Touchdown on Mars - after 352 million miles

A daring space mission to discover if there really was life on Mars took a giant step forward today with a spectacular robot landing on the surface of the red planet.

Curiosity, a £1.6 billion one-ton robot rover the size of a small car, immediately began transmitting the first pictures for the surface of Mars after one of the most daring and difficult space operations ever attempted.

It completes the first phase of a journey which has so far taken eight-and-a-half months and seen Curiosity travel 352 million miles.

The arrival was an engineering tour de force, debuting never-before-tried acrobatics packed into 'seven minutes of terror' as Curiosity sliced through the Martian atmosphere at 13,000mph (21,000kph).

Now the aim really is to see if there was life on Mars. The much anticipated signal confirming that the robot had landed was received on Earth at 6.31am today.

There were scenes of jubilation at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California when the message came through to mission control.

"Touchdown confirmed," said engineer Allen Chen. "We're safe on Mars."

Curiosity can now start its 98 week mission – the length of one Martian year – exploring a Martian crater that billions of years ago may have been filled with water.

The nuclear powered rover is bristling with sophisticated technology designed to discover if Mars may have supported life.

Read more in today's Shropshire Star