Opportunity knocks as rover sends first Mars photos

NASA'S Opportunity rover zipped its first pictures of Mars to Earth early yesterday, delighting and puzzling scientists just hours after the spacecraft bounced to a landing on the opposite side of the red planet from its twin rover, Spirit.

The pictures showed a surface smooth and dark red in some places, and strewn with fragmented slabs of light bedrock in others. Bounce marks apparently left by the rover's air bags when it landed were clearly visible.

"I am flabbergasted. I am astonished. I am blown away. Opportunity has touched down in an alien and bizarre landscape," Steven Squyres, the mission's main scientist, said early yesterday. "I still don't know what we're looking at."