PASADENA, Calif.
(AP) -- In a show of technological wizardry, the robotic explorer
Curiosity blazed through the pink skies of Mars, steering itself to a
gentle landing inside a giant crater for the most ambitious dig yet into
the red planet's past.
Cheers and applause
echoed through the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory late Sunday after the
most high-tech interplanetary rover ever built signaled it had survived a
harrowing plunge through the thin Mars atmosphere.
"Touchdown confirmed," said engineer Allen Chen. "We're safe on Mars."
Minutes
after the landing signal reached Earth at 10:32 p.m. PDT, Curiosity
beamed back the first black-and-white pictures from inside the crater
showing its wheel and its shadow, cast by the afternoon sun.
"We
landed in a nice flat spot. Beautiful, really beautiful," said engineer
Adam Steltzner, who led the team that devised the tricky landing
routine.
It was NASA's seventh landing on
Earth's neighbor; many other attempts by the U.S. and other countries to
zip past, circle or set down on Mars have gone awry.
The
arrival was an engineering tour de force, debuting never-before-tried
acrobatics packed into "seven minutes of terror" as Curiosity sliced
through the Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph.
In
a Hollywood-style finish, cables delicately lowered the rover to the
ground at a snail-paced 2 mph. A video camera was set to capture the
most dramatic moments - which would give Earthlings their first glimpse
of a touchdown on another world.
Celebrations
by the mission team were so joyous over the next hour that JPL Director
Charles Elachi had to plead for calm in order to hold a post-landing
press conference. He compared the team to athletic teams that
participate in the Olympics.
"This team came back with the gold," he said.
The
extraterrestrial feat injected a much-needed boost to NASA, which is
debating whether it can afford another robotic Mars landing this decade.
At a budget-busting $2.5 billion, Curiosity is the priciest gamble yet,
which scientists hope will pay off with a bonanza of discoveries and
pave the way for astronaut landings.
"The wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars," said NASA chief Charles Bolden.
President
Barack Obama lauded the landing in a statement, calling it "an
unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national
pride far into the future."
Over the next two
years, Curiosity 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's the latest chapter in the long-running quest to find out
whether primitive life arose early in the planet's history.
The
voyage to Mars took more than eight months and spanned 352 million
miles. The trickiest part of the journey? The landing. Because Curiosity
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 in 2004.
Curiosity
relied on a series of braking tricks, similar to those used by the
space shuttle, a heat shield and a supersonic parachute to slow down as
it punched through the atmosphere.
And in a
new twist, engineers came up with a way to lower the rover by cable from
a hovering rocket-powered backpack. At touchdown, the cords cut and the
rocket stage crashed a distance away.
The
nuclear-powered Curiosity, the size of a small car, is packed with
scientific tools, cameras and a weather station. It sports a robotic arm
with a power drill, a laser that can zap distant rocks, a chemistry lab
to sniff for the chemical building blocks of life and a detector to
measure dangerous radiation on the surface.
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 is expected to send back the first
color pictures. After several weeks of health checkups, the six-wheel
rover could take its first short drive and flex its robotic arm.
The
landing site near Mars' equator was picked because there are signs of
past water everywhere, meeting one of the requirements for life as we
know it. Inside Gale Crater is a 3-mile-high mountain, and images from
space show the base appears rich in minerals that formed in the presence
of water.
Previous trips to Mars have
uncovered ice near the Martian north pole and evidence that water once
flowed when the planet was wetter and toastier unlike today's harsh,
frigid desert environment.
Curiosity's goal:
to scour for basic ingredients essential for life including carbon,
nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur and oxygen. It's not equipped to search
for living or fossil microorganisms. To get a definitive answer, a
future mission needs to fly Martian rocks and soil back to Earth to be
examined by powerful laboratories.
The mission
comes as NASA retools its Mars exploration strategy. Faced with tough
economic times, the space agency pulled out of partnership with the
European Space Agency to land a rock-collecting rover in 2018. The
Europeans have since teamed with the Russians as NASA decides on a new
roadmap.
Despite Mars' reputation as a
spacecraft graveyard, humans continue their love affair with the planet,
lobbing spacecraft in search of clues about its early history. Out of
more than three dozen attempts - flybys, orbiters and landings - by the
U.S., Soviet Union, Europe and Japan since the 1960s, more than half
have ended disastrously.
One NASA rover that
defied expectations is Opportunity, which is still busy wheeling around
the rim of a crater in the Martian southern hemisphere eight years
later.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
