Science, Mars | featured news

NASA's Curiosity rover on Wednesday left its first tracks on Mars, successfully completing a short test drive that showed it was ready to roll on longer treks for science investigations over the next two years.

NASA's Curiosity rover has zapped its first Martian rock, aiming its laser for the sake of science. During the target practice on Sunday, Curiosity fired 30 pulses at a nearby rock over a 10-second window, burning a small hole.

Curiosity phoned home throughout its daring and unprecedented landing sequence that night, giving its nervous handlers step-by-step status and health updates. The European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter recorded some of this chatter, and now we can hear what Curiosity had to say.

This week's arrival of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity set the stage for a potentially game-changing quest to learn whether the planet most like Earth ever had a shot at developing life, but follow-up missions exist only on drawing boards.

The first pictures from the best cameras on NASA's Curiosity rover document a Martian landscape so Earthlike it reminds scientists of home. "The first impression that you get is how Earthlike this seems, looking at that landscape," said Caltech's John Grotzinger, chief scientist for the $2.5 billion mission. "You would really be forgiven for thinking that NASA was trying to pull a fast one on you, and we actually put a rover out in the Mojave Desert and took a picture."

NASA's Curiosity rover has beamed back its first color photo from the ancient crater where it landed on Mars and a video showing the last 2 1/2 minutes of its white-knuckle dive through the Martian atmosphere, a sneak peek of a spacecraft landing on another world.

Nasa has provided almost 300 thumbnails from a sequence of pictures that will eventually be run together as a colour hi-def movie. Visible in the timelapse is the heatshield discarded by the vehicle as it neared the ground. So too is the dust kicked up by the rover's rocket-powered crane. It was the crane that finally settled the robot on to the surface.

The most high-tech rover NASA has ever designed landed safely on Mars early Monday, after a 352-million-mile journey and a harrowing plunge through the planet's atmosphere dubbed “7 Minutes of Terror.” Beforehand, with Curiosity on autopilot, engineers became spectators, anxiously waiting to see if Curiosity executed the routine as planned. "I'm not the nervous type, but I haven't been sleeping all that well the last week or so even though I'm still very confident," said engineer Steven Lee.