NASA's Curiosity, packed with sophisticated instruments, touched down on Mars on a quest for signs of whether the planet has evidence of past and present habitable environments. 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. The craft's descent through Mars' thin atmosphere, a feat called the most elaborate and risky achievement in the annals of robotic spaceflight, turned out to be short-lived cliffhanger, much to NASA's relief. Here are a few things to know about Curiosity:
The purpose of the $2.5 billion mission is to look for evidence that Mars - the planet most similar to Earth - may have once harbored the basic building blocks necessary for microbial life to evolve. It represents NASA's first astrobiology mission since the 1970s-era Viking probes.
It has been equipped with 10 scientific instruments, including two for ingesting and analysing samples of powdered rock delivered by the rover's robotic arm.
The robotic lab sailed through space for more than eight months, covering 352 million miles (566 million km), before piercing Mars' atmosphere at 13,000 miles(20,921 km) per hour -- 17 times the speed of sound -- before starting its descent.
The $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory, the formal name of the mission deploying the Curiosity rover, was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida, Nov 26, 2011.
Curiosity will spend two years exploring Gale Crater and an unusual three-mile (5 km)-high mountain consisting of what appears to be sediments rising from the crater's floor.
The craft's descent through Mars' thin atmosphere, a feat called the most elaborate and risky achievement in the annals of robotic spaceflight, turned out to be short-lived cliffhanger, much to NASA's relief.
Curiosity, encased in a protective capsule-like shell, utilized a first-of-its kind automated flight entry system to sharply reduce its speed before landing. 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, located near the planet's equator in its southern hemisphere.
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 (7 meters) away to create a spark whose spectral image is analyzed by a special telescope to discern the mineral's chemical composition.
Weighing in at about a ton, Curiosity is too big for the landing bags and thruster rockets that were designed to let previous probes to Mars touch down gently down on its surface. Instead, engineers designed a complicated landing system that navigates through the thin but unpredictable atmosphere, deploys a massive parachute at supersonic speeds and fires up a rocket-powered descent platform. The platform holds an aerial crane to lower the rover on a tether to the surface of Gale Crater and fly away.
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 program. he last time NASA sent a rover to Mars, it sent two - Spirit and Opportunity, which were dispatched to opposite sides of the planet to hunt for signs of past water. Both outlived their three-month design lives by years. Spirit succumbed to the harsh environment in 2010. Opportunity continues to operate.
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