Houston, August 6 
In a moment of triumph for outer space exploration, NASA’s most modern spacecraft successfully landed on Mars today to begin a pioneering two-year search to find out if the red planet once hosted conditions suitable for life and whether it can be inhabitable in the future.

The $2.5 billion robotic ‘Curiosity’ made a spectacular landing near the foot of a mountain 4.8 km tall and 154 km in diameter inside Gale Crater, said NASA.

“Touchdown confirmed,” the triumphant NASA engineer Allen Chen claimed in the control room as America’s most high-tech interplanetary rover survived a harrowing plunge through the Mars’ thin atmosphere to touch down on the red planet at 5.30 GMT.

Just minutes after the signal arrived that the landing had gone off successfully, Curiosity beamed back its first black-and-white thumbnail image of Mars. Soon after, a bigger image - 256 by 256 pixels large - showed up onscreen at the laboratory.

The spacecraft is the largest and most advanced ever sent to another planet. The car-size, one-tonne rover’s descent- stage retrorockets fired, guiding it in a “sky crane” manoeuvre to the surface of the Mars.

Applause erupted across the campus of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge and engineers inside mission control could be seen hugging and weeping with joy as it received the first photos from its Curiosity rover.

“Curiosity, the most sophisticated rover ever built, is now on the surface of the Red Planet, where it will seek to answer age-old questions about whether life ever existed on Mars, or if the planet can sustain life in the future,” said an ecstatic NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

“Today, the wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars,” he said. Curiosity is expected to revolutionise the understanding of Mars, gathering evidence that Mars is or was capable of fostering life, probably in microbial form.

The spacecraft is also expected to pave the way for important leaps in deep-space exploration, including bringing Martian rock or soil back to Earth for detailed analysis and, eventually, human exploration.

Curiosity carries 10 science instruments, some of them the first of their kinds on Mars, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking elemental composition of rocks from a distance, NASA said in a statement.

The rover will use a drill and scoop at the end of its robotic arm to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into analytical laboratory instruments inside the rover.

“Tonight, on the planet Mars, the United States of America made history,” said President Barack Obama in his message to NASA soon after the landing.

Scientists have found signs of water on the red planet, though it is now a dry place with a thin atmosphere, extreme winters and dust storms.

Curiosity is not equipped to search for living or fossil micro-organisms but it will look for basic ingredients essential for life, including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, sulphur and oxygen.— PTI