Nasa's ambitious attempt to land its Curiosity rover on Mars has so far gone without a hitch paving the way for a smooth landing on Monday morning, scientists have said.
Undated handout CGI issued by NASA depicting the Curiosity rover, of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, as it uses its Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument to investigate the composition of a rock surface on Mars.
The crucial stage of the £1.6bn mission comes in the minutes before 6.30am on Monday, when the probe streaks into the Martian atmosphere at 13,000mph and begins an intricate set of manoeuvres designed to drop its cargo onto the surface of the planet with no more than a gentle bump.
But the rover's chance of surviving the unprecedentedly complex landing – dubbed "seven minutes of terror" – has been boosted after mission engineers announced its parent craft remains exactly on target to hit its designated landing site.
To land in the correct spot, the probe must pass through a window of Mars's upper atmosphere measuring just 3km by 12km, requiring an accuracy scientists have compared to hitting a golf ball from Los Angeles to Scotland and scoring a hole-in-one.
But the team in charge of the mission is so happy with the probe's course that they passed up on their final opportunity to adjust its trajectory on Friday, insisting it is precisely on course and no fine-tuning is required, the BBC reported.
Arthur Amador, mission manager, said on Saturday: "After flying more than eight months and 350 million miles since launch, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft is now right on target to fly through the eye of the needle that is our target at the top of the Mars atmosphere."
Should it land safely, Curiosity's job will be to explore an area of Mars's surface called the Gale basin, with the ultimate aim of finding out whether the harsh conditions on the planet could ever have supported primitive life.
To do this it will explore patterns of sediment which appear to have been shaped billions of years ago by small streams of liquid water, and search for evidence of carbon compounds – another condition thought to be necessary for life to exist.
First it will need to negotiate its way through the final stages of its descent.
Because the rover – the size of a small car – is too heavy to survive previously used landing methods, such as a straightforward drop cushioned by airbags, the probe will use a crane to lower it to the ground on nylon ropes, before changing its course and crashing nearby just a few seconds later.
Two British scientists are among the team involved in the project, Nasa's first mission to land a probe on Mars since 2004.
Dr John Bridges, of Leicester University, who is preparing for the landing at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Florida, wrote on his blog: "The landing is not an end to the development of the mission.
"I think our MSL work will gradually increase as more data is returned, we won't get a great deal in the first few days. [There is] more work for us to do in the instrument teams though.
"Lots of finer details [are] starting to emerge in the discussions now, [for example] what direction will the mast be pointing after landing?"
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