A wealth of Opportunity as rover lands on Mars

A second US probe has landed successfully on Mars and sent back stark pictures of a rocky outcrop that may have been formed by a volcano.

Three weeks after the first rover, Spirit, touched down, Opportunity made a relatively soft landing swaddled in protective air bags and began transmitting pictures.

The landing - on the other side of Mars to the first rover - heralded renewed good fortune for Nasa, which had been forced to concede only days ago that it had lost intelligent contact with Spirit.

"We're on Mars everybody," shouted Rob Manning, the manager of the entry, descent and landing portion of the mission, as fellow scientists at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, burst into wild applause.

The unmanned, six-wheeled, golf cart-sized rover landed at 5.05am British time in Meridiani Planum, a smooth, flat plain 6,600 miles from where Spirit set down on January 3. Minutes later, Al Gore, a former vice president, and the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, strode through mission control, shaking hands with scientists.

The US space agency had sent the rovers on the £455m mission to determine if Mars had ever had enough water to sustain life. Just one in three international efforts to land on the planet has succeeded.

Last week, when Spirit developed problems, cutting off what had been a steady flow of pictures and data, the prognosis appeared gloomy. But yesterday the scientists announced they were confident they could fix the problem.

"We resurrected one rover and saw the birth of another today," said Ed Weiler, the associate administrator for space science at Nasa.

Nasa had warned that it could take as long as 22 hours before Opportunity made contact with Earth, but it did so almost immediately. Emerging from its cocoon it began sending images to the orbiting Odyssey satellite. The images showed an eerie plain, featuring the first bedrock ever seen on the planet.

Views of the red and grey soil and outcrop of slabby rock were in contrast to the butterscotch-coloured hills in the Gusev crater, possibly an ancient lake bed, where Spirit landed. Opportunity is expected to roll off its lander within a fortnight.

Three spacecraft, two from Nasa and one from the European Space Agency, remain in orbit around Mars.

On Friday the Europeans announced that the Mars Express orbiter, the spacecraft which carried the Beagle 2 probe, had made the first discovery of water ice on the planet, suggesting that life-supporting oceans may once have been a feature of Mars. The US space agency insisted the find was not new.

Meanwhile, the orbiter was making another attempt to find the probe, which has been out of contact since it landed on Christmas Day. A spokesman said: "Two flights [on Saturday and Sunday night] will cover the widest possible area where Beagle 2 should be, giving us the best chance of getting a response from the continuous (emergency) transmission."