Rover Opportunity Lands Safely On Mars

And the pictures are stunning. NASA's second rover to land on Mars this month made it safely to the surface, amid the distant cheers of ground crew members at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (CA). It was, to coin a phrase, a "nominal" landing and a feather in the space agency's cap.

"I am flabbergasted. I am astonished. I am blown away. Opportunity has touched down in an alien and bizarre landscape," Steven Squyres, the mission's main scientist, said early Sunday. "I still don't know what we're looking at."

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was on hand at JPL as engineers, controllers and scientists whooped it up like a bunch of fourth graders at a fire drill.

"The pictures just blow me away. We've certainly not been to this place before," deputy project manager Richard Cook said. 
 
Opportunity landed at 12:05 am EST in Meridiani Planum, perhaps the smoothest, flattest part of the Red Planet. It's about halfway around Mars from where the troubled Spirit rover now sits. Unlike Spirit, there appears to be no obstructions in the way of the rover's exit ramp leading to the surface from its landing vehicle.

"It's smooth sailing to the horizon," Squyres said.

Spirit, on the other hand, is still not fully communicating with its Earthbound controllers. But after the probe sent an unexpected packet of information to the Mars Odyssey orbiter Friday, the prospects for repair seemed much brighter.

With that sense of optimism in the air, NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe popped a bottle of champagne to share with Mars mission specialists after Opportunity began sending back pictures.

"As the old saying goes, it's far better to be lucky than good, but you know, the harder we work the luckier we seem to get," O'Keefe said, adding "no one dared hope" that both rover landings would be so successful.

FMI: http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov