Nasa spacecraft successfully lands on Mars

Pasadena: A Nasa spacecraft plunged into the atmosphere of Mars and successfully landed in the Red Planet's northern polar region on Sunday, where it will begin 90 days of digging in the permafrost to look for evidence of the building blocks of life.

Cheers swept through mission control at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory when the touchdown signal from the Phoenix Mars Lander was detected after a nail biting descent.

"In my dreams it couldn't have gone as perfectly as it went," project manager Barry Goldstein said. "It went right down the middle."

The first images transmitted from the lander about two hours after landing showed one of its feet sitting on Martian soil amid tiny rocks and a view of the horizon of the arctic plain. Another image showed that the lander's solar panels had deployed.

The early pictures were primarily to give engineers information on the condition of the lander including its power supply and the health of its science instruments. The solar panels were designed to not unfurl until after the dust settled.

Phoenix plunged into the Martian atmosphere at more than 12,000 mph after a 10-month, 422 million-mile voyage through space.

The lander kept in contact with Earth through the orbiting Mars Odyssey during the entire "seven minutes of terror."

The landing is a relief for Nasa since Mars has a reputation of swallowing spacecraft. More than half of all nations' attempts to land on Mars have failed.