This image shows one of the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity's first breathtaking views of the martian landscape after its successful landing at Meridiani Planum on Mars.
Exactly three weeks after its identical twin set down on Mars, NASA’s Opportunity rover landed late Saturday and sent back pictures of Martian terrain unlike any seen before.
Scientists had expected that Opportunity's landing site would look markedly different from the rock-strewn landscapes that surrounded the Spirit rover as well as the Pathfinder and Viking landers — and they were right.
The first crop of black-and-white pictures showed what appeared to be a plain of dark soil so fine it was imprinted with the trails of the airbags that cushioned Opportunity's landing. In the distance, blocky slabs of lighter rock poked up through the soil.
"I'm flabbergasted. I'm astonished. I'm blown away," Steve Squyres, principal investigator for rover science, said early Sunday during a news briefing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Opportunity has touched down in a bizarre,...