NASA's Mars science rover Curiosity landed safely late on Sunday on Red Planet after rover
had survived its perilous descent for travelling for more than eight months, covering 352 million miles (566 million km), before piercing Mars' atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hour -- 17 times the speed of sound -- before starting its descent.
Three picture just moments after landing and entire control room was a burst of applause.
Allen Chen, the deputy lead of the rover's entry, descent and landing team at the Jet Propulsion was : "I can't believe this. This is unbelievable.”
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.
NASA put the official landing time of Curiosity, the first full-fledged mobile science laboratory sent to a distant world, at 10:32 p.m. Curiosity, the $2.5 billion mission, will look for evidence that the planet most similar to Earth might have some sign of life.
John Holdren, the top science advisor to President Barack Obama was all praise when he said: "It's an enormous step forward in planetary exploration. Nobody has ever done anything like this. It was an incredible performance."
The mission will roll into action after NASA puts it through several weeks of engineering checks. The rover, launched on November 26 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, 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 away to create a spark whose spectral image is analyzed by a special telescope to discern the mineral's chemical composition.
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