover the size of a small car was lowered to the surface of Mars on the end of a 25-foot-long bridle suspended from the belly of a rocket-powered flying crane late Sunday to kick off an unprecedented $2.5 billion mission. With flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory anxiously watching telemetry flowing in from Mars, 154 million miles away and 13.8 minutes after the fact, the Mars Science Laboratory rover -- Curiosity -- radioed confirmation of touchdown at 10:32 p.m. PDT (GMT-7; 1:32 a.m. EDT Monday). "Touchdown confirmed. We're safe on Mars!" said mission control commentator Allen Chen as the flight control team erupted in boisterous cheers and applause.
 
Curiosity Rover Lands Safely On Mars
 
Kenneth Chang - New York Times
 
The Curiosity has landed.
 
With pride, relief and exhilaration, NASA engineers and officials erupted in cheers and hugs early Monday morning with confirmation that the Curiosity, a car-sized, plutonium-powered robotic rover, had landed safely on the surface of Mars. "Touchdown confirmed," Allen Chen, the engineer in the control room providing commentary, said at 1:32 a.m. Eastern time. A couple of minutes later, the first image popped onto the video screen - a grainy, 64-pixel-by-64-pixel black-and-white image showing one of the rover's wheels and the Martian horizon. Three minutes later, a higher-resolution version of the same image appeared, and then came another image from the other side of the rover.
 
Mars Rover Curiosity Lands On The Red Planet
 
Alicia Chang - Associated Press
 
In a show of technological wizardry, the robotic explorer Curiosity blazed through the pink skies of Mars, steering itself to a gentle landing inside a giant crater for the most ambitious dig yet into the Red Planet's past. A chorus of cheers and applause echoed through the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Sunday night after the most high-tech interplanetary rover ever built signaled it had survived a harrowing plunge through the thin Mars atmosphere. "Touchdown confirmed," said engineer Allen Chen. "We're safe on Mars." Minutes after the landing signal reached Earth at 10:32 p.m. PDT, Curiosity beamed back the first black-and-white pictures from inside the crater showing its wheel and its shadow, cast by the afternoon sun.
 
NASA rover Curiosity makes historic Mars landing, beams back photos
 
Steve Gorman & Irene Klotz - Reuters
 
NASA's Mars science rover Curiosity performed a daredevil descent through pink Martian skies late on Sunday to clinch an historic landing inside an ancient crater, ready to search for signs the Red Planet may once have harbored key ingredients for life. Mission controllers burst into applause and cheers as they received signals confirming that the car-sized rover had survived a perilous seven-minute descent NASA called the most elaborate and difficult feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight. Engineers said the tricky landing sequence, combining a giant parachute with a rocket-pack that lowered the rover to the Martian surface on a tether, allowed for zero margin for error.
 
Mars Curiosity Rover Lands Successfully On Mars
 
Gina Sunseri, Ned Potter & Anthony Castellano – ABC News
 
NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover has landed on the surface of the red planet following an eight month, 352-million-mile journey. NASA says it received a signal from the Curiosity rover after a plunge through the Martian atmosphere described as "seven minutes of terror." A chorus of cheers and applause echoed through the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory just after 1:30 a.m. EDT Monday when it was confirmed the rover had landed successfully. "Touchdown confirmed," said engineer Allen Chen. "We're safe on Mars." Minutes later, Curiosity beamed back the first pictures from the surface showing its wheel and its shadow, cast by the afternoon sun - giving earthlings their first glimpse of a touchdown on another world.
 
Obama praises NASA for Mars landing
 
Associated Press
 
President Barack Obama says NASA's successful mission to put a robotic rover on Mars is an "unprecedented feat of technology." In a statement issued Monday shortly after the rover Curiosity landed, Obama said "Tonight, on the planet Mars, the United States of America made history."
 
Mars Rover Curiosity Safely Lands On Mars
 
Scott Gold - Los Angeles Times
 
Curiosity, the largest and most advanced spacecraft ever sent to another planet, stuck its extraordinary landing Sunday night without a hitch and is poised to begin its pioneering two-year hunt for the building blocks of life - signs that Earth's creatures may not be alone in the universe. Applause erupted across the campus of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge and engineers inside mission control could be seen hugging and weeping with joy. Al Chen, an engineer on Curiosity's entry, descent and landing team, said the words that space scientists had been waiting on for 10 years: "Touchdown confirmed." "We did it again!" another engineer shouted.
 
JPL Rover Curiosity Touches Down On Surface Of Mars
 
James Figueroa - Los Angeles Daily News
 
The world was holding its breath and watching Sunday night as NASA's Curiosity traversed its final trajectory to the surface of Mars. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory rover landed safely on Mars late Sunday night, as engineers erupted in cheers after confirming successful touchdown right at 10:32 p.m, the projected landing time. "We are going to have the opportunity for untold discoveries," NASA director of Mars exploration Doug McCuistion said during a pre-landing briefing Sunday. He called the Curiosity mission the "Super Bowl" of planetary exploration.
 
7 minutes of glory as NASA lands rover on Mars
 
Eric Berger - Houston Chronicle
 
Engineers who designed the daredevil landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars described it as "crazy," "terrifying" and "unprecedented." Here's one more adjective they can now add: successful. Early Monday NASA safely dropped the 1-ton rover, the largest ever, on the surface of Mars. The space agency now has a mobile chemical laboratory the size of a Volkswagen Beetle patrolling the surface of the Red Planet.
 
Mars Curiosity Rover: Mars Rover Survives 'Seven Minutes Of Terror'
 
Mark Matthews - Orlando Sentinel
 
NASA stuck the landing. And now a rover is safely on Mars. At about 1:32 a.m. today, NASA learned that a SUV-sized rover it launched to Mars last fall had successfully survived an acrobatic -- and dangerous -- descent through the Martian atmosphere that was considered so complex that even NASA engineers called it crazy. The success means the one-ton rover, which cost $2.5 billion to build and launch, soon can begin its two-year exploration of the Red Planet. Using 10 science instruments, the Curiosity will search for clues on whether Mars ever could have supported microbial life.
 
Touchdown confirmed; We're back on Mars
 
Todd Halvorson - Florida Today
 
NASA's car-sized Curiosity rover is safe on the surface of Mars today after surviving the most audacious landing ever attempted at another planet. Ecstatic engineers jumped, clapped, cheered and hugged at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as radio signals beamed back across interplanetary space confirmed the outcome. Thumbnail images started coming down almost immediately. "It's the wheel! It's the wheel!" a flight controller shouted. "Oh my God." "This is amazing," said flight commentator Allen Chen. Earlier, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden admitted a successful landing was a long shot. "It's like us launching something from Kennedy Space Center and having it land in the Rose Bowl, on the 50-year-line, on a Frisbee," Bolden told an assembled group of social media followers.
 
Mars Curiosity Lands; Ready To Search For 'Ingredients Of Life'
 
Yesenia Robles - Denver Post
 
After a journey of about 253 days across space, NASA landed its largest rover, Curiosity, on Mars on Sunday night. Colorado scientists and enthusiasts, some of whom contributed to the mission, erupted in cheers and applause watching the landing live Sunday night at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. "I think we can breathe now," said the event's host Steve Lee, a scientist from the museum. "This wasn't expected, to get a full resolution image back yet. What a treat."
 
Greetings from Mars!
Huge NASA rover makes daring landing on Red Planet
 
Mike Wall – Space.com
 
A car-size NASA rover touched down on the Martian surface late Sunday night (Aug. 5), executing a stunning series of maneuvers that seem pulled from the pages of a sci-fi novel. News of the 1-ton Curiosity rover's successful landing came in at 10:31 p.m. PDT Sunday (1:31 a.m. EDT and 0517 GMT Monday), though the robot actually touched down inside Mars' huge Gale Crater around 10:17 p.m. "Touchdown confirmed. We're safe on Mars!" a mission controller announced to deafening cheers here at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Rover team members leapt to their feet to hug and high-five each other.
 
NASA has plenty to celebrate after Mars rover Curiosity's perfect landing
 
Rebecca Boyle - Popular Science
 
Long minutes of thunderous applause greeted the managers and engineers who paraded into an auditorium here Sunday night, triumphant after a perfect landing on another world. The Mars rover Curiosity sent a picture from the Martian surface just moments after its self-piloted descent and airdrop, and everyone assembled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory could not help but cheer. It's a huge moment for NASA, which delivered the rover over budget and two years late -- but delivered it, and beautifully. Nothing is harder than landing on Mars, and no one does it better than the United States, said Charles Bolden, NASA's administrator. In a few moments of proud flag-waving, Bolden, White House science adviser John Holdren and others trumpeted the space agency's momentous achievement.
 
Curiosity Rover Lands Safely On Mars After Risky Descent
 
Elizabeth Lopatto - Bloomberg News
 
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Curiosity rover landed safely on Mars, after a 352 million-mile journey and harrowing plunge through the planet's atmosphere dubbed "7 Minutes of Terror." The vehicle, loaded with the most-sophisticated instruments ever used off Earth, touched down at 1:32 a.m. New York time. Scientists developed the $2.5 billion mission to help determine whether Mars has an environment that can support life. Curiosity landed at a site called Gale Crater, at the foot of a 3.4 mile (5.5 kilometer) high mountain. The crater spans 96 miles, an area about the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, according to NASA.
 
