Technology, Mars | featured news

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has relayed new images that confirm it has successfully obtained the first sample ever collected from the interior of a rock on another planet. No rover has ever drilled into a rock beyond Earth and collected a sample from its interior.

This nearly global mosaic of observations made by the Mars Color Imager on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 18, 2012, shows a dust storm in Mars' southern hemisphere.

NASA's Curiosity rover reached out and touched a Martian rock with its huge robotic arm for the first time, then took off on its longest Red Planet drive to date. Curiosity spent the past several days investigating a strange pyramid-shaped stone named "Jake Matijevic," testing out some of the gear at the end of its 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) arm. These tools include the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer, or APXS, which measures elemental composition; and the Mars Hand Lens Imager close-up camera, or MAHLI.

Getting a six-wheeled car-size rover safely onto the surface of the red planet? Daunting, sure. But NASA did it with Curiosity. Sending humans on a mission to Mars? That requires overcoming even more outlandish obstacles.

NASA's Curiosity rover has beamed back its first color photo from the ancient crater where it landed on Mars and a video showing the last 2 1/2 minutes of its white-knuckle dive through the Martian atmosphere, a sneak peek of a spacecraft landing on another world.

Nasa has provided almost 300 thumbnails from a sequence of pictures that will eventually be run together as a colour hi-def movie. Visible in the timelapse is the heatshield discarded by the vehicle as it neared the ground. So too is the dust kicked up by the rover's rocket-powered crane. It was the crane that finally settled the robot on to the surface.

Obama said the successful landing of Curiosity -- "the most sophisticated roving laboratory ever to land on another planet" -- is "an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future." "It proves that even the longest of odds are no match for our unique blend of ingenuity and determination," Obama said.

Firing on all engines, NASA's latest rover to Mars executed a course adjustment Wednesday that put it on track for a landing in August.

Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: The end of a 520-day simulated space mission marks one more step in a succession of make-believe trips to Mars, leading up to the real thing.