With "seven minutes of terror" behind them, NASA scientists say they're looking forward to three months of extraordinary new data from the Phoenix Mars Lander.
Phoenix began beaming back photos just hours after its Sunday evening descended on to the surface of Mars northern polar region.
Scientists had said they were concerned about the last part of the probe's 10-month journey.
They were especially worried about Phoenix's seven-minute, 21,000 km/h entry into the planet's atmosphere -- but in the end the probe made a soft landing without any major glitches.
"The seven minutes of terror are going to be followed by three months of joy," said project manager Barry Goldstein.
Goldstein and his team were given a round of applause at a Monday afternoon press conference as he showed a picture of the landing. It was taken from a distance by a previous orbiter already surveying the planet.
"This is a scientist's dream," principal investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, had said shortly after Phoenix landed.
At the Monday afternoon press conference, he began to analyze some of the photographs that were earlier released to the public.
Within two hours of landing, a flood of images sent back by Phoenix revealed a landscape similar to Earth's permafrost regions. The polygon-cracked terrain is believed to hold a reservoir of ice beneath the surface
"We see what look like cracks in the soil caused by the contraction of ice and that would mean that the soil is still active ... this is our first look at the surface," Smith said.
He noted his excitement about what new information future images will provide.
Smith added that Phoenix dug into the surface of Mars and cut into the soil, "which is good news for us because we're going to dig in with our robotic arm."
Phoenix landed on Mars following 679-million kilometre journey through space.
"Tomorrow we can expect the 7.7-foot robotic arm (on Phoenix) to actually begin digging into the ice on Mars and it will start to transmit some of the data back to earth," CNN's Thelma Gutierrez told CTV's Canada AM.
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.
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.
"We are actually contributing quite a significant chunk to the mission," Tim Cole, spokesperson for the Canada Science and Technology Museum, told Â鶹´«Ã½net Monday afternoon.
Phoenix's lidar instrument is "going to give us an indication of how the atmosphere is put together, what's in the atmosphere, (and information about) cloud formation."
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.
NASA engineers studied what went wrong with the Polar Lander and tried to anticipate any more potential problems when designing Phoenix.
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