'Enormous step forward' As NASA lands rover on Mars
 
Romain Raynaldy - Agence France Presse
 
NASA successfully landed its $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory and Curiosity rover on the surface of the Red Planet, marking the most ambitious attempt to reach Mars in history. "Touchdown confirmed," said a member of mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as the room erupted in cheers. "We are wheels down on Mars. Oh, my God." A dusty image of the rover's wheel on the surface, taken from a rear camera on the vehicle, confirmed the arrival of the car-sized rover and its sophisticated toolkit designed to hunt for signs that life once existed there.
__________
 
COMPLETE STORIES
 
Curiosity lands on Mars
 
William Harwood - CBS News
 
In an unparalleled technological triumph, a one-ton nuclear-powered rover the size of a small car was lowered to the surface of Mars on the end of a 25-foot-long bridle suspended from the belly of a rocket-powered flying crane late Sunday to kick off an unprecedented $2.5 billion mission.
 
With flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory anxiously watching telemetry flowing in from Mars, 154 million miles away and 13.8 minutes after the fact, the Mars Science Laboratory rover -- Curiosity -- radioed confirmation of touchdown at 10:32 p.m. PDT (GMT-7; 1:32 a.m. EDT Monday).
 
"Touchdown confirmed. We're safe on Mars!" said mission control commentator Allen Chen as the flight control team erupted in boisterous cheers and applause.
 
"It's just absolutely incredible, it doesn't get any better than this," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "I was a basket case in there, I was really on pins and needles.
 
"It's a huge day for the nation, it's a huge day for all of our partners and it's a huge day for the American people," he said. "Everybody in the morning should be sticking their chests out, saying 'that's my rover on Mars.' Because it belongs to all of us."
 
The target landing zone was the floor of Gale Crater near the base of a three-mile-high mound of layered rock that represents hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of years of martian history, a frozen record of the planet's changing environment and evolution.
 
While the rover's exact position was not immediately known, there were no obvious problems during the dramatic entry, descent and landing and Curiosity presumably made it down inside a predicted footprint measuring four miles wide and 12 miles long -- a pinpoint landing compared to previous missions.
 
The seven-minute descent to the surface provided high drama as flight controllers monitored telemetry from the spacecraft, relayed through NASA's aging Mars Odyssey orbiter. As each major milestone ticked off, engineers clapped and cheered, increasingly optimistic as the spacecraft passed one hurdle after another.
 
"Vehicle reports entry interface," Chen said as the descent vehicle plunged into the discernible atmosphere at a blistering 13,200 mph. "At this time it will begin pressurizing the propulsion system to increase the thrust of the system. It'll use that for all the maneuvering in the atmosphere we're about to do... We are standing by for guidance start and the start of guided entry."
 
A few moments later: "We are beginning to feel the atmosphere as we go in here," Chen said. "The vehicle has just reported via tones that it has started guided entry. At this time, the vehicle is beginning to steer its way to the target... It's starting its first bank reversal."
 
As the spacecraft guided itself through two banking roll reversals to bleed off velocity as it zeroed in on the target landing zone, Chen noted "we have seen peak deceleration. We've passed through peak heating and peak deceleration. It is reporting we are seeing Gs on the order of 11 to 12 Earth Gs."
 
Guided entry then ended as expected and the spacecraft's huge parachute deployed and inflated as it fell toward Mars at 1.7 times the speed of sound, quickly decelerating as required.
 
"Stand by for parachute deploy... Parachute deploy!" Chen reported as the flight control team applauded. "Thrusters have been re-enabled, we will control attitude on chute, we are decelerating. About 10 kilometers (10.2 miles) and descending, we are at 150 meters per second (335 mph)..."
 
"We are nine kilometers (5.6 miles) and descending... We have acquired the ground with the radar (applause). Heat shield has separated, we have found the ground. We're standing by to prime the MLE engines in preparation for powered flight. We're down to 90 meters per second (201 mph) at an altitude of 6.9 kilometers (4.3 miles) and descending."
 
As Curiosity fell, Earth dropped below the martian horizon, cutting off simple tones sent back by the spacecraft to mark major events. But the Mars Odyssey orbiter continued beaming back an uninterrupted flow of telemetry, giving flight engineers a ringside seat.
 
"We're down to 86 meters per second (192 mph) at an altitude of four kilometers (2.5 miles) and descending," Chen said. "We have lost tones from Earth at this time, this is expected. We're continuing on Odyssey telemetry... Standing by for backshell separation..."
 
Right on schedule, less than a mile above the surface, Curiosity and its "sky crane" backpack fell away from the parachute and backshell and an instant later, eight rocket engines, two on each corner ignited to stabilize the craft and slow it to a sedate 1.7 mph.
 
"We are in powered flight," Chen reported, prompting more applause. "We're at an altitude of one kilometer (0.6 miles) and descending about 70 meters per second (157 mph)... Down to 50 meters per second (112 mph), 500 meters (1,640 feet) in altitude, standing by for sky crane... We found a nice flat place, we're coming in ready for sky crane... Down to 10 meters per second (22 mph), 40 meters altitude (131 feet)...
 
"Sky crane has started (applause)... Descending at about point 75 meters per second (1.7 mph) as expected... Expecting bridle cut shortly."
 
As Curiosity's wheels settled to the surface, the flight computer sent commands to cut the cables connecting it to the sky crane descent stage, which then flew away to a crash landing as planned.
 
Finally, after checking telemetry and confirming its status, Chen reported "touchdown confirmed. We're safe on Mars!"
 
Amid jubilant applause and cheers, he added: "Time to see where Curiosity will take us!"
 
While engineers did not expect pictures right away, blurry low-resolution thumbnails from the rover's rear hazard avoidance cameras were transmitted within minutes of touchdown showing a wheel on the surface of Mars.
 
"Odyssey data is still strong," Chen reported. "Odyssey is nice and high in the sky. At this time we're standing by for images..."
 
"We've got thumbnails," someone said.
 
"We are wheels down on Mars!" Chen reported.
 
"Oh my God," someone else said in the background.
 
Exploring the crater floor and climbing Mount Sharp over the next two years, Curiosity will look for signs of past or present habitability and search for carbon compounds, the building blocks of life as it is known on Earth.
 
But before the rover's geological fieldwork can begin, engineers will devote several weeks to carefully checking out Curiosity's complex systems and testing its state-of-the-art instruments and cameras.
 
"I can guarantee you in the days, months and years from now you'll be hearing an incredible science story," said Project Scientist John Grotzinger. "The money, two-and-a-half billion dollars, we don't put it in the rover and send it to mars, we spend it on Earth.
 
"This whole enterprise, if you divide by every woman, man and child in this country, comes out to be the cost of a movie (about $7). I speak on behalf of all my colleagues in science, that's a movie I want to see!"
 
Curiosity's landing represented the most challenging robotic descent to the surface of another world ever attempted, a tightly choreographed sequence of autonomously executed events with little margin for error.
 
But it all worked and the cheers that rocked the halls of the mission operations enter signaled the pride -- and relief -- felt by the flight control team, engineers and scientists who labored for nearly a decade to design, build, launch and land the Mars Science Laboratory.
 
"Today, right now, the wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars," Bolden said at a post-landing news conference. "Curiosity, the most sophisticated rover ever built is now on the surface of the red planet where it will seek to answer age old questions about whether life ever existed there on Mars or if the planet can sustain life in the future. This an amazing achievement."
 
John Holdren, President Obama's science advisor, said the landing was a "technological tour de force."
 
"It's an enormous step forward in planetary exploration, nobody has ever done anything like this," he said. "This lander is vastly bigger, vastly more capable, much more complicated to bring in, many new technologies had to work in perfect succession and perfect synchronization for this to happen.
 
"This is by far the most capable device, set of instruments, we've put up there for determining whether Mars every could have supported life. ... We stand to learn a tremendous amount from this Curiosity Mars Science Laboratory. It's going to do incredible things."
 
While precise numbers were not expected until the telemetry could be analyzed, the entry, descent and landing appeared to follow the EDL team's script without any major problems.
 
"It looked extremely clean," said Adam Seltzner, the lead engineer on the entry, descent and landing team. "Our navigation error was on the low side of our expectation. ... Our powered flight appears to have been excellent. We landed with 140 kilograms of fuel reserves out of a total of 400 kilos we carried in.
 
"It looked good, in short, good and clean," he said.
 
The timing of events in the following description were predicted and may be slightly different from the actual values, which depended on atmospheric conditions and other factors. But given the successful touchdown, the spacecraft lived up to the team's sky-high expectations.
 
The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft consisted of an interplanetary cruise stage, providing power and communications during the long-flight out from Earth, and the Curiosity rover, cocooned inside a heat shield and aeroshell to protect it from the extreme temperatures of atmospheric entry.
 
After covering 352 million miles since launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., last November, the cruise stage separated from the lander around 10 p.m. But because of the distance between Earth and Mars -- 154 million miles -- it took radio signals confirming critical events 13.8 minutes to reach the flight control team at JPL. That translated into 10:14 p.m. "Earth-received time."
 
One minute later, thrusters fired to stop the entry vehicle's 2-rpm rotation and the spacecraft re-oriented itself heat shield forward and slammed into the discernible atmosphere at 10:24 p.m. at an altitude of about 78 miles and a velocity of 13,200 mph. At that point, it was about 390 miles -- seven minutes -- from touchdown in Gale Crater.
 
