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Good morning and welcome to our live blog of one of the most hair-raising landings ever attempted by Nasa: the Mars Science Laboratory mission and its intrepid Curiosity rover.

During the descent, the spacecraft must shed tungsten weights to shift its centre of gravity, fly through the Martian atmosphere, pop a huge parachute, fire retrorockets, and finally lower the car-sized rover to the ground. In these "seven minutes of terror", the spacecraft will go from 13,000mph to a standstill on the Martian surface. News of the touchdown is due at 6.31am BST.

The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft is now within 10,000km (6,200 miles) of the planet. The probe accelerates as it arrives at Mars, then slows as it ploughs into the atmosphere. One of the first moves the spacecraft makes pulls the heat shield into a forwards position. Friction with the atmosphere will raise the temperature of the shield to more than 2000C.

The spacecraft is now inside the orbit of the Martian moon, Phobos. During the entry, landing and descent phase, some 76 pyrotechnic charges will be fired aboard the probe to release weights and release the parachute. Shedding twin 75kg tungsten weights on arrival allows the spacecraft to get aerodynamic lift: instead of dropping like a stone, it can fly through the thin Martian atmosphere. The spacecraft has to sense its position and atmospheric conditions and use small onboard thrusters to steer its way to the landing site.

Adam Stelzner, NASA's lead scientist for the Entry, Descent and Landing Phase has just given brief thanks to his team for getting Mars Science Laboratory so far so smoothly. He said:

Curiosity is in great shape … See you on the other side, on Mars

Mars is around half the size of Earth, but the planet has a similar land mass. The target landing spot for Curiosity is the Gale Crater, which is thought to be around 3.5bn years old. The Curiosity rover will spend most of its Martian year exploring Mount Sharp, an enormous mound in the centre of the crater that rises 5km above the ground. The spacecraft is now 20 minutes from entry.

It takes just under 14 minutes for radio signals to reach Earth from Mars. So when mission controllers hear that Curiosity has entered the atmosphere, it will already have been on the ground – safely or otherwise – for seven minutes. The gravity on Mars is 38% as strong as Earth's.

More Mars trivia: The canyon system of Valles Marineris on Mars is the largest and deepest known in the solar system. It extends for more than 2,500 miles (4,000km) and in places reaches 10km from floor to the surrounding plateaus.

If the rover lands safely, what will we see first from the surface?

This is from Curiosity's mission pages:

The very first images are likely to arrive more than two hours after landing, due to the timing of NASA's signal-relaying Odyssey orbiter. They will be captured with the left and right Hazcams at the back and front of the rover, and they will not yet be full-resolution (the two images arriving on Earth first are "thumbnail" copies, which are 64 by 64 pixels in size). The Hazcams [Hazard-Avoidance cameras] are equipped with very wide-angle, fisheye lenses, initially capped with clear dust covers. The covers are designed to protect the cameras from dust that may be kicked up during landing; they are clear just in case they don't pop off as expected.

The spacecraft has separated from its cruise stage. Small thrusters on the back shell of the probe have now fired to halt the two-revolutions-per-minute spin that the spacecraft maintains during flight. The thrusters fire next to bring the heat shield into position, in a move called "turn to entry".

A tweet from Curiosity:

I'm inside the orbit of Deimos and completely on my own. Wish me luck!

In case you were wondering, Deimos is the outer of Curiosity's two moons.

The spacecraft is still accelerating under the planet's gravitational pull and will reach 13,000mph before it starts to feel the outer atmosphere of the planet. The atmospheric pressure on Mars is about one hundredth that on Earth. Surface winds are typically up to 20mph, with gusts up to 90mph. The atmosphere is 95.3% carbon dioxide, 2.7% nitrogen and 1.6% argon. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is tracking the probe.

Geraint Jones, a planetary scientist from UCL's Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Surrey, is here in the office with me. In answer to a question left on the blog earlier, he says:

@wwwwwlllll: The surface winds expected at the landing site are around 0-32km/h. MSL [Mars Science Laboratory] is designed to cope with much stronger gusts than that if they arise. There was a dust storm spotted towards the end of last week around 1000km away, but this isn't causing the team any worries.

One minute to entry. "We are now beginning to feel the atmosphere," says a Nasa scientist.

