Nasa’s Mars Perseverance rover has safely landed on the red planet to begin a search for life.
The rover – a scientific laboratory the size of a car – touched down shortly before 9pm (UK time) on Thursday.
It landed in a deep crater near the planet's equator, Jezero.
Engineers at Nasa's mission control in California erupted with joy as touchdown was confirmed.
NASA Mars Perseverance - In pictures
The six-wheeled vehicle will now spend at least the next two years drilling into the rocks - looking for evidence of past life.
Steve Jurczyk, Nasa’s acting administrator, said: “Just what an amazing team to work through all the adversity and all the challenges that go with landing a rover on Mars, plus the challenges of Covid.
“And just an amazing accomplishment.”
The Perseverance Mars Rover account tweeted a picture of the surface of Mars, saying: “Hello, world. My first look at my forever home.”
Scientists know that 3.5 billion years ago, Jezero was the site of a large lake, complete with its own delta.
They believe that while the water may be long gone, somewhere within the crater, or maybe along its 2,000-foot-tall (610 metre) rim, evidence that life once existed there could be waiting.
Any hunt for these signs will include the rover’s cameras, especially Mastcam-Z, which is located on the rover’s mast.
It can zoom in to inspect scientifically interesting targets.
The mission’s science team can task Perseverance’s SuperCam instrument – also on the mast – to fire a laser at a promising target, generating a small plasma cloud that can be analysed to help determine its chemical composition.
If that data is intriguing enough, the team could command the rover’s robotic arm to go in for a closer look.
Perseverance will gather rock and soil samples using its drill, and will store the sample cores in tubes on the Martian surface ready for a return mission to bring around 30 samples to Earth in the early 2030s.
The signal alerting controllers that Perseverance was down and safe arrived at 8.55pm.
The rover is the second to be put on Mars by Nasa. The first, Curiosity, was landed in a different crater in 2012.
