Ten facts about Curiosity's journey to Mars

NASA's Curiosity, packed with sophisticated instruments, touched down on Mars on a quest for signs of whether the planet has evidence of past and present habitable environments. Moments after landing, Curiosity beamed back its first three images from the Martian surface, one of them showing a wheel of the vehicle and the rover's shadow cast on the rocky terrain. The craft's descent through Mars' thin atmosphere, a feat called the most elaborate and risky achievement in the annals of robotic spaceflight, turned out to be short-lived cliffhanger, much to NASA's relief. Here are a few things to know about Curiosity:

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The purpose of the $2.5 billion mission is to look for evidence that Mars - the planet most similar to Earth - may have once harbored the basic building blocks necessary for microbial life to evolve. It represents NASA's first astrobiology mission since the 1970s-era Viking probes.
The purpose of the $2.5 billion mission is to look for evidence that Mars - the planet most similar to Earth - may have once harbored the basic building blocks necessary for microbial life to evolve. It represents NASA's first astrobiology mission since the 1970s-era Viking probes.