NASA's Phoenix lander has survived "seven minutes of terror" and reached the surface of Mars, ending a 10-month journey through space.
Phoenix ripped through the Martian atmosphere at nearly 21,000 kilometres per hour, before slowing itself down with a parachute and reverse thrusters to land in the planet's northern region.
Unlike the Mars rovers, which were cushioned by inflatable airbags as they hit the surface, Phoenix used a jet pack to ease its three legs onto the ground. The last NASA probes to successfully accomplish such a descent were the Viking landers back in 1976.
NASA had earlier dubbed Phoenix's entry as the "seven minutes of terror," referring to the approximate time it would take the lander to blast through the atmosphere.
The probe is designed to study the planet's northern climate and whether the environment is suitable for life. A crucial part of Phoenix is a Canadian-designed weather station, which cost $37 million.
"It's certainly an exciting time, because this Canadian technology is going to be providing information that we've never seen before on another planet," Kevin Shortt, president of the Canadian Space Agency, told Â鶹´«Ã½net.
"In a few years, we'll be able to watch the 11 o'clock news and see a brief weather forecast for Mars."
The weather station has a lidar -- an acronym for Light Detection and Ranging -- that will beam a laser beam into the atmosphere. The light will scatter particles and be reflected back to sensors in the weather station, giving scientists an idea of how Martian weather works.
Dr. Thomas Duck, a professor of physics and atmospheric science at Dalhousie University, was a key designer of the lidar.
Phoenix is also equipped with a 7.7-foot arm to scoop up samples of underground ice and soil, but it will have to dig through permafrost.
The Mars landing was the end of a nearly 680-million-kilometre journey through space. Phoenix had been travelling for about 10 months.
More than half of all missions to land probes on the Red Planet have ended in failure. In 2003, the European Space Agency launched the Beagle 2 lander to Mars, but lost contact before it reached the planet.
In 1999, NASA's Mars Polar Lander had engine problems before reaching the planet's south pole and it crashed.
With Phoenix, NASA engineers studied what went wrong with the Polar Lander and tried to anticipate any more potential problems with the design. But Barry Goldstein, project manager of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said it's impossible to foresee every obstacle.
"It's kind of like going to Vegas. If you have high odds, you play a number of times, eventually one of them is going to bite you," he said. "That's what's concerns us the most."
Phoenix cost about $420 million in total. The project was overseen by Jet Propulsion Laboratory and led by the University of Arizona.
With files from The Associated Press
