NASA’s rover Curiosity successfully carried out a highly challenging landing on Mars, transmitting images back to Earth after traveling hundreds of millions of miles through space in order to explore the Red Planet.

It will now embark on a mission of at least 2 years to look for evidence that Mars may once have supported life. A signal confirming the rover was on the ground safely was relayed to Earth via Nasa’s Odyssey satellite, which is in orbit around the Mars. The success was greeted with a roar of approval here at mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Precisely on time and target, NASA’s Curiosity rover touched down safely on Mars to begin an ambitious two-year trek through a mountainous crater that promises to reveal whether the Red Planet was ever hospitable to life.

One exuberant flight engineer from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said : ‘ There is the wheel of the rover safely on the surface of Mars. This is amazing. ‘

NASA big success / Curiosity rover has landed on the Mars, video

Over the next 2 years, NASA Curiosity rover 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 is the latest chapter in the long-running quest to find out whether primitive life arose early in the Mars planet’s history.

The journey to Mars took more than 8 months and spanned 352 million miles. The hardest part of the journey was the landing. Curiosity rover 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 eight years ago.

The mission control in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California burst into cheers as the Curiosity rover touched down. Team members hugged and high-fived one another as NASA Curiosity rover beamed back the first pictures from the planet.

Successfull landing of NASA’s Curiosity rover 2012 / video

Charles Bolden, the Nasa administrator, has told reporters in a press conference after the safe Curiosity rover landing was confirmed : ‘ It’s absolutely incredible. It doesn’t get any better than this. We were sitting there saying, we know we’re on the ground, we just don’t know what shape we’re in. To hear everything was OK was great. ‘

The first pictures, taken from a low-resolution camera aboard the Curiosity rover, suggested the vehicle had touched down away from large rocks. In one, one of the rover’s wheels was visible. In another, the Curiosity rover cast a shadow over the floor of the Gale crater. The images prompted whoops of delight from blue-shirted mission scientists who could barely believe the rover landing was so clean.

Landing the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity on the Mars was by any measure the most challenging mission ever attempted in the history of planetary exploration.

Mars Curiosity Rover : NASA’s rover Curiosity has landed on the Red Planet, video :

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