PASADENA, Calif. NASA celebrated the precision landing of a rover on Mars and marveled over the mission's first photographs Monday grainy, black-and-white images of Martian gravel, a mountain at sunset and, most exciting of all, the spacecraft's white-knuckle plunge through the red planet's atmosphere. <\/p>\n
Curiosity, a roving laboratory the size of a compact car, landed right on target late Sunday night after an eight-month, 352-million-mile journey. <\/p>\n
Cheers and applause echoed through NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and engineers hugged, high-fived and thrust their fists in the air after signals from space indicated the vehicle had survived the harrowing descent through Mars' pinkish atmosphere. <\/p>\n
JPL Director Charles Elachi likened the team to Olympic athletes: \"This team came back with the gold.\" <\/p>\n
\"Everybody in the morning should be sticking their chests out and saying, 'That's my rover on Mars,'\" NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said on NASA TV. <\/p>\n
Extraordinary efforts were needed for the landing because the rover weighs one ton, and the thin Martian atmosphere offers little friction to slow a spacecraft down. Curiosity had to go from 13,000 mph to zero in seven minutes, unfurling a parachute, then firing rockets to brake. In a Hollywood-style finish, cables delicately lowered it to the ground at 2 mph. <\/p>\n
At the end of what NASA called \"seven minutes of terror,\" the vehicle settled into place almost perfectly flat in the crater it was aiming for. <\/p>\n
\"We have ended one phase of the mission much to our enjoyment,\" mission manager Mike Watkins said. \"But another part has just begun.\" <\/p>\n
The nuclear-powered Curiosity will dig into the Martian surface to analyze what's there and hunt for some of the molecular building blocks of life, including carbon. <\/p>\n
It won't start moving for a couple of weeks, because all the systems on the $2.5 billion rover have to be checked out. Color photos, panoramas and video will start coming in the next few days. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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NASA cheers new photos from Mars<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" PASADENA, Calif. Continue reading