(7 Aug 2012) STORYLINE
NASA's Curiosity rover has transmitted its first colour photo and a low-resolution video showing the last two-and-a-half minutes of its dramatic dive through the Martian atmosphere, giving a sneak peek of a spacecraft landing on another world.
The picture released on Tuesday was shot from the crater where Curiosity landed and showed a pebbly landscape and the rim of Gale Crater off in the distance.
Curiosity snapped the photo on its first day on the surface after touching down on Sunday night.
The rover took the shot with a camera at the end of its robotic arm.
The landscape looked fuzzy because the camera's removable cover was coated with dust that kicked up during the descent.
"Curiosity is still healthy, still in what we call surface nominal mode, and still in great shape," said mission manager Mike Watkins of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Slowly but surely, NASA scientists and engineers are booting up Curiosity's various instruments, scanners, antennae and cameras.
After Curiosity "wakes up", engineers will tweak the position of a large antenna that will allow direct communication between the rover and earth.
The team will also deploy Curiosity's remote sensing mast, which holds two instruments for studying surroundings as well as navigation cameras.
NASA celebrated the precision landing of a rover on Mars and marvelled over the mission's flurry of photographs - grainy, black-and-white images of Martian gravel, a mountain at sunset and, most exciting of all, the spacecraft's plunge through the red planet's atmosphere.
Curiosity is the heaviest piece of machinery NASA has landed on Mars, and the success gave the space agency confidence that it can unload equipment that astronauts may need in a future manned trip to the red planet.
The roving laboratory, the size of a compact car, landed right on target after an eight-month, 352-million-mile (566-million-kilometre) journey.
It parked its six wheels about four miles (6 kilometres) from its ultimate science destination - Mount Sharp, rising from the floor of Gale Crater near the equator.
The nuclear-powered Curiosity will dig into the Martian surface to analyse what's there and hunt for some of the molecular building blocks of life, including carbon.
It won't start moving for a couple of weeks, because all the systems on the 2.5 (b) billion US Dollars rover have to be checked out.
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