A tweet from Brian Cox:

Now admit it, this is more exciting than the 100m last night #MSL

Early days, but all looking good. The spacecraft is "heading directly to the target", according to a Nasa scientist. The seven minutes of terror are under way!

Parachute deployed. The probe is decelerating.

The probe is being monitored by Mars Odyssey. Now around 4km from the surface. The retrorockets are firing. Velocity is 50 metres per second. Standing by for sky crane – the amazing system that lowers the rover by nylon ropes.

The sky crane is now lowering the rover.

"Touchdown confirmed. We are safe on Mars!"

Scenes of complete jubilation in NASA's mission control. That was extraordinary. Images are on their way.

"It's the wheel!" exclaims one of the NASA scientists. The first image from Mars Curiosity has arrived. More pictures are on their way. We'll be grabbing those images to post as soon as we can.

"We have just blown dust all over the place with our descent engines," says one NASA scientist.

A high resolution image showing the horizon and dust particles on the camera have just arrived. Amazing stuff. Extraordinary to see this work so smoothly. The landing was the most complex ever attempted on an alien world.

And here is the first picture from Curiosity after touchdown.

I've not seen scenes of such joy since CERN found the Higgs boson. Worth waiting for will be the video feed from underneath the spacecraft as it flew to its target and began lowering the Curiosity rover on those nylon ropes. That will be truly extraordinary to see. The NASA Curiosity team will now spend a good while on Mars time so they can synchronise their operations with the rover.

This is the live stream of Nasa TV, courtesy of Ustream.

Here's another of the first pictures to arrive from Mars Curiosity.

The first pictures from Mars are now on NASA's website.

Lovely picture - the shadow of Curiosity in Gale Crater.

As Geraint Jones, planetary scientist at UCL, who is here with me today, says:

The good news is that there are no big rocks. That'll make it easier to drive around.

Tweet from Brian Cox:

Absolutely wonderful. What a year! First the Higgs, now the search for Life on Mars begins ! #MSL

Of course Mars Curiosity is famously not looking for life on Mars, but for signs of ancient habitable environments. This is a prospecting mission. The first job is to find areas where life may have survived had it ever evolved on Mars. Once those places are found – if they exist – scientists will know where to send future missions to look for direct signs of past life on the planet.

Celebrations at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California as the Mars Curiosity rover touches down on the red planet. A huge success for the US space agency.

NASA is holding a press conference on the Mars Curiosity landing at 7.30am UK. So far the mission has gone without hitch, and there was plenty of opportunity for failure. The rover - the largest ever built by NASA - will spend the next year exploring the Gale Crater and its central mountain in the hope of finding geological evidence that Mars was once hospitable to life.

Measurements from Mars point to a gentle landing for the Curiosity rover, the nearest thing to an SUV that has ever been sent to another planet. The impact speed was just 0.67 metres per second, or 1.5mph. The sideways drift of the rover was a minuscule 0.044 metres per second, less than 0.1mph.

Susanne Schwenzer, a postdoc at Open University, has sent this:

Curiosity is on Mars. Seven minutes of landing went by very fast, it was so intense. The parachute deploy was the moment I took the first deep breath, thinking this may work. And it did. How exciting! We now have the chance to explore Gale crater. This unique place on Mars, which contains a series of geological features, which we now can start investigating with the most advanced rover ever. For me as a mineralogist it will be especially interesting to find out more about the formation conditions of the clays, that have been seen from orbit. They will tell us more about past water and the potential for habitability. Personally, being part of Dr. John Bridges participating scientist team is a unique, probably once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of exploration of Mars. I am looking forward to the science to come - and in the short term to the first panorama image after mast deploy in the days to come.

John Bridges at Leicester University blogs:

Lots of very happy and excited people in this room! What an opportunity we have now to explore this fascinating planet.

Charles Bolden, the NASA administrator, tells the press conference that the President's science adviser, John Holdren "nearly threw up", presumably with the stress and excitement of the landing.

This just in from John Bridges at University of Leicester:

From cruise stage separation, atmospheric entry at 6km/s, parachute deployment – slowing down – then Skycrane deployment , it went without a hitch. The first images have already got us talking …

The press conference is settling down now …

Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Lab, is having a nightmare trying to calm everyone down for the press conference.

Great NPR interview with Adam Steltzner, head of the Entry, Descent and Landing phase for Mars Curiosity here.

