Mars Rover, Curiosity Rover | featured news

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.

NASA's Curiosity rover has just sent back its first panoramic, color image of Mars' Gale Crater. It’s been on the surface of Mars for less than a week, but already the Curiosity rover is hard at work exploring the surface of Mars. The first part of that exploration, of course, is taking photos to send back to Earth so that the Mars rover team can study the surface. That may not sound like much, but consider this – the camera itself has spent nearly nine months in the cold and vacuum of space. By contrast, most of us get worried about getting our cameras wet even if it’s only sprinkling a little.

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."

Only 20 people have qualified for the mentally grueling job of driving the fully loaded Curiosity while living essentially sequestered on Mars time. The San Gabriel Mountains rise over a rough patch of sun-baked volcanic boulders, dusty flagstones and earthen slopes.

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.

Obama said the successful landing of Curiosity -- "the most sophisticated roving laboratory ever to land on another planet" -- is "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," Obama said.

After an 8 1/2-month voyage through space, NASA's souped-up Mars spacecraft zoomed toward the red planet for what the agency hopes will be an epic touchdown. The fiery punch through the tenuous Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph Sunday night marks the beginning of "seven minutes of terror" as the Curiosity rover aims for a bull's-eye landing inside a massive crater near the equator.