New Delhi: NASA's first nuclear-powered rover Curiosity landed on Mars at 11 am (Indian time). Ahead of the landing, NASA said, "The Mars Odyssey orbiter is now in a position to listen and transmit back to Earth from Mars Curiosity during entry and descent."
The Mars rover Curiosity is the most sophisticated mobile science lab ever sent to another world.
Mission control engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles acknowledge that delivering the one-ton, six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover in one piece was a highly risky proposition under the best of circumstances.
But JPL's team said the spacecraft and its systems were all healthy and performing flawlessly.
NASA, facing deep cuts in its science budget and struggling to regain its footing after cancellation of the space shuttle programme, the agency's centerpiece for 30 years, has a lot riding on its successful landing.
Mars is the chief component of NASA's long-term deep space exploration plans. Curiosity is designed primarily to search for evidence that the planet most similar to Earth may have once harboured ingredients necessary for microbial life to evolve.
It took $2.6 billion to build Curiosity. At one ton, it's the heaviest man-made object to land on another planet. With five kilos of Plutonium dioxide on board, it's also the first nuclear powered one. Also aboard is eighteen times more equipment than any Mars rover ever built, an entire science laboratory.
Curiosity isn't searching for Martian life. But it is looking for left over traces. Curiosity will land in an area that might once have had running water. With lasers, cameras, brushes and sieves, it will search soil billions of years old, for traces of sulphur compounds, clay and most importantly, carbon, a basic building block of life.
(With additional inputs from agencies)
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