I was sort of studying sex, drugs and rock and roll in high school," says Steltzner. It wasn't just the long hair. "I liked to wear this strange Air Force jump suit. And my first car was a '69 Cadillac hearse. I put a bed in the back.

Tom Watson MP tweets:

Am I misguided to think that humankind landing a robot on Mars -on Mars! - is the biggest story of the day? Got to follow: #MSL

While Stuart Clark, Guardian space blogger, adds:

Let us enjoy and celebrate achievement. This is Olympian science. Years of dedication and effort - paying off

Adam Steltzner, head of the Entry, Descent and Landing phase team, is overwhelmed by the success.

I am terribly humbled by this experience. I, forever, secretly, have felt I do not deserve to be in the position of leading the team I lead … In my life I will be forever satisfied if this is the greatest thing I have ever given.

Wonderful panoramic view of the press conference, where people are now captivated by the team describing their thoughts on touchdown.

Adam Steltzner, head of NASA JPL's Mars landing team, describes himself on his twitter feed as "Master of Mars"

Steltzner emphasising the data that has come in to date is preliminary. He says the landing "looked to be extremely clean", with the rover coming down in conditions that were calmer than they had prepared for. "Our powered flight appeared to be excellent." The spacecraft landed with 140kg of fuel left over. "Looks like we landed in a nice, flat spot. Beautiful."

Second question of the press conference … "Can you tell us the file type and compression used to send the image back?"

Steltzner saves us all with: "I absolutely cannot."

He goes on to say:

"Curiosity is perhaps the central defining human attribute."

NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden, writes:

I am so proud of the NASA team that has made tonight's challenging milestone possible. However, tomorrow we begin to plan for the next great challenge – and start compiling incredible scientific data from Curiosity. For the past 50 years, NASA has specialized in doing the hard things. Thanks to the ingenuity of our teams across America and the world, we are poised for even greater success.

Geraint Jones, planetary scientist from UCL, who is here at the Guardian, says:

Very keen amateurs have started looking at the images taken after the landing – there's a curious cloud-like feature that appears in images taken by two separate cameras. Some are suggesting that it might be a cloud of dust thrown into the air when the descent stage hit the ground a few hundred metres away after delivering the rover to the surface.

Project scientist John Grotzinger says they are in no hurry to get to Mount Sharp. "The place we landed looks pretty darn interesting."

Hi folks. James Randerson taking over for a while as Ian puts together a news story. If you have any specific questions about the mission, we have Dr Geraint Jones with us, planetary scientist at UCL, who can try to answer them.

An update on the MSL blog from Dr John Bridges out in Pasadena:

The next data relay via Mars Odyssey is at 12.30am PDT (add 8 hours for BST). We will start the process of checking the instruments. That doesn't have the drama of landing but it's why we are on Mars … The mission PI stresses that we need to be patient.

Some reaction pulled together by the Science Media Centre in London:

Dr Stephen Lewis, Open University:

This is a spectacular technological achievement and opens the way to ambitious exploration of Mars with more sophisticated spacecraft than was previously possible. Mars Curiosity science will tell us much more about the past history of Mars, its climate, how it changed and whether it was ever habitable.

Professor Sanjeev Gupta, Imperial College London:

Now that the MSL has landed we can get to grips with some remarkable science. The area the rover will be exploring, with its large areas of exposed rock and variety of landforms, will take us on a journey through geological time. With the extraordinary volume of data MSL can produce we will be able to reconstruct how the rocks and climate of this region have changed through time.





Dr John Bridges, University of Leicester:

The science community has been given a very valuable chance to move forward our understanding of how Mars has evolved. How long did wet conditions last and were there standing bodies of water on Mars? I hope the effective combination in MSL of science objectives and space engineering will point the way towards more exploration of the Solar System and technological innovations.

Sue Horne, Head of Exploration at the UK Space Agency:

The fact that NASA have managed to successfully demonstrate such a novel landing system is an inspiration for everyone involved in space exploration. Now we can breathe a sigh of relief and look forward to the exciting scientific discoveries to come from Curiosity. The mission paves the way for future Mars exploration, and hopefully the future of Mars Sample Return.