The Mars Science Laboratory was the first spacecraft to attempt a so-called guided entry on another planet.
 
To control its lift, which allowed Curiosity's flight computer to make a pinpoint landing, two 165-pound tungsten weights were ejected just before entry to change the spacecraft's center of mass. During hypersonic flight, thruster firings controlled the orientation of the vehicle's "lift vector" to compensate for actual atmospheric conditions as it precisely controlled its path toward Gale Crater.
 
About one minute and 15 seconds after entry, the spacecraft's heat shield experienced peak temperatures of up to 3,800 degrees Fahrenheit as atmospheric friction provided 90 percent of the spacecraft's deceleration. Ten seconds after peak heating, that deceleration was expected to peak at 10 to 15 times the force of Earth's gravity at sea level.
 
Plummeting toward Mars, the rover's flight computer continued steering the spacecraft, firing thrusters to make subtle changes in the flight path as required by atmospheric density and other variables.
 
The guided entry phase of flight was programmed to an end about four minutes after entry began. Six 55-pound weights then had to be ejected to move the center of mass back to the central axis of the spacecraft to help ensure stability when its braking parachute deployed.
 
Seconds later, at an altitude of about seven miles and a velocity of some 900 miles per hour, the huge chute unfurled and inflated to a diameter of 70 feet, delivering a 65,000-pound jolt to the still-supersonic spacecraft.
 
The heat shield was expected to be jettisoned about 24 seconds later, at an altitude of about five miles and a descent rate of 280 mph, exposing the rover's undercarriage to view.
 
A sophisticated radar altimeter then began measuring altitude and velocity, feeding those data to the rover's flight computer while a high-definition camera began recording video of the remaining few minutes of the descent.
 
Six minutes after entry, now one mile up and falling toward the surface at roughly 180 mph, the rover and its rocket pack were cut away from the parachute and backshell, falling like a rock through the thin martian atmosphere.
 
An instant later, eight hydrazine-burning rocket engines, two at each corner of the descent stage, ignited to stabilize and quickly slow the craft's vertical velocity to less than 2 mph.
 
About 16 seconds before touchdown, at an altitude of just under 70 feet, Curiosity was lowered on the end of a 25-foot-long bridle made up of three cables. As the support and data cables unreeled, the rover's six motorized wheels presumably snapped into position for touchdown.
 
Finally, seven minutes after the entry began and descending at a gentle 1.7 mph, Curiosity's wheels touched the surface of Mars. Radio confirmation of landing came in at 10:32 p.m., about 3 p.m. local time on Mars.
 
Curiosity's flight computer, sensing "weight on wheels," then sent commands to fire small explosive devices that severed the cables connecting the rover to the still-firing propulsion system. Its work complete, the descent stage flew away to a crash landing a safe distance away.
 
"We have three different signals we would use to confirm touchdown and we need all three of those things to look right before we say so," Steltzner said earlier Sunday. "One of those is a message from the spacecraft that says 'I touched down, and this is the velocity I touched down at and where I think I am.'
 
"The rover has an inertial measurement unit, a gyro and an accelerometer set, and we look at that stream to say the rover's not moving at all, that signal says 'I think I'm on the ground and I'm not moving.' And the third is, we wait a safe period of time and confirm we're getting continuous UHF (radio) transmission. And frankly, that's there to make sure the descent stage hasn't fallen back down on top of the rover. When all three of those signals are positive, we declare touchdown confirmation."
 
And that's exactly what Chen reported at 10:32 p.m.
 
Curiosity Rover Lands Safely On Mars
 
Kenneth Chang - New York Times
 
The Curiosity has landed.
 
With pride, relief and exhilaration, NASA engineers and officials erupted in cheers and hugs early Monday morning with confirmation that the Curiosity, a car-sized, plutonium-powered robotic rover, had landed safely on the surface of Mars.
 
"Touchdown confirmed," Allen Chen, the engineer in the control room providing commentary, said at 1:32 a.m. Eastern time.
 
A couple of minutes later, the first image popped onto the video screen - a grainy, 64-pixel-by-64-pixel black-and-white image showing one of the rover's wheels and the Martian horizon. Three minutes later, a higher-resolution version of the same image appeared, and then came another image from the other side of the rover.
 
"This is amazing," said Robert Manning, the chief engineer for the project. "That's the shadow of the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars."
 
The Curiosity, far larger and more capable than the earlier generation of rovers, will open a new era of exploration, looking for signs that early Mars had the ingredients and environment that could have come together to form life.
 
The success validates a $2.5 billion bet that NASA took in embarking on this ambitious mission. While the spacecraft has performed flawlessly since its launching last November, that is only after NASA overcame technical problems, delayed launching by more than two years and poured in hundreds of millions of dollars as the price tag rose from $1.6 billion.
 
The landing, involving a seemingly impossible sequence of complex maneuvers, proceeded like clockwork: the capsule containing Curiosity entered the Martian atmosphere, the parachute deployed, the rocket engines fired, the rover was lowered and, finally, the Curiosity was on the ground.
 
Over the first week, Curiosity is to deploy its main antenna, raise a mast containing cameras, a rock-vaporizing laser and other instruments, and take its first panoramic shot of its surroundings.
 
NASA will spend the first month checking out Curiosity. The first drive could occur early next month. The rover would not scoop its first sample of Martian soil until mid-September at the earliest, and the first drilling into rock would occur in October or November.
 
Because Curiosity is powered by electricity generated from the heat of a chunk of plutonium, it could continue operating for years, perhaps decades, in exploring the 96-mile-wide crater where it has landed.
 
Mars Rover Curiosity Lands On The Red Planet
 
Alicia Chang - Associated Press
 
In a show of technological wizardry, the robotic explorer Curiosity blazed through the pink skies of Mars, steering itself to a gentle landing inside a giant crater for the most ambitious dig yet into the Red Planet's past.
 
A chorus of cheers and applause echoed through the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Sunday night after the most high-tech interplanetary rover ever built signaled it had survived a harrowing plunge through the thin Mars atmosphere.
 
"Touchdown confirmed," said engineer Allen Chen. "We're safe on Mars."
 
Minutes after the landing signal reached Earth at 10:32 p.m. PDT, Curiosity beamed back the first black-and-white pictures from inside the crater showing its wheel and its shadow, cast by the afternoon sun.
 
"It looks like we landed in a nice flat spot. Beautiful, really beautiful," said engineer Adam Steltzner, who led the team that devised the tricky landing routine.
 
It was NASA's seventh landing on Earth's neighbor; many other attempts by the U.S. and other countries to zip past, circle or set down on Mars have gone awry.
 
The arrival was an engineering tour de force, debuting never-before-tried acrobatics packed into "seven minutes of terror" as Curiosity sliced through the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph.
 
In a Hollywood-style finish, cables delicately lowered the rover to the ground at a snail-paced 2 mph. A video camera was set to capture the most dramatic moments - which would give earthlings their first glimpse of a touchdown on another world.
 
Celebrations by the mission team were so joyous over the next hour that JPL Director Charles Elachi had to plead for calm in order to hold a press conference. He compared the team to athletic teams that go to the Olympics.
 
"This team came back with the gold," he said.
 
The extraterrestrial feat injected a much-needed boost to NASA, which is debating whether it can afford another Mars landing this decade. At a budget-busting $2.5 billion, Curiosity is the priciest gamble yet, which scientists hope will pay off with a bonanza of discoveries.
 
"We're on Mars again," said NASA chief Charles Bolden. "It's just absolutely incredible. It doesn't get any better than this."
 
President Barack Obama tweeted his appreciation: "I congratulate and thank all the men and women of NASA who made this remarkable accomplishment a reality."
 
In a statement, Obama lauded the landing as "an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future."
 
Over the next two years, Curiosity will drive over to a mountain rising from the crater floor, poke into rocks and scoop up rust-tinted soil to see if the region ever had the right environment for microscopic organisms to thrive. It's the latest chapter in the long-running quest to find out whether primitive life arose early in the planet's history.
 
The voyage to Mars took more than eight months and spanned 352 million miles. The trickiest part of the journey? The landing. Because Curiosity weighs nearly a ton, engineers drummed up a new and more controlled way to set the rover down. The last Mars rovers, twins Spirit and Opportunity, were cocooned in air bags and bounced to a stop in 2004.
 
The plans for Curiosity called for a series of braking tricks, similar to those used by the space shuttle, and a supersonic parachute to slow it down. Next: Ditch the heat shield used for the fiery descent.
 
And in a new twist, engineers came up with a way to lower the rover by cable from a hovering rocket-powered backpack. At touchdown, the cords cut and the rocket stage crashed a distance away.
 
The nuclear-powered Curiosity, the size of a small car, is packed with scientific tools, cameras and a weather station. It sports a robotic arm with a power drill, a laser that can zap distant rocks, a chemistry lab to sniff for the chemical building blocks of life and a detector to measure dangerous radiation on the surface.
 
It also tracked radiation levels during the journey to help NASA better understand the risks astronauts could face on a future manned trip.
 
Over the next several days, Curiosity was expected to send back the first color pictures. After several weeks of health checkups, the six-wheel rover could take its first short drive and flex its robotic arm.
 
The landing site near Mars' equator was picked because there are signs of past water everywhere, meeting one of the requirements for life as we know it. Inside Gale Crater is a 3-mile-high mountain, and images from space show the base appears rich in minerals that formed in the presence of water.
 
