CALIFORNIA, Aug 6:The Mars rover Curiosity has made a successful landing on the red planet.

And engineers stretching from NASA’s Californian control room to Kiwi scientists at the Carter Observatory in Wellington are celebrating.

Dr Claire Bretherton from Carter Observatory says that, “this is the most technologically advanced, largest most superior robot that we’ve ever sent to the surface of another planet.”

“This is a stepping stone to go further out into the solar system,” she said.

Curiosity, the first full-fledged mobile science laboratory sent to a distant world, touched down inside the vast, ancient impact crater.

Hours before Curiosity’s rendezvous with Mars, mission control engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles said the spacecraft and its systems were functioning flawlessly, and forecasts called for favourable Martian weather over the landing zone.

After a journey from Earth of more than 567 million km, engineers said they were hopeful the rover, the size of a small sports car, will land precisely as planned near the foot of a tall mountain rising from the floor of Gale Crater in Mars’ southern hemisphere.
“We’re rationally confident, emotionally terrified,” Adam Seltzner, leader of Curiosity’s descent and landing team, told reporters at a JPL briefing yesterday, as the spacecraft hurtled to within 161,000 km of its destination – less than half the distance between Earth and the moon.

The vessel was sailing through space at about 13,000 km per hour and steadily gaining speed from the tug of Martian gravity.

Flight controllers anticipated clear and calm conditions for touchdown, slated to occur in the Martian late afternoon.

There may be some haze in the planet’s pink skies from ice clouds, typical for this time of year, with temperatures at about minus 12 degrees Celsius.

Facing deep cuts in its science budget and struggling to regain its footing after cancellation of the space shuttle program – NASA’s centerpiece for 30 years – the agency has much at stake in the outcome of the $2.5 billion mission.

President Barack Obama’s top science adviser, John Holdren, was among the dignitaries visiting JPL yesterday for the landing, along with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

“It’s critically important for the nation because it allows us to stay on pace for what the president asked us to, getting humans to Mars in the mid-2030s,” Bolden said.

He added that success also was key to NASA’s international partners in 12 countries in maintaining public and government support abroad for their continued funding.

Mars is the chief component of NASA’s long-term deep space exploration plans. Curiosity, the space agency’s first astrobiology mission since the 1970s-era Viking probes, is designed primarily to search for evidence that the planet most similar to Earth may once have harbored the necessary building blocks for microbial life to evolve.