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PASADENA, California (CNN) -- A NASA robotic explorer touched down on Mars, sending a signal home that it survived the risky descent through the Martian atmosphere and bounced to a halt.
The $400 million rover Spirit, designed to conduct unprecedented geologic and photographic surveys on the Martian surface, transmitted a simple hello to Earth minutes after landing.
"This is a big night for NASA. We're back," Sean O'Keefe, NASA's chief, said at 12:30 a.m. ET Sunday, about half an hour after confirmation of the successful red planet landing, the space agency's first since 1997.
Within hours, it beamed back images from its new home, stunning black and white snapshots that elicited excited shouts from mission controllers. Spirit will need more than a week to begin its roaming expedition, which is expected to last at least 90 days.
The golf cart-sized Spirit went through what NASA assistant administrator Ed Weiler characterized as "six minutes from hell" -- the time it took to enter the Martian atmosphere, descend and land in Gusev Crater.
During the descent, Spirit deployed parachutes and fired retrorockets to decelerate. Seconds before impact, it inflated a protective cocoon of airbags. Everything went as planned.
"It went to perfection. I can't tell the difference between what was predicted and what actually happened," said Rob Manning, the descent and landing manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
A series of bounces and rolls may have sent the robot up to four stories high and more than a mile from its landing spot, according to mission control scientists at JPL. The final stopping spot has elated mission researchers.
"The rocks, to a great extent, look swept clean. It's a much cleaner surface than what we had a right to hope for," said Steven Squyres, a Cornell University geologist in charge of the scientific instruments on Spirit and its identical twin, Opportunity, which will complete the 300 million-mile trip to Mars in three weeks.
"It's a very good surface for driving. It couldn't be better for what this vehicle is designed for," he said.
Packed with a slew of geology instruments and cameras, Spirit has much more mobility and capability than the most recent successful visitor to Mars. The 1997 Pathfinder mission included a lander, which beamed back thousands of images, and Sojourner, a toy-sized test rover that scurried around the rocks and boulders littering the landing site.
Each of the new rover twins, however, is built to explore nearly as much territory in one day as Sojourner covered in three months, about 100 yards.
And each comes equipped with eight cameras that should provide stunning panoramas of the Martian surface, with resolutions so sharp they retain crisp detail when blown up to the size of a movie screen, according to NASA. Their microscopes, spectrometers and drills could unlock geologic secrets from billions of years ago, when the now cold and dry planet is thought to have been warm and wet.
Death planet
Spirit's landing generated cheers, hugs and applause at NASA's mission control. Team members had waited nervously for confirmation, knowing too well that Mars has often proven a deadly place to visit. Two-thirds of the more than 30 spacecraft that have attempted to reach or orbit Mars have met with disaster, including two NASA attempts in 1999.
The most recent casualties include Japan's Nozomi, a satellite zapped by lethal solar radiation during its four-year odyssey to Mars. Mission engineers abandoned their attempts to steer the ailing craft as it neared the red planet last month.
Another possible victim is the Beagle 2, an ambitious life-searching lander from Britain, which has remained silent since its presumed touchdown December 25.
