New Mars photos have been released after Curiosity safely landed on the Red Planet on Sunday after making an eight month journey that spanned over 352 million miles (566 million km).
An amazing photo by a spacecraft orbiting Mars has captured NASA's new rover Curiosity as it plunged toward the Martian surface under a giant parachute.
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a powerful spacecraft that has circled the Red Planet since 2006, captured the picture. The orbiter snapped photos of the Mars rover Curiosity as the robot dangled from a supersonic parachute six minutes into its "seven minutes of terror" landing late Sunday
"HiRISE has taken over 120 pictures of Gale as part of the landing site selection and characterization process, but I really think this is the coolest one," Sarah Milkovich, HiRISE investigation scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. told reporters in a briefing.
The landing marked a huge success and a major milestone for a U.S. space agency beset by budget cuts and the recent cancellation of its space shuttle program, NASA's centerpiece for 30 years.
The $2.5 billion Curiosity project, formally called the Mars Science Laboratory, is NASA's first astrobiology mission since the 1970s-era Viking probes.
(Watch live Mars rover landing coverage via NASA TV streaming video.)
"Tonight's success, delivered by NASA, parallels our major steps forward towards a vision for a new partnership with American companies to send American astronauts into space on American spacecraft," President Obama said in a statement.
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is a 1-ton robot designed to explore the Red Planet like never before. The rover carries an instrument-laden robotic arm and tool kit to seek out any evidence that Mars has ever been habitable for microbial life.
The $2.5 billion rover will spend two years exploring Gale crater and is expected to climb a 3-mile (5 km) mountain in the crater's center. NASA launched Curiosity rover, which is also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, in November 2011. The mission is overseen by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
