"This is a screen capture of the 5 minutes before, and 5 minutes after, the NASA MSL Curiosity rover landed on Mars. The entire mission control room bursts into cheers around time 5:30 upon confirmation of landing and the first images arrive around time 7:30.

Alongside the NASA TV stream I have running the Eyes on the Solar System computer simulation that was using live telemetry data to show what was happening in near real-time. All of this was captured on my laptop in Australia, which was streaming the event over the 3G connection on my iPhone. See more updates and images from NASA's MSL homepage: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html"

This is one of the first images taken by NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars the evening of Aug. 5 PDT (morning of Aug. 6 EDT). It was taken through a "fisheye" wide-angle lens on the left "eye" of a stereo pair of Hazard-Avoidance cameras on the left-rear side of the rover. The image is one-half of full resolution. The clear dust cover that protected the camera during landing has been sprung open. Part of the spring that released the dust cover can be seen at the bottom right, near the rover's wheel.

On the top left, part of the rover's power supply is visible.

Some dust appears on the lens even with the dust cover off.

The cameras are looking directly into the sun, so the top of the image is saturated. Looking straight into the sun does not harm the cameras. The lines across the top are an artifact called "blooming" that occurs in the camera's detector because of the saturation.

As planned, the rover's early engineering images are lower resolution. Larger color images from other cameras are expected later in the week when the rover's mast, carrying high-resolution cameras, is deployed. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech"

Descent pics via HiRISEClick the pics for larger shots."NASA's Curiosity rover and its parachute were spotted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as Curiosity descended to the surface on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT). The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera captured this image of Curiosity while the orbiter was listening to transmissions from Curiosity..."