Previous trips to Mars have uncovered ice near the Martian north pole and evidence that water once flowed when the planet was wetter and toastier unlike today's harsh, frigid desert environment.
 
Curiosity's goal: to scour for basic ingredients essential for life including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur and oxygen. It's not equipped to search for living or fossil microorganisms. To get a definitive answer, a future mission needs to fly Martian rocks and soil back to Earth to be examined by powerful laboratories.
 
The mission comes as NASA retools its Mars exploration strategy. Faced with tough economic times, the space agency pulled out of partnership with the European Space Agency to land a rock-collecting rover in 2018. The Europeans have since teamed with the Russians as NASA decides on a new roadmap.
 
Despite Mars' reputation as a spacecraft graveyard, humans continue their love affair with the planet, lobbing spacecraft in search of clues about its early history. Out of more than three dozen attempts - flybys, orbiters and landings - by the U.S., Soviet Union, Europe and Japan since the 1960s, more than half have ended disastrously.
 
One NASA rover that defied expectations is Opportunity, which is still busy wheeling around the rim of a crater in the Martian southern hemisphere eight years later.
 
NASA rover Curiosity makes historic Mars landing, beams back photos
 
Steve Gorman & Irene Klotz - Reuters
 
NASA's Mars science rover Curiosity performed a daredevil descent through pink Martian skies late on Sunday to clinch an historic landing inside an ancient crater, ready to search for signs the Red Planet may once have harbored key ingredients for life.
 
Mission controllers burst into applause and cheers as they received signals confirming that the car-sized rover had survived a perilous seven-minute descent NASA called the most elaborate and difficult feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight.
 
Engineers said the tricky landing sequence, combining a giant parachute with a rocket-pack that lowered the rover to the Martian surface on a tether, allowed for zero margin for error.
 
"I can't believe this. This is unbelievable," enthused Allen Chen, the deputy head of the rover's descent and landing team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles.
 
Moments later, Curiosity beamed back its first three images from the Martian surface, one of them showing a wheel of the vehicle and the rover's shadow cast on the rocky terrain.
 
NASA put the official landing time of Curiosity, touted as the first full-fledged mobile science laboratory sent to a distant world, at 10:32 p.m. Pacific time (1:32 a.m. EDT/0532 GMT).
 
The landing marked a much-welcome success and a major milestone for a U.S. space agency beset by budget cuts and the recent cancellation of its space shuttle program, NASA's centerpiece for 30 years.
 
The $2.5 billion Curiosity project, formally called the Mars Science Laboratory, is NASA's first astrobiology mission since the 1970s-era Viking probes.
 
"It's an enormous step forward in planetary exploration. Nobody has ever done anything like this," said John Holdren, the top science advisor to President Barack Obama, who was visiting JPL for the event. "It was an incredible performance."
 
Obama himself issued a statement hailing the Curiosity landing as "an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future."
 
"It proves that even the longest of odds are no match for our unique blend of ingenuity and determination," he said.
 
Checkup for Curiosity before it roves
 
While Curiosity rover appears to have landed intact, its exact condition was still to be ascertained.
 
NASA plans to put the one-ton, six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover and its sophisticated instruments through several weeks of engineering checks before starting its two-year surface mission in earnest.
 
"We're going to make sure that we're firing on all cylinders before we blaze out across the plains," lead scientist John Grotzinger said.
 
The rover's precise location had yet to be determined, but NASA said it came to rest in its planned landing zone near the foot of a tall mountain rising from the floor of a vast impact basin called Gale Crater, in Mars' southern hemisphere.
 
Launched on November 26 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the robotic lab sailed through space for more than eight months, covering 352 million miles (566 million km), before piercing Mars' thin atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour -- 17 times the speed of sound -- and starting its descent.
 
Encased in a protective capsule-like shell, the craft utilized a first-of-its kind automated flight-entry system to sharply reduce its speed.
 
Then the probe rode a huge, supersonic parachute into the lower atmosphere before a jet-powered backpack NASA called a "sky crane" carried Curiosity most of the rest of the way to its destination, lowering it to the ground by nylon tethers.
 
'Seven minutes of terror’
 
When the rover's wheels were planted firmly on the ground, the cords were cut and the sky crane flew a safe distance away and crashed.
 
The sequence also involved 79 pyrotechnic detonations to release exterior ballast weights, open the parachute, separate the heat shield, detach the craft's back shell, jettison the parachute and other functions. The failure of any one of those would have doomed the landing, JPL engineers said.
 
NASA sardonically referred the unorthodox seven-minute descent and landing sequence as "seven minutes of terror."
 
With a 14-minute delay in the time it takes for radio waves from Earth to reach Mars 154 million miles (248 million km) away, NASA engineers had little to do during Curiosity's descent but anxiously track its progress.
 
By the time they received radio confirmation of Curiosity's safe landing, relayed to Earth by a NASA satellite orbiting Mars, the craft already had been on the ground for seven minutes.
 
NASA engineers said the intricate and elaborate landing system used by Curiosity was necessary because of its size and weight.
 
Over twice as large and five times heavier than either of the twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity that landed on Mars in 2004, Curiosity weighed too much to be bounced to the surface in airbags or fly itself all the way down with rocket thrusters -- systems successfully used by six previous NASA landers, engineers said.
 
Curiosity is designed to spend the next two years exploring Gale Crater and an unusual 3-mile- (5 km-) high mountain consisting of what appears to be sediments rising from the crater's floor.
 
Its primary mission is to look for evidence that Mars - the planet most similar to Earth - may have once hosted the basic building blocks necessary for microbial life to evolve.
 
The rover comes equipped with an array of sophisticated instruments capable of analyzing samples of soil, rocks and atmosphere on the spot and beaming results back to Earth.
 
One is a laser gun that can zap a rock from 23 feet away to create a spark whose spectral image is analyzed by a special telescope to discern the mineral's chemical composition.
 
Mission controllers were joined by 1,400 scientists, engineers and dignitaries who tensely waited at JPL to learn Curiosity's fate, among them film star Morgan Freeman, television's "Jeopardy!" host Alex Trebek, comic actor Seth Green and actress June Lockhart of "Lost in Space" fame. Another 5,000 people watched from the nearby California Institute of Technology, the academic home of JPL.
 
"There are many out in the community who say that NASA has lost its way, that we don't know how to explore, that we've lost our moxie. I think it's fair to say that NASA knows how to explore, we've been exploring and we're on Mars," former astronaut and NASA's associate administrator for science, John Grunsfeld, told reporters shortly after the touchdown.
 
Mars Curiosity Rover Lands Successfully On Mars
 
Gina Sunseri, Ned Potter & Anthony Castellano – ABC News
 
NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover has landed on the surface of the red planet following an eight month, 352-million-mile journey. NASA says it received a signal from the Curiosity rover after a plunge through the Martian atmosphere described as "seven minutes of terror."
 
A chorus of cheers and applause echoed through the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory just after 1:30 a.m. EDT Monday when it was confirmed the rover had landed successfully.
 
"Touchdown confirmed," said engineer Allen Chen. "We're safe on Mars."
 
Minutes later, Curiosity beamed back the first pictures from the surface showing its wheel and its shadow, cast by the afternoon sun - giving earthlings their first glimpse of a touchdown on another world.
 
"Tonight's success, delivered by NASA, parallels our major steps forward towards a vision for a new partnership with American companies to send American astronauts into space on American spacecraft," President Barack Obama said in a statement. "And tonight's success reminds us that our preeminence - not just in space, but here on Earth - depends on continuing to invest wisely in the innovation, technology, and basic research that has always made our economy the envy of the world."
 
NASA Associate Administrator John Grunsfeld told ABC New Curiosity's instruments are starting to communicate and more photos are coming in. NASA thinks they've spotted a lovely pebble field in front of the rover.
 
Mars Curiosity is NASA's latest and boldest attempt yet to go where robots -- but no man -- have gone before. Before this mission, the U.S., Russia, Japan and Europe had sent 40 spacecraft to explore the fourth planet from the sun since the space age began. Twenty-six had failed.
 
Curiosity, an intrepid chemistry set on wheels, packed with cameras and gadgets galore, was designed to look for signs that life once existed on Mars. Not Marvin the Martian, but signs that Mars could once have had the chemical resources needed to support microbial life. This could mean potential sources of water, food and energy that could someday support visiting humans from Earth.
 
The landing has been dubbed "Seven Minutes of Terror" by the engineers who figured out the best way to land. Adam Steltzner, team leader for the entry, descent and landing of Curiosity, said that as the ship was in the planning stages and then heading to Mars, he found himself waking up in the middle of the night, thinking about the sequence of events that would have to go perfectly.
 
"The big trick is you are going 13,000 miles an hour," he said. "You slam into the Martian atmosphere and you want to gracefully get the spacecraft down sitting quietly on the surface on her wheels, and all of that takes different changes in the configuration of the vehicle, 79 events that must occur."
 
Curiosity was set to land when Mars was 154 million miles from Earth. It weighed 5,293 pounds on Earth -- the size of a small car and much, much bigger than the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which were cushioned by airbags when they landed in 2004. Engineers quickly figured out that airbags would burst if they were tried on Curiosity. So they designed it to be lowered to the Martian surface by a heat shield, then a parachute, then retro-rockets, and finally a sky crane -- something that had never tried before -- and that's what made this so scary for them. Just one slip would mean $2.5 billion down the drain.
 
Curiosity launched on Thanksgiving weekend 2011 and traveled 354 million miles in eight months. Its target: Gale Crater, a site where many layers of Martian bedrock are believed to be exposed.
 
The landing was set to happen in an area that would be facing away from Earth as the planet turned. The spacecraft was equipped with an X-band transmitter to let the rover communicate directly with Earth, but its first attempt to phone home would be relayed by an older U.S. probe in orbit around Mars. Controllers cautioned in advance that Curiosity could make a perfectly good landing -- but hours or even days could pass before confirmation reached Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Lab here in Pasadena.
 
How long was Curiosity designed to roam the planet? One Martian year, which is 22 months on Earth. Spirit and Opportunity -- NASA deliberately played down expectations -- were only expected to run for 90 Martian "sols," or days on Mars (each lasts 24 hours and 39 minutes), but Spirit kept on going until 2010 and Opportunity is still puttering around on Mars.
 
The U.S. has had its share of failures getting to Mars, but it has done better than other countries. Russia has the most dismal record: it launched 19 missions and 19 failed. You have to give them credit for trying. Phobos Grunt, a mission to return a small soil sample from one of Mars' tiny moons, ended in spectacular fashion last fall, unable even to leave Earth orbit. India just announced it would fund its first mission to Mars to launch next year.
 
Why do this? Aswin Vasavada, a project scientist for Mars Curiosity, said there is an elemental drive in humans.
 
"We are humans, we want to explore," he said. "We see a mountain, and we want to climb it. As scientists we want to answer the big questions."
 
Obama praises NASA for Mars landing
 
Associated Press
 
President Barack Obama says NASA's successful mission to put a robotic rover on Mars is an "unprecedented feat of technology."
 
In a statement issued Monday shortly after the rover Curiosity landed, Obama said "Tonight, on the planet Mars, the United States of America made history."
 
He says the feat, which gives the space agency a much-needed boost, proves that even the longest odds are no match for American ingenuity and determination.
 
The president says the mission, which cost taxpayers $2.5 billion, shows that American preeminence "depends on continuing to invest wisely in the innovation, technology, and basic research that has always made our economy the envy of the world."
 
Obama also congratulated the NASA workers "who made this remarkable accomplishment a reality."
 
Mars Rover Curiosity Safely Lands On Mars
 
Scott Gold - Los Angeles Times
 
Curiosity, the largest and most advanced spacecraft ever sent to another planet, stuck its extraordinary landing Sunday night without a hitch and is poised to begin its pioneering two-year hunt for the building blocks of life - signs that Earth's creatures may not be alone in the universe.
 
Applause erupted across the campus of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge and engineers inside mission control could be seen hugging and weeping with joy. Al Chen, an engineer on Curiosity's entry, descent and landing team, said the words that space scientists had been waiting on for 10 years: "Touchdown confirmed."
 
"We did it again!" another engineer shouted.
 
The landing site was 154 million miles from home, enough distance that the spacecraft's elaborate landing sequence had to be automated. The Earth also "set" below the Mars horizon shortly before landing, making even delayed direct communication with mission control impossible - and confirmation of Curiosity's fate tricky.
Engineers were waiting for a passing satellite, Odyssey, to relay a series of three messages from Curiosity. One would indicate the robot's rough position and how hard it had landed; another would indicate that it was no longer moving; and a third would indicate that the spacecraft was emitting a continuous stream of communication.
If Curiosity's success is confirmed, it would be a moment of triumph for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managing the $2.5-billion mission.
 
Curiosity is expected to revolutionize the understanding of Mars, gathering evidence that Mars is or was capable of fostering life, probably in microbial form.
 
The spacecraft is also expected to pave the way for important leaps in deep-space exploration, including bringing Martian rock or soil back to Earth for detailed analysis and, eventually, human exploration. President Obama has established a goal of sending astronauts to Mars in the 2030s - and John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator, said on Sunday that humans might one day live there too.
 
"Curiosity has captured the imagination of the world," Grunsfeld said before the landing. "We're about to do something that I think is just huge for humankind."
 
A six-wheeled, nuclear-powered geochemistry laboratory, Curiosity is the size of a small car - five times heavier and twice as long as previous Mars rovers. It is equipped with a suite of powerful instruments, including 17 cameras, lasers and a radiation detector. The rover can bore into rock and ingest samples, drawing them into an on-board chemistry lab and then sending the lab results home.
 
The primary mission is expected to last for at least one Martian year, or 687 Earth days.
 
Previous NASA missions have found evidence that Mars, now a cold and dry planet, had a warmer, watery past, so much so that scientists think of it as Earth's space cousin. Every environment on Earth that contains liquid water also sustains life. Curiosity will search for the other building blocks of life, particularly carbon-carrying organic molecules.
 
"Mars looks like it has been habitable," said Michael Meyer, a leader of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. "But you need to go and look.... And Curiosity is the rover that is able to do that."
 
Other than the decision to send the robot to Mars in the first place, the choice of a landing site was probably the most important issue scientists faced.
 
For five years, space scientists made impassioned arguments for their favored site. Last summer, from a pool of 60 candidates, NASA and JPL decided to send Curiosity to Gale Crater, an ancient geological feature just south of the equator, caused when a meteor slammed into Mars 3 billion years ago.
 
Gale Crater won out largely because of an enormous mountain in its center. Dubbed Mt. Sharp in honor of noted Caltech geologist Robert Phillip Sharp, the mountain is three miles high. That's taller than any mountain in the "lower 48" of the United States, and taller than some portions of the rim of the crater that encircles the mound.
 
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a satellite that launched in 2005, has found that the mountain's slopes contain distinct layers - clay at the bottom, an apparent remnant of Mars's watery past, a layer of sulfates on top of that, and layers of sand and dust toward the top.
 
Similar to the way the walls of the Grand Canyon offer a layered view of the evolution of North America, space scientists believe Mt. Sharp's slopes contain a preserved record of Mars's past.
 
Caltech's John Grotzinger, Curiosity's principal investigator, said the rover "will have started the era of a whole new dimension of space exploration." That dimension, he said, is one of "deep time." Rather than getting a snapshot of one point in time on Mars, the mountain will allow Curiosity to build an understanding of "hundreds of millions to even billions of years," Grotzinger said this weekend as JPL ramped up for landing.
 
Curiosity will climb the lower portion of the mountain to investigate the makeup of the layers of soil.
 
Much of the discussion about Curiosity as it approached Mars focused on its complex landing sequence. In a matter of minutes Sunday night, the spacecraft needed to change form five times - using a massive parachute, a "backpack" of reverse-thrust engines and a contraption known as a "skycrane" to reach the surface.
 
The unusual sequence carried huge benefits, namely allowing scientists to be far more particular about where Curiosity would land. JPL Director Charles Elachi called it a "quantum jump," and said it was akin to flying a rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., to the Rose Bowl - and then not only landing in the stadium, but landing on one pre-selected seat.
 
Because the landing site is so far away, a message sent from the rover takes 14 minutes to get home. The landing sequence took seven minutes - which meant that by the time scientists received a message that the spacecraft had entered the Martian atmosphere Sunday night, it had already been on the surface for seven minutes. NASA dubbed this period of the mission "seven minutes of terror."
 
Now, scientists can take their time. Ensuring that all of Curiosity's instruments are working in proper fashion will take weeks. The rover is not expected to begin driving until early September, and will likely begin "scoop" samples several weeks later. Curiosity is expected to begin drilling into rocks later in the fall.
 
JPL Rover Curiosity Touches Down On Surface Of Mars
 
James Figueroa - Los Angeles Daily News
 
The world was holding its breath and watching Sunday night as NASA's Curiosity traversed its final trajectory to the surface of Mars.
 
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory rover landed safely on Mars late Sunday night, as engineers erupted in cheers after confirming successful touchdown right at 10:32 p.m, the projected landing time.
 
"We are going to have the opportunity for untold discoveries," NASA director of Mars exploration Doug McCuistion said during a pre-landing briefing Sunday. He called the Curiosity mission the "Super Bowl" of planetary exploration.
 
JPL's primary objective on Sunday was simply to confirm Curiosity had landed safely, and received a few thumbnail-size images a few minutes after the landing.
 
Conditions before the landing looked solid. JPL declined to use a final, contingency window to adjust Curiosity's flight path on Sunday morning, satisfied the spacecraft would make it to the elliptical landing zone near the Martian equator.
 
The weather proved cooperative as well, with no dust storms showing up to cloud Curiosity's descent.
 
That meant JPL engineers were confident yet anxious as they watched Curiosity hurtle toward its "seven minutes of terror" landing, a complicated series of maneuvers involving a heat shield, a guided entry system, a parachute and a "sky crane" cable intended to gently lower the rover to ground.
 
At one metric ton, it's the largest spacecraft that scientists have ever attempted to land on the surface of another planet.
 
Engineers designed the spacecraft to control its own descent, so their vantage point at mission control was just like anyone else watching the feed at home or at various public viewings. There is a 14-minute delay in communications from the Odyssey orbiting spacecraft that monitored Curiosity's descent, adding some extra tension to the evening.
 
"We are rationally confident, emotionally terrified and we're ready for EDL," said JPL engineer Adam Steltzner on Sunday morning, referring to the entry, descent and landing stage.
 
Odyssey had only a small window to relay communications from Curiosity to Earth before passing out of the rover's sight, but JPL confirmed all systems were go within an hour of landing.
 
