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Mars rover 'Curiosity' makes incredible landing

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    Images already coming in from the Red Planet

  • Duration 2:24
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-- -- New images from the red planet scientists in California had quite a party over night.

After their latest probe survived -- harrowing landing on Mars.

Correspondent Adam Housley is at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The story of a mission that seems to have captured the country's imagination again.

And liftoff.

Of the -- was five with curiosity.

Eight months after liftoff that a 154 million miles from earth NASA -- stuck the landing the -- one -- rover called curiosity now sits inside a crater on the planet Mars already sending back some of its first images.

And ready to conduct scientific tests over the next two years about the viability of life curiosity.

The most sophisticated rover ever built is now on the surface of the -- plant.

Where it will seek to answer age old questions about whether life ever existed on Mars we touched down in conditions that were.

On them more -- nine inside of our nominal expectation.

And it looks at least I have my eyeball that we alleged -- that nice flat spot you can really beautiful.

Successful landing couldn't come at a better time for NASA as president Obama's 2013 budget.

Proposes cutting its planetary science program by 300 million dollars.

Thus ending to future Mars partnerships with the European Union to anybody has been harboring doubts about the status of US leadership in space.

Well there's a one -- automobile sized piece of American ingenuity.

-- -- Ingenuity that cost 2.5 billion dollars as the curiosity rover is a laboratory outfitted with ten different instruments.

Including a real strong enough to -- away concrete magna fires gas analyzer and seventeen cameras.

What can take only fourteen minutes for low resolution pictures to transmit back to earth using two different satellites.

Hi resolution photos and video will take hours even days.

NASA says HD quality pictures panorama is even some small video clips could be beamed back to earth by the end of this week.

Then scientists will instruct the rover to make its first movements on the planet as it begins to search for life on Mars Brett.

We'll bring you any new images as we get them out of house -- lot Pasadena Adam thank you.