Joy at safe Mars landing

AP

Staff celebrate a successful landing inside the Spaceflight Operations Facility for Nasas Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Nasa’s Mars science rover Curiosity landed safely on Monday SA time after hurtling through the pink Martian skies at the start of a two-year quest for signs the Red Planet once hosted key ingredients for life.

A chorus of cheers and applause echoed through the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory after the most high-tech interplanetary rover ever built signalled it had survived a harrowing plunge through the thin Mars atmosphere.

“Touchdown confirmed. I can’t believe this. This is unbelievable,” enthused Allen Chen, the deputy lead of the rover’s entry, descent and landing team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles. “We’re safe on Mars.”

Curiosity, which is the size of a small car and weighs nearly a ton, sailed through space for more than eight months, covering 566 million kilometres, before piercing Mars’s atmosphere at 20 921km/h (17 times the speed of sound) before starting its descent. Cables delicately lowered the rover to the ground at a snail-paced 3km/h. At touchdown, the cords cut and the rocket stage crashed a distance away.

Moments after landing, 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.

Curiosity, encased in a protective capsule-like shell, used a first-of-its-kind automated flight entry system, similar to systems used in the dpace shuttles, to sharply reduce its speed before landing.

Jasper Goldberg, left, and Andreas Bastian watch a live broadcast of the Nasa Mission Control centre as the planetary rover "Curiosity" lands on Mars, in Time Square, in New York.

REUTERS

Then it rode a giant supersonic parachute, a jet-powered backpack and a never-before-used “sky crane” to touch down inside a vast impact basin called Gale Crater, near the planet’s equator in its southern hemisphere.

“It’s an enormous step forward in planetary exploration. Nobody has ever done anything like this,” said John Holdren, the top science adviser to President Barack Obama, and who was at the centre for the landing.

“It was an incredible performance.”

The exact condition of the rover upon arrival was not immediately clear. Nasa plans to put the rover and its laboratory gear through several weeks of engineering checks before starting its two-year surface mission in earnest.

The rover, launched on November 26 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, comes equipped with an array of sophisticated instruments capable of analysing 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 7m away to create a spark whose spectral image is analysed by a special telescope to discern the mineral’s chemical composition.

Curiosity will drive over to an unusual 5km-high mountain consisting of what appears to be sediments rising from the crater’s floor. It will poke into rocks and scoop up rust-tinted soil to see if the region ever had the right environment for microscopic organisms to thrive.

The purpose of the $2.5 billion mission is to look for evidence that Mars, the planet most similar to Earth, may have once harboured the basic building blocks necessary for microbial life to evolve.

It represents Nasa’s first astrobiology mission since the 1970s-era Viking probes. The last Mars rovers, twins Spirit and Opportunity, were cocooned in air bags and bounced to a stop in 2004.

The landing marks a major milestone for a US space agency beset by budget cuts and the recent loss of its 30-year-old space shuttle programme.

The nuclear-powered Curiosity is packed with scientific tools, cameras and a weather station. 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 colour pictures. – Reuters,

Sapa-AP