JPL designed Curiosity to better handle the rocky, dusty terrain on Mars than Spirit and Opportunity, the two previous rovers that confirmed water on the planet in the past decade. Curiosity carries the analytical Mars Science Laboratory, built to search for signs of life during a two-year mission at Mars' Gale Crater. The crater is at one of the lowest elevations on Mars, and scientists believe water once pooled there, offering a likely home for ancient microbial life. The rocky layers of Mount Sharp, in the middle of the crater, could hold clues about organic compounds that may have existed billions of years ago.
 
Mars Science Laboratory has an impressive array of instruments, including ten cameras, an X-ray spectrometer and a laser that will zap rocks to identify minerals.
 
Although Curiosity is the beginning of a new stage of Mars exploration to detect the possibility of life, it isn't actually equipped to identify anything biological. Future missions will heighten that search, including next year's launch of Mars orbiter that will study the planet's upper atmosphere.
 
Funding is uncertain, however, as NASA and JPL went through budget cuts this year that undercut plans to bring rock samples back to Earth. The next opportunity to do that isn't likely until 2020 at the earliest, and could depend on the possibility of sending manned missions to Mars.
 
NASA and JPL plan to keep looking forward.
 
"The science is on the surface and we need to keep going back, and that's the plan," McCuistion said.
 
7 minutes of glory as NASA lands rover on Mars
 
Eric Berger - Houston Chronicle
 
Engineers who designed the daredevil landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars described it as "crazy," "terrifying" and "unprecedented."
 
Here's one more adjective they can now add: successful.
 
Early Monday NASA safely dropped the 1-ton rover, the largest ever, on the surface of Mars. The space agency now has a mobile chemical laboratory the size of a Volkswagen Beetle patrolling the surface of the Red Planet.
 
The challenge engineers faced was immense, slowing the spacecraft carrying Curiosity from a speed of 13,000 mph to zero in seven minutes, all the while flying through an atmosphere just 1 percent the thickness of Earth's. Half of the landers previously sent to Mars failed.
 
But not this time.
 
The mission control room erupted at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory half an hour after midnight Monday morning - arms raised, cheers and hugs all around - as it became clear that Curiosity landed safely.
 
A few minutes later, the first images came in, showing one of Curiosity's wheels under a late afternoon sun.
 
"Surface team, our fun has begun," declared Mike Watkins, a mission manager for the rover.
 
Space Center party
 
At Space Center Houston, just before the landing, a mock-up of the rover descended from the ceiling under disco lights. As speakers blared Kanye West's song Champion, the crowd of 1,500 began a jubilant celebration. For a harried U.S. space program, Monday morning's landing was full of win.
 
Five times the size of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers already on Mars, Curiosity is packed with scientific equipment: HD-resolution cameras that can capture video; a laser than can ignite a spark on rocks 20 feet away to determine what they're made of; and other high-tech tools including an X-ray diffraction setup, a mass spectrometer and a gas chromatograph.
 
With these devices the six-wheeled rover will be able to sample hundreds of layers of sedimentary rock, allowing scientists to understand how the surface of Mars changed over time, and providing a detailed history of the Red Planet and clues to whether life could have flourished there.
 
Mars Curiosity Rover: Mars Rover Survives 'Seven Minutes Of Terror'
 
Mark Matthews - Orlando Sentinel
 
NASA stuck the landing. And now a rover is safely on Mars.
 
At about 1:32 a.m. today, NASA learned that a SUV-sized rover it launched to Mars last fall had successfully survived an acrobatic -- and dangerous -- descent through the Martian atmosphere that was considered so complex that even NASA engineers called it crazy.
 
The success means the one-ton rover, which cost $2.5 billion to build and launch, soon can begin its two-year exploration of the Red Planet. Using 10 science instruments, the Curiosity will search for clues on whether Mars ever could have supported microbial life.
 
But first, NASA took a moment to celebrate. When word of the landing reached NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the room burst into cheers as NASA engineers in light blue T-shirts shouted and clapped.
 
"It's absolutely incredible. It doesn't get any better than this," said NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden. "It's a huge day for the nation."
 
Before the applause, however, were several tense hours as NASA officials prepared to put the rover through a complicated landing sequence dubbed "seven minutes of terror." Adding to the tension was that fewer than half of all Mars missions have succeeded.
 
A few minutes after 1 a.m., the rover and its descent craft hit the top of the Martian atmosphere at speeds nearing 13,200 miles per hour. As the ever-thickening atmosphere slowed it down during the next four minutes, the temperature of its heat shield soared as high as 3,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
 
When the speed then dropped to 900 mph - about seven miles above the surface - the spacecraft popped a supersonic parachute and ditched the heat shield so instruments on its underside could help with the landing.
 
But even with the parachute deployed, the landing craft was still traveling too fast. So, with a mile to go, it jettisoned the parachute and transformed into a hovercraft. Eight small "retrorockets" slowed its descent to 2 mph and then it executed the trickiest part - the sky crane maneuver.
 
Because the retrorockets risk stirring up a dust storm - blinding the rover's instruments - the hovercraft had use nylon cords to gently lower the rover to the surface; a delicate maneuver that would be hard on Earth, let alone another planet.
 
"The seven minutes of terror has turned into the seven minutes of triumph," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science, in a statement. "My immense joy in the success of this mission is matched only by overwhelming pride I feel for the women and men of the mission's team."
 
Touchdown confirmed; We're back on Mars
 
Todd Halvorson - Florida Today
 
NASA's car-sized Curiosity rover is safe on the surface of Mars today after surviving the most audacious landing ever attempted at another planet.
 
Ecstatic engineers jumped, clapped, cheered and hugged at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as radio signals beamed back across interplanetary space confirmed the outcome. Thumbnail images started coming down almost immediately.
 
"It's the wheel! It's the wheel!" a flight controller shouted. "Oh my God."
 
"This is amazing," said flight commentator Allen Chen.
 
Earlier, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden admitted a successful landing was a long shot.
 
"It's like us launching something from Kennedy Space Center and having it land in the Rose Bowl, on the 50-year-line, on a Frisbee," Bolden told an assembled group of social media followers.
 
White House Science Advisor John Holdren called the landing a tremendous achievement.
 
"It's an enormous step forward in planetary exploration," said Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "Nobody has ever done anything like this."
 
Eight months after launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the Mars Science Laboratory separated from a cruise stage that had propelled in on an interplanetary journey that covered 352 million miles.
 
Back on Earth, engineers received a signal confirming that event at 1:14 a.m. EDT. It took the signal 14 minutes to reach Earth.
 
Ten minutes later, signals showed the Mars Science Laboratory hit the top of the planet's atmosphere at about 13,200 mph. Altitude: 81.5 miles.
 
The spacecraft went through a "straighten up and fly right" roll maneuver four minutes later, purposely shedding ballast so it would tilt slightly, creating aerodynamic lift.
 
Just like a space shuttle making a guided reentry to Earth's atmosphere, the Mars Science Lab and its cocooned Curiosity rover flew sweeping S-curves to bleed off speed.
 
Temperatures on its ablative heat shield were expected to build up to 3,800 degrees Fahrenheit during the dramatic descent.
 
Nine-tenths of the deceleration toward zero mph resulted from friction with the atmosphere, and engineers in Mission Control cheered each step in the plunge.
 
A supersonic parachute deployed, the heat shield separated, and then Curiosity emerged from a protective back shell.
 
Eight retrorockets on a separate descent stage ignited before Curiosity was lowered to the ground on three bridles - a so-called "sky crane" maneuver.
 
Curiosity gently touched down on its six wheels at 1:31 a.m. EDT. The bridles severed, and then descent stage flew off to a pre-programmed crash landing about a half-mile away.
 
The one-ton rover, equipped with the most sophisticated suite of science instruments ever sent to another planet, landed inside Gale Crater, a gaping expanse the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island together.
 
The first-ever guided entry allowed a pinpoint touchdown in a landing zone near the base of Aerolis Mons, informally known as Mount Sharp, a three-mile-high mountain taller than any in the contiguous U.S.
 
Rover instruments will be used to determine if Mars ever harbored the primary building blocks of life: water, a source of energy and carbonaceous compounds.
 
The $2.5 billion mission is expected to last at least two years.
 
Mars Curiosity Lands; Ready To Search For 'Ingredients Of Life'
 
Yesenia Robles - Denver Post
 
After a journey of about 253 days across space, NASA landed its largest rover, Curiosity, on Mars on Sunday night.
 
Colorado scientists and enthusiasts, some of whom contributed to the mission, erupted in cheers and applause watching the landing live Sunday night at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
 
"I think we can breathe now," said the event's host Steve Lee, a scientist from the museum. "This wasn't expected, to get a full resolution image back yet. What a treat."
 
Curiosity, a 7-foot-tall rover, was designed, developed and assembled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.
 
Curiosity will be on Mars for one Martian year, the equivalent of about 23 months on Earth.
 
"We are not looking for life," said a Curiosity project scientist through parts of video coverage presented at the museum. "What we are looking for is the ingredients of life."
 
The success of the ambitious mission, as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration says, depended in part on some Colorado companies.
 
Lockheed Martin designed and built the aeroshell and heat shield designed to protect Curiosity, particularly as it landed on Mars.
 
"All of these were built here in Waterton Canyon in Denver," said Richard Hund, an engineer with Lockheed Martin, who was also at the museum's event. "One of the challenges in building these shells was the size."
 
