Pasadena, California, U.S.A. — Remarkable image sets from NASA’s Curiosity rover and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) are continuing to develop the story of Curiosity’s landing and first days on Mars.

The images from Curiosity’s just-activated navigation cameras, or Navcams, include the rover’s first self-portrait, looking down at its deck from above. Another Navcam image set, in lower-resolution thumbnails, is the first 360-degree view of Curiosity’s new home in Gale Crater. Also downlinked were two, higher-resolution Navcams providing the most detailed depiction to date of the surface adjacent to the rover.

“These Navcam images indicate that our powered descent stage did more than give us a great ride, it gave our science team an amazing freebie,” said John Grotzinger, project scientist for the mission from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “The thrust from the rockets actually dug a one-and-a-half-foot-long [0.5 meter] trench in the surface. It appears we can see Martian bedrock on the bottom. Its depth below the surface is valuable data we can use going forward.”

Another image set, courtesy of the Context Camera, or CTX, aboard NASA’s MRO has pinpointed the final resting spots of the six, 55-pound (25-kilogram) entry ballast masses. The tungsten masses impacted the Martian surface at a high speed of about 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) from Curiosity’s landing location.

Curiosity’s latest images are available at: http://1.usa.gov/MfiyD0

Wednesday, the team deployed the 3.6 foot-tall (1.1-meter) camera mast, activated and gathered surface radiation data from the rover’s Radiation Assessment Detector and concluded testing of the rover’s high-gain antenna.

Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads on NASA’s Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the tools, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking rocks’ elemental composition from a distance, are the first of their kind on Mars. Curiosity will use a drill and scoop, which are located at the end of its robotic arm, to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into the rover’s analytical laboratory instruments.

To handle this science toolkit, Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity. The Gale Crater landing site places the rover within driving distance of layers of the crater’s interior mountain. Observations from orbit have identified clay and sulfate minerals in the lower layers, indicating a wet history.

MRO’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera is operated by the University of Arizona in Tucson. The instrument was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo.The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Exploration Rover projects are managed by JPL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the orbiter.

For more about NASA’s Curiosity mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mars and follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity.

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NASA’s newest and most developed land rover, Curiosity, successfully touched down on Mars earlier today. The first image, sent seven minutes after touchdown, featured some dust and the Mars floor.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This was quickly followed by a second picture its own shadow. These are the first of many photographs and samples expected from the new rover. The mission, the latest in the line from the Mars Science Laboratory (which created Sojourner in 1997, Spirit in 2004, and Opportunity in 2004), is expected to last about two years.

The landing in itself was a small miracle, involving a supersonic parachute, a shedded heat shield, and a rocket-powered “sky crane,” but was ultimately flawless. The entire SUV-sized land rover, including all of its equipment, will be checked over by the lab scientists before beginning its journey.

The cost of the project was about $2.5 billion, $900 million over the original estimate. The project also ran 2 years late, after 14 years of planning. NASA is not truly worried about the cost. John Grotzinger, one of the project scientists, said “This whole enterprise comes out to be the cost of a movie. And that’s a movie I want to see.”

Curiosity was launched in November of last year, equipped with the technology to analyze rocks and soil samples, and take pictures, in the hope of confirming or denying whether Mars could support life forms at some point. The intention is to find the organic molecules that are necessary to create life, such as carbon that could contain fossilized life forms.

The rover will also check the air for signs of current existing life, like methane gas. The first stop for Curiosity is Gale Crater, which was once possibly a lake, and eventually, about a year from now, Mount Sharp in the center of the crater. The layers of rock in the mountain will give a lot of information about the planet’s history.

But scientists insist even this cannot determine if life existed on Mars, only that it is possible.

NASA is extremely proud of their success after previous failures, and are anxious to see what Curiosity will report. NASA administrator Charles Bolden said, “It’s just absolutely incredible, and it’s a huge day for the American people. Everybody in the morning should be sticking their chest out and saying, ‘That’s my rover on Mars,’ because it belongs to everyone.”

“The successful landing of Curiosity — the most sophisticated roving laboratory ever to land on another planet — marks an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future,” President Barack Obama commented.

US citizens eagerly await more information on Curiosity’s journey, marking the day that the exploration into our solar system was brought to a whole new level.

Image Courtesy of  Songquan Deng / Shutterstock.com

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