• The Mars Science Laboratory mission safely landed the car-sized rover Curiosity on Mars at 6.14am BST (it took a few minutes for the signal from the rover to reach Earth). The touchdown followed a complex landing sequence involving a parachute, retro-thrusters and a sky crane – a system that lowered the rover to the surface on nylon ropes.

• Curiosity announced its arrival with a tweet: "I'm safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!!" Its impact speed was just 0.67 metres per second, or 1.5mph.

• The flawless landing was followed by scenes of jubilation at mission control as the rover sent back four low-resolution black and white images of its surroundings. One showed Curiosity's own shadow.

• Adam Steltzner, head of the Entry, Descent and Landing phase team said he was "terribly humbled" by the experience. "In my life I will be forever satisfied if this is the greatest thing I have ever given," he said at a press conference following the landing.

More images on the way.

Prof Jim Al-Khalili, physicist at the University of Surrey and presenter of Radio 4's The Life Scientific tweets:

Wondering whether the silly moon landing sceptics doubt this latest NASA mission. After all, Mars is 3 orders of mag further away.

OK, I'm going to pull out a few of your comments on the mission from below the line:

LeBeerO says:

I truly hope I live to see the day that human beings set foot on Mars. Moments like this fill me with hope and joy and optimism. Sadly, that optimism is increasingly tempered by my realisation that that feat, a human being travelling millions of miles to set foot upon a completely different planet that no human has ever seen with their own eyes, seems more likely than creating a peaceful and equal society here on our home planet … I'm filled with a bittersweet feeling about this achievement. It's truly inspirational to see what humans can do when we work together, and truly saddening to see how often we don't.

RhysGethin writes:

Bloody fantastic! I must admit I never thought this was going to work in a million years, well done NASA!

kingmaker says:

If you had written that landing procedure for a movie you would have been kicked out of Hollywood. Awesomely brilliant job by all those involved.

ILikeChips objected to the jingoistic tone of the press conference:

The whooping of the press conference was a little grating. However, I suspect all the "with american leadership the world can be a better place" stuff was largely a plea to the suits in Washington not to cut NASA budgets.

More from Dr Geraint Jones, at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London:

As Earth is below the horizon as seen from Curiosity's landing site, the data taken during the landing was gathered by the orbiting Mars Odyssey spacecraft as it passed overhead and it passed the information directly on to Earth. It's currently passing on more data; it's been once around Mars since the landing and is crossing the sky again as seen from Curiosity. Two other spacecraft can also listen to Curiosity: NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and the European Space Agency's Mars Express. Any data they picked up from MSL as it landed has been stored onboard and will be transmitted to Earth later. There could be spectacular images on the way not only from Curiosity itself but also from MRO: there's a 60% chance that it managed to take images of Curiosity with its extremely powerful camera as the rover was descending to the surface.

In case you missed the moment of touchdown or would like to re-live it. Here it is:

More from Dr Geraint Jones on expected future Mars missions:

The next two landings on Mars should both be parts of the European Space Agency-led ExoMars project. There will be a static lander launched in 2016, followed by a rover in 2018. NASA were going to be ESA's partner on ExoMars, but they withdrew from the project due to budget constraints. The Russian Space Agency are now likely to play a major role in the mission instead – the formal agreement for this is expected to be signed this November.

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The latest image from Curiosity. Project scientist John Grotzinger described it earlier as a "beautiful sunset on Mars".

"Those hills in the background should be crater rim - I'm just taking a guess here," he said.

Dr Geraint Jones has this on another image we are expecting to see later today:

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter had been commanded to attempt to image Curiosity as it was descending to the surface. Apparently the spacecraft has now sent data back to Earth and the images have been processed. We probably won't see the result until later today; NASA will hold its next press conference at 5pm UK time.

The Mars Science Laboratory and Curiosity rover in pictures.

Here's what happened during the landing sequence – what NASA called Curiosity's "seven minutes of terror".

More background on the mission: the Guardian's new space blogger Dr Stuart Clark on why Curiosity isn't looking for life on Mars. You can follow him on twitter @drstuclark.

We're recording a podcast on today's amazing landing. It should go live around mid-afternoon. You can listen to it here.

OK folks. It's been quite a morning and I need a coffee (I suspect the NASA folks are having something stronger). Thanks for joining us and for your comments. We're going to wrap up the blog now, but please do continue the discussion below.