Hund said many employees had to be trained to help with the labor-intensive job of putting together the large cone-shaped shell that encloses the rover.
 
The last 7 minutes, dubbed the "7 minutes of terror" as Curiosity enters the Mars atmosphere at temperatures of almost 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, depended upon Lockheed's shells protecting the rover from the heat.
 
"We can test bits and pieces; we do the best we can," said another engineer who worked on the descent brakes and gearheads, Scott Christiansen, from Sierra Nevada Corp. "But the whole thing we won't know until it does it tonight."
 
Mark Bailey, the director of business development for the company, said after so much similar work with other clients, including NASA on 11 other trips to Mars, the company wasn't sweating the pressure.
 
"We're used to it," Bailey said. "We do it basically every two weeks."
 
Another company out of Boulder also is counting on the safe landing of Curiosity, which carries instruments built by the Southwest Research Institute with cooperation from a university in Germany.
 
The instrument will allow scientists to measure radiation on Mars for the first time.
 
United Launch Alliance in Centennial already did its part as well by providing the rocket that launched Curiosity into space last Nov. 26.
 
Gaytri Amin, an engineer with the Centennial company, said she designed more than 20 trajectories for the launch of the rocket carrying Curiosity — one for each day within the window where conditions could be good for travel.
 
"The window opened up on the second day, and all that extra work went by the wayside," Amin said.
 
Though Curiosity is equipped with high-tech gear, the first images scientists received from the rover were gray-scale pictures snapped from a 1-megapixel, hazard-avoidance camera attached to the body of the rover.
 
Scientists will wait until they determine it is safe to deploy the other cameras and equipment, which could take a few days.
 
Curiosity facts
 
·         Curiosity was launched to study whether the Martian environment ever had conditions suitable for microbial life.
 
·         The voyage to Mars took more than eight months and spanned 352 million miles.
 
·         The trickiest part of the journey? The landing. Because Curiosity weighs nearly a ton, engineers drummed up a new and more controlled way to set the rover down.
 
·         The plans for Curiosity called for a series of braking tricks, similar to those used by the space shuttle, and a supersonic parachute to slow it down.
 
·         Engineers came up with a way to lower the rover by cable from a hovering rocket-powered backpack. At touchdown, the cords are cut and the rocket stage crashes a distance away.
 
·         The nuclear-powered Curiosity, the size of a small car, is packed with scientific tools, cameras and a weather station. It sports a robotic arm with a power drill, a laser that can zap distant rocks, a chemistry lab to sniff for the chemical building blocks of life and a detector to measure dangerous radiation on the surface.
 
Greetings from Mars!
Huge NASA rover makes daring landing on Red Planet
 
Mike Wall – Space.com
 
A car-size NASA rover touched down on the Martian surface late Sunday night (Aug. 5), executing a stunning series of maneuvers that seem pulled from the pages of a sci-fi novel.
 
News of the 1-ton Curiosity rover's successful landing came in at 10:31 p.m. PDT Sunday (1:31 a.m. EDT and 0517 GMT Monday), though the robot actually touched down inside Mars' huge Gale Crater around 10:17 p.m. (It takes about 14 minutes for signals to travel from the Red Planet to Earth).
 
"Touchdown confirmed. We're safe on Mars!" a mission controller announced to deafening cheers here at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Rover team members leapt to their feet to hug and high-five each other.
 
Then, a few minutes later, Curiosity's first photo - a fuzzy thumbnail showing one of the huge rover's six wheels on the Martian surface - came down to Earth, sparking another eruption of emotion.
 
"It's the wheel! It's the wheel!" somebody exclaimed in mission control.
 
Curiosity survived a harrowing and unprecedented journey to the Red Planet's surface. After hurtling into the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph late Sunday (21,000 kph), Curiosity's spacecraft deployed an enormous supersonic parachute to slow down to 200 mph (320 kph) or so. The vehicle then fired rockets to slow its descent further, to less than 2 mph (3.2 kph).
 
Then the craziness began.
 
A rocket-powered sky crane lowered Curiosity to the Martian surface on cables, then flew off and crash-landed intentionally a safe distance away after the rover's six wheels hit the red dirt. The ambitious maneuver capped a landing sequence that NASA officials have dubbed "seven minutes of terror."
 
With the landing, the Curiosity rover wrapped up an eight-month voyage across 352 million miles to reach Mars, where the robot now faces an ambitious two-year mission.
 
Word of the touchdown came via NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, which relayed signals from Curiosity to Earth. Curiosity couldn't ping Earth directly, because Mars' rotation took the rover out of contact with our planet just before it landed.
 
The successful landing is a huge moment for NASA and the future of robotic planetary exploration, which is imperiled by budget cuts. NASA is counting on Curiosity's $2.5 billion mission - which is officially known as the Mars Science Laboratory, or MSL - to generate excitement about the agency's exploration efforts and, perhaps, bring some of the lost funding back.
 
"We're on Mars again," NASA chief Charlie Bolden said just minutes after Curiosity touched down. "It doesn't get any better than this."
 
Assessing Martian habitability
 
Curiosity can now get to work. Its main task is to determine if the Gale Crater area is, or ever was, capable of supporting microbial life. It sports 10 scientific instruments to aid in this task, including a rock-zapping laser and gear that can identify organic compounds, the carbon-containing building blocks of life as we know it.
 
A mysterious 3-mile-high (5 kilometer) mountain called Mount Sharp rises from Gale's center. Mount Sharp's many layers preserve a record of Mars' environmental conditions going back perhaps 1 billion years or more, scientists say. Curiosity will read these layers like a book to gain insights about how the Red Planet has changed over time.
 
Mars-orbiting spacecraft have spotted signs of clays and sulfates - materials known to form in the presence of water - in Mount Sharp's lower reaches. Since all life on Earth is intimately tied to water, Curiosity will doubtless spend a lot of time poking around the mound's base.
 
But the MSL team also wants the rover to climb high enough to reach the mountain's drier layers, so it can help investigate why Mars transitioned from a relatively warm and wet planet to the frigid and dry world we know today.
 
"Something happened on Mars, and it went dry, and that's what we have today," MSL chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, told SPACE.com. "The question is, what was that event? What was that trigger? What happened environmentally? My hope is that we'll get some insight into this Great Desiccation Event."
 
To cross the wet-dry threshold, Curiosity will likely have to climb about 2,300 feet (700 meters) up Mount Sharp. But that shouldn't be too difficult, as the mountain has relatively gentle slopes, like the huge volcanoes of Hawaii, Grotzinger said.
 
In fact, it's possible the rover could clamber all the way to Mount Sharp's top, given enough time, officials have said. But this mountaineering feat isn't high on the MSL team's list of priorities right now.
 
Taking it slow
 
Curiosity's not quite ready to go roving yet. The robot's handlers must first perform a series of checkouts to make sure the rover and its instruments are in good working condition on the Martian surface.
 
It will likely be two to four weeks before Curiosity begins "contact science" operations, said MSL project manager Pete Theisinger of JPL. Such work involves examining rocks and soil with the rover's Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer and its Mars Hand Lens Imager, which functions like a high-powered magnifying glass.
 
It will probably be one to two months before Curiosity drops the first soil samples into its internal analytical instruments, Theisinger added. And the rover likely won't be ready to start the drive toward Mount Sharp for two or three months, Grotzinger said.
 
"On Sunday night, at 10:32, OK, we will have a priceless, priceless asset that we have placed on the surface of another planet that could last a long time if we operate it correctly," Theisinger told reporters Thursday (Aug. 2). "And so we will be cautious as hell about what we do with it."
 
Curiosity's prime mission is slated to last one Martian year, or roughly two Earth years. But the rover's plutonium power source could keep it going for a decade or more, provided key parts don't break down.
 
Such longevity wouldn't be unprecedented for a NASA Mars rover. The twin robots Spirit and Opportunity, after all, were supposed to explore the Red Planet for three months when they touched down in January 2004. Spirit stopped communicating with Earth in March 2010, and Opportunity is still going strong.
 
"We are going to have the opportunity for untold discoveries," Doug McCuistion, head of NASA's Mars Exploration program, said before Curiosity's landing Sunday. "It's going to be exciting, with years of exploration coming."
 
Helping save NASA planetary science
 
NASA is expecting big things from Curiosity. The rover's discoveries should help lay the foundation for a concerted life-detection mission, which would likely involve sending samples of Martian soil and rock to Earth for study, agency officials have said.
 
Martian sample-return would likely cost several billion dollars, however, putting it out of NASA's reach for the foreseeable future. The space agency temporarily shelved all plans for such ambitious, expensive "flagship" planetary missions after the White House released its 2013 federal budget request in February.
 
This request cut NASA's planetary science efforts by 20 percent, from $1.5 billion this year to $1.2 billion next year, with further cuts expected in the coming years.
 
Much of this money will come out of the agency's Mars program, which sees its funding fall from $587 million this year to $360 million in 2013, and then to just $189 million in 2015.
 
But NASA thinks this budget outlook could improve if Curiosity performs as advertised. Curiosity's discoveries might generate enough enthusiasm among the public and politicians to restore some of the lost funding, officials have said.
 
"I think the way to recover the program is to have a much broader community understand the value, and we have a huge opportunity with MSL landing - where there'll be a lot of visibility, some real discoveries, some really interesting discoveries - to talk about the exciting work that leverages the science," John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science, said in March.
 
