Pasadena, California: The Curiosity has landed.

With pride, relief and exhilaration, NASA engineers and officials erupted in cheers and hugs early Monday morning with confirmation that the Curiosity, a car-sized, plutonium-powered robotic rover, had landed safely on the surface of Mars.

“Touchdown confirmed,” Allen Chen, the engineer in the control room providing commentary, said at 1:32 a.m. Eastern time.

A couple of minutes later, the first image popped onto the video screen – a grainy, 64-pixel-by-64-pixel black-and-white image showing one of the rover’s wheels and the Martian horizon.

Three minutes later, a higher-resolution version of the same image appeared, and then came another image from the other side of the rover.

“This is amazing,” said Robert Manning, the chief engineer for the project. “That’s the shadow of the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars.”

The Curiosity, far larger and more capable than the earlier generation of rovers, will open a new era of exploration, looking for signs that early Mars had the ingredients and environment that could have come together to form life.

The success validates a $2.5 billion bet that NASA took in embarking on this ambitious mission. While the spacecraft has performed flawlessly since its launching last November, that is only after NASA overcame technical problems, delayed launching by more than two years and poured in hundreds of millions of dollars as the price tag rose from $1.6 billion.

The landing, involving a seemingly impossible sequence of complex maneuvers, proceeded like clockwork: the capsule containing Curiosity entered the Martian atmosphere, the parachute deployed, the rocket engines fired, the rover was lowered and, finally, the Curiosity was on the ground.

Over the first week, Curiosity is to deploy its main antenna, raise a mast containing cameras, a rock-vaporizing laser and other instruments, and take its first panoramic shot of its surroundings.

NASA will spend the first month checking out Curiosity. The first drive could occur early next month. The rover would not scoop its first sample of Martian soil until mid-September at the earliest, and the first drilling into rock would occur in October or November.

Because Curiosity is powered by electricity generated from the heat of a chunk of plutonium, it could continue operating for years, perhaps decades, in exploring the 96-mile-wide crater where it has landed.