Nasa said on Friday that a mysterious spot shown on a photograph sent back to earth by the Mars rover Curiosity was the crash landing of its rocket stage.

Mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles burst into applause and cheered as they received signals relayed by a Mars orbiter confirming that the rover had survived a make-or-break descent and touched down within its landing zone.

A high-resolution 3-D camera that Avatar director James Cameron was helping to build for Nasa’s next Mars rover won’t fly after all.
Nasa on Friday said work on the zoom camera was halted because there wasn’t enough time to thoroughly test it before launch.