The miraculous Mars rover Curiosity has now been on the surface of the Red Planet for three weeks. It has performed its first test drive, fired its megawatt laser, and taken lots of photos with its navigation and hazard cameras. Over the last few days, however, it has finally booted up its two high-resolution, full-color mast cameras: Mastcam 34 and Mastcam 100. Curiosity has also taken its first steps towards detecting water on the surface of Mars — and at a press conference yesterday, NASA showed off an audio clip that was transmitted from Earth to Curiosity, and then back to Earth.

We’ll lead with the new Mastcam photos, as they’ll blow your mind.

This first one was taken by Mastcam 34, which is a 2-megapixel CCD digital camera attached to a 34mm (wide-angle) lens. It’s pointing south-southwest from Curiosity’s landing site, towards the base of Mount Sharp and Curiosity’s eventual destination. It has been color-corrected to appear as if the photo was taken on Earth — in reality, with the Martian atmosphere, the photo would be a lot more yellowy-red.

This image is taken by Mastcam 100, which is the same 2MP CCD, but with a 100mm (telescopic) lens in front. It’s pointing in the same direction as Mastcam 34 — it’s just more zoomed in. NASA has provided the raw (non-color-corrected) version, if you want to see what Curiosity actually sees; and there’s an annotated version, too. In brief, the gravel in the foreground is 125 meters away from Curiosity, the impact crater (about a third of the way up the image) is about 3.5km (2mi) away, and the farthest point is around 16km (10mi) away.

This image is a crop of the 100mm photo above, but it has been color-corrected and then processed to accentuate the different kind of rocks. The image at the top of the story is another photo taken by Mastcam 34, and has also been modified slightly to accentuate geological differences. About a third of the way down the image, where light rock turns to slightly darker rock, is the eventual destination of Curiosity.

The two Mastcam 34 images were taken from this vast panorama of 140 images, which was snapped from Curiosity’s landing site (Bradbury Landing). In the middle is Mount Sharp, which is 20km (12mi) away and 5.5km (3.4mi) tall. Be sure to check out the full-size version — and see if you can spot where the two other Mastcam 34 images were snipped from.

On a different topic entirely, NASA held a press conference yesterday where it talked about these new images — and played an audio clip (embedded above) that had been recorded by NASA administrator Charles Bolden, uploaded to Curiosity, and then downloaded again to mission control. As far as I can tell, the only reason for this exercise was to make NASA look cool — and indeed, the bulk of the monologue was Bolden congratulating NASA and the US on the successful launch and landing of Curiosity. “Hello. This is Charlie Bolden, NASA Administrator, speaking to you via the broadcast capabilities of the Curiosity Rover, which is now on the surface of Mars,” Bolden said, via interplanetary voicemail. “This is an extraordinary achievement. Landing a rover on Mars is not easy – others have tried –- only America has fully succeeded.”

And finally, here’s a photo of Curiosity’s Science Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument. The robotic arm pulverizes rocks and soil, and then deposits samples in the hopper in the top right. Each of the three sections (a tunable laser spectrometer, quadrupole mass spectrometer, and gas chromatograph) then performs various tests to work out the exact composition of the samples — and to work out if there is, or has ever been, life on Mars.

Read more about Curiosity’s hardware and software, or about whether Curiosity could be disabled by hackers