Curiosity launched from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Nov. 26, 2011. The mission was originally slated to blast off in 2009, but technical setbacks pushed things back two years to the next available Mars launch window.
 
NASA has plenty to celebrate after Mars rover Curiosity's perfect landing
 
Rebecca Boyle - Popular Science
 
Long minutes of thunderous applause greeted the managers and engineers who paraded into an auditorium here Sunday night, triumphant after a perfect landing on another world. The Mars rover Curiosity sent a picture from the Martian surface just moments after its self-piloted descent and airdrop, and everyone assembled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory could not help but cheer. It's a huge moment for NASA, which delivered the rover over budget and two years late -- but delivered it, and beautifully.
 
Nothing is harder than landing on Mars, and no one does it better than the United States, said Charles Bolden, NASA's administrator. In a few moments of proud flag-waving, Bolden, White House science adviser John Holdren and others trumpeted the space agency's momentous achievement.
 
"Tonight, there are at least 4 countries, and I won't name them, who are on Mars. And they're on Mars because they went with the United States," Bolden said. "Our leadership is going to make this world better."
 
The landing comes at a transition time for NASA and space exploration generally -- the agency retired its storied space shuttles a year ago, and its Mars program has been in question amid ongoing federal budget debates. A successful landing carries much more than the promise of groundbreaking science -- it's a moment fraught with enormous pressure, weighing on the agency's prestige, and this was evident in all the speeches and words of congratulations Sunday night.
 
"It will stand as an American point of pride far into the future," Holdren said of Curiosity.
 
Obama himself said via Twitter that the U.S. had made history once again. "I congratulate and thank all the men and women of NASA who made this remarkable accomplishment a reality," the tweet said.
 
So many people followed the landing on Twitter and through NASA channels that the space agency's websites briefly crashed in the moments after the landing. Members of the public (and media) who were hoping to access Curiosity's first images via a special NASA site were instead greeted with error messages. It was a frustrating glitch, but it was also strong evidence of the public's fascination with the robot geologist and all it represents.
 
Charles Elachi, JPL's director, said he hoped the landing would inspire new generations of engineers and spark their curiosity. It's what NASA is about.
 
"This movie cost you less than seven bucks per American citizen, and look at the excitement we have," he said, to further applause.
 
Later Monday, we'll have even more images, including a spectacular shot of Curiosity on the parachute, plummeting toward the surface. Stay tuned!
 
Curiosity Rover Lands Safely On Mars After Risky Descent
 
Elizabeth Lopatto - Bloomberg News
 
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Curiosity rover landed safely on Mars, after a 352 million-mile journey and harrowing plunge through the planet's atmosphere dubbed "7 Minutes of Terror."
 
The vehicle, loaded with the most-sophisticated instruments ever used off Earth, touched down at 1:32 a.m. New York time. Scientists developed the $2.5 billion mission to help determine whether Mars has an environment that can support life.
 
Curiosity landed at a site called Gale Crater, at the foot of a 3.4 mile (5.5 kilometer) high mountain. The crater spans 96 miles, an area about the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, according to NASA. Because of its low elevation, water on Mars would probably have pooled in the crater. Orbiting probes suggest there may be water-related clay and minerals. Curiosity is loaded with equipment to allow analysis of air, rock and soil samples.
 
"I'm thrilled," said Bobby Braun, a professor of space technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who was NASA's chief technologist in 2010-2011. "I'm ecstatic. I can barely talk because I've been screaming. We were tense here, but the mission went like clockwork."
 
Hundreds of spectators, many carrying cameras, gathered in sultry weather in New York's Times Square to witness the event, which was broadcast on a large electronic screen overhead. The crowd erupted into applause and chanted "NASA! NASA!" when Curiosity's safe landing was confirmed. An electronic sign below carried the message: "Congratulations Curiosity on your successful landing on Mars."
 
"I wanted to see the landing in an intensely social atmosphere," said Max Juren, 31, from Austin, Texas, wearing a tinfoil hat for the occasion. "I would rather see billions of dollars spent on exploration than a single cent on war. I am happy they succeeded. I was nervous."
 
The one-ton rover touched down after hanging by ropes from a rocket backpack. The descent was tracked by the Mars orbiter Odyssey, which was able to almost immediately relay to scientists on earth black-and-white fisheye images of the planet received by the Canberra, Australia, antenna station of NASA's Deep Space Network.
 
"It's a really big step outwards, and the only place we can look is out," said Jim O'Reilly, 20, from Redding, Connecticut, who joined the crowd at Times Square.
 
NASA dubbed the period from entry to touchdown the "7 Minutes of Terror" in a video describing the event. The spacecraft entered the atmosphere and decelerated quickly, deploying a parachute. It then separated into parts, one of which was a hover craft with rockets.
 
"Today, the wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. President Barack Obama laid out a vision for sending humans to Mars in the mid-2030s, "and today's landing marks a significant step toward achieving this goal," Bolden said.
 
The craft lowered Curiosity to the ground using a "sky crane," and then flew away. The new system replaced airbags used in previous missions to lessen ground impact because Curiosity was too heavy to use them.
 
A 14-minute communication lag exists between the vehicle and the control center 154 million miles away on Earth, where scientists monitored transmissions from the craft. By the time NASA got word the device had entered the atmosphere, Curiosity had already landed.
 
"Some people have been working on this for 10 years," said Braun, the space researcher, in a telephone interview from Mission Control in California. "This is an asset for the whole world, so we're going to be careful."
 
Curiosity returned its first view of Mars, a wide-angle scene of rocky ground near the front of the rover. More images are anticipated in the next several days as the mission blends observations of the landing site with activities to configure the rover for work and check the performance of its instruments and mechanisms, NASA said.
 
The rover is currently in a safe state, Braun said. It will be checked out and deployed over several days.
 
"The cameras have to be calibrated," he said. "This is an elaborate, complex machine."
 
Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, according to NASA. Some of the tools are the first of their kind on Mars, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking elemental composition of rocks from a distance.
 
The rover will use a drill and scoop at the end of its robotic arm to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into analytical laboratory instruments inside the rover, NASA said.
 
The Mars Science Laboratory, the formal name of the mission deploying the Curiosity rover, was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Nov. 26, 2011. After Curiosity, the only planned U.S. mission to Mars is an atmospheric orbiter meant to launch next year.
 
'Enormous step forward' As NASA lands rover on Mars
 
Romain Raynaldy - Agence France Presse
 
NASA successfully landed its $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory and Curiosity rover on the surface of the Red Planet, marking the most ambitious attempt to reach Mars in history.
 
"Touchdown confirmed," said a member of mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as the room erupted in cheers. "We are wheels down on Mars. Oh, my God."
 
A dusty image of the rover's wheel on the surface, taken from a rear camera on the vehicle, confirmed the arrival of the car-sized rover and its sophisticated toolkit designed to hunt for signs that life once existed there.
 
A second image arrived within seconds, showing the shadow of the rover on Mars.
 
When the landing was announced after a tense, seven-minute process known as entry, descent and landing, the room filled with jubilation as the mission team cheered, exchanged hugs and chief scientists handed out Mars chocolate bars.
 
President Barack Obama described the feat as a singular source of American pride.
 
"The successful landing of Curiosity -- the most sophisticated roving laboratory ever 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 in a statement.
 
"It proves that even the longest of odds are no match for our unique blend of ingenuity and determination."
 
Charles Bolden, the NASA administrator, echoed that sentiment and applauded all the nations who contributed to science experiments on board the rover.
 
"It is a huge day for the nation, it is a huge day for all of our partners who have something on Curiosity and it is a huge day for the American people," Bolden said.
 
Obama's science advisor John Holdren described the landing as "an enormous step forward in planetary exploration. Nobody has ever done anything like this. We are actually the only country that has landed surface landers on any other planet," he told NASA television.
 
"But this lander is vastly bigger, vastly more capable and much more complicated to bring in," he added. "It was an incredible performance."
 
However, success was anything but certain with this first-of-its-kind attempt to drop a six-wheeled chemistry lab by rocket-powered sky crane on an alien planet. NASA's more recent rover dropoffs were done with the help of airbags.
 
In the final moments, the spacecraft accelerated with the pull of gravity as it neared Mars' atmosphere, making a fiery entry at a speed of 13,200 miles (21,240 kilometers) per hour and then slowing down with the help of a supersonic parachute.
 
After that, an elaborate sky crane powered by rocket blasters kicked in, and the rover was lowered down by nylon tethers, apparently landing upright on all six wheels.
 
Scientists do not expect Curiosity to find aliens or living creatures. Rather they hope to use it to analyze soil and rocks for signs that the building blocks of life are present and may have supported life in the past.
 
The project also aims to study the Martian environment to prepare for a possible human mission there in the coming years.
 
It has already been collecting data on radiation during its eight and a half month journey following launch in November 2011 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
 
Earlier on Sunday, Mars program director Doug McCuistion called the science "absolutely crucial" to finding out if humans are alone, how Mars evolved from a wet to a dry planet and how accessible Mars may be for human explorers in the future.
 
"If we succeed, it will be one of the greatest feats in planetary exploration ever," he told reporters. "Our success rate has been pretty darn good recently."
 
Attempts by global space agencies since 1960 have resulted in a near 40 percent success rate in sending landers, orbiters or other spacecraft for flybys to Mars. NASA has the best record.
 
END