Washington, November 27 (ANI): ESA's Mars orbiter has for the first time relayed scientific data, including detailed images of 'Rocknest3', from NASA's Curiosity rover on the Red Planet's surface.

The data were received by ESA's deep-space antenna in Australia.

Early on the morning of 6 October, ESA's Mars Express looked down as it orbited the planet, lining up its lander communication antenna to point at Curiosity far below on the surface.

For 15 minutes, the NASA rover transmitted scientific data up to the ESA satellite. A few hours later, Mars Express slewed to point its high-gain antenna toward Earth and began downlinking the precious information to the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, via the Agency's 35 m-diameter antenna in New Norcia, Australia.

The data were immediately made available to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California for processing and analysis, proving again that NASA's amazing new rover can talk with Europe's veteran Mars orbiter.

The information included a pair of tremendously interesting images acquired on 4 October by Curiosity's ChemCam Remote Micro-Imager camera.

"The quality of these images from ChemCam is outstanding, and the mosaic image of the spectrometer analyses has been essential for scientific interpretation of the data," said Sylvestre Maurice, Deputy Principal Investigator for ChemCam at France's Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP).

"This combination of imaging and analysis has demonstrated its potential for future missions," he noted.

A third image, relayed separately by NASA, indicates the locations of the laser target points on Rocknest3, as seen by the RMI camera.

'Rocknest' is the area where Curiosity stopped for a month to perform its first mobile laboratory analyses on soil scooped from a small sand dune. Rocknest3 was a convenient nearby target where ChemCam made more than 30 observations using 1500 laser shots.

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ESA's Mars Express relays images of 'Rocknest3' from Curiosity rover