NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / Ed Truthan

A section of the color panorama from Curiosity rover's Mastcam imaging system shows the layered rock along the ridge of the mountain known as Aeolis Mons or Mount Sharp, with a dark dune field closer to the camera. The color has been adjusted to provide a white-balanced, Earthlike view.

Newly received images from NASA's Curiosity rover are filling out the high-resolution view of its surroundings at Gale Crater on Mars — and providing an up-close look at the six-wheeled craft's nuclear power source. But there are even more impressive vistas yet to come.

Some of the new imagery was actually taken by Curiosity's Mastcam color camera more than a week ago, on Aug. 8-9, also known as Sol 3 of Curiosity's mission. It didn't take long for the rover to transmit 130 low-resolution thumbnails, each measuring 144 by 144 pixels. Those were assembled and released as a 360-degree panorama on Aug. 9. But the high-resolution versions, at 1,200 pixels square, have taken a lot longer to send back. Today's additions to the jigsaw puzzle include pictures of the layered rock on the flank of a 3-mile-high (5 kilometer-high) mountain known Aeolis Mons or Mount Sharp.

The image wizards who frequent the forums at UnmannedSpaceflight.com pounced on the fresh pictures and incorporated them into their own panoramic views. One long strip was done up by California graphic designer Ed Truthan in two flavors: the red-tinged view that Curiosity saw on Mars, and the white-balanced view that earthlings would see if the scene were transported to our planet.

Another strip, which includes some of the rover hardware, was offered by British researcher James Canvin. Two pieces of the puzzle are still missing from the central area of the image, and a horizontal line in the image was left behind as an artifact of the image-stitching process.

"I'll fix this and add some final touches when the final two images are available," Canvin promises.

If you click on the preview image below, you'll find some impressive high-resolution views on Canvin's Martian Vistas website.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / James Canvin

A scaled-down version of a high-resolution panorama from NASA's Curiosity rover is still missing a few pieces. Click on the image for larger-format files.

The most impressive part of Curiosity's surroundings is expected to be Mount Sharp's peak, which would rise above the frame at the center of Canvin's panorama. We haven't seen a color view of the summit yet, but the team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., says that getting pictures of the mountain's upper reaches is one of the top targets for Mastcam. We'll hear more about how that's coming along during a teleconference scheduled for 1:30 p.m. ET (10:30 a.m. PT) on Friday. 

In the meantime, here are two more must-see vistas that have just become available. The photograph is a view from the black-and-white Navcam system, looking toward the back of the rover. The cylinder with fins on it is Curiosity's radioisotope thermal generator, a power source that uses plutonium as fuel. The RTG is designed to keep Curiosity's batteries charged up not just during the two-year primary mission, but perhaps for decades longer. The video is a compilation of high-resolution imagery from Curiosity's Mars Descent Imager, or MARDI, which provides a 23-second taste of the rover's ride to the surface.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

A view from the Navcam system on the Curiosity rover's camera mast looks toward the back of the rover. The most prominent hardware is the probe's radioisotope thermal generator, or RTG, which uses radioactive plutonium to generate electricity. The fins serve as radiators for heat from the RTG. The picture also shows black bits of Martian debris that were thrown onto the rover's deck during landing. The device that looks like a joystick at lower right is a sundial, which is used as a color calibration target. The original picture has been processed to enhance brightness.

More about Mars:

• Mars rover team faces the masses
• Mars fans make viral video
• Panoramas add spin to Mars
• Mars orbiter gets a long look at Curiosity rover
• Reprogrammed rover getting ready to roll
• Obama tells rover team: Watch out for Martians
• Search for life to shape future Mars missions
• Mars rover getting reprogrammed for science
• Why the rover has such a dinky camera and computer
• How to build your own Mars rover with Lego blocks
• The Puff on Mars: Photo mystery solved!
• Panorama reveals a colorful Mars
• NBC video: Panorama featured on 'Nightly News'
• Curiosity reveals a Martian Mojave
• Tour the Martian Mojave in 3-D
• Flying saucer spotted over Mars
• First 3-D pictures sent by Curiosity
• Orbital photo spots rover and its trash
• Curiosity sends color snapshot from Mars
• Rover video looks down on Mars during landing
• Mars orbiter spots rover in midair
• NASA's Mohawk Guy marvels at his fame
• Curiosity rover scores touchdown on Mars

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBC News' other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

A low-resolution mosaic of images from NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars shows part of a 360-degree panorama in Gale Crater. The shadow of the rover's camera mast can be seen in the lower left corner, and a rover wheel is visible in the lower right corner. The foothills of 3-mile-high Aeolis Mons, also known as Mount Sharp, stretch out in the background. Click on the image for the full-resolution, 360-degree view from NASA.

Scientists say the first 360-degree color panorama photo sent from Mars by NASA's Curiosity rover reveals an unusual amount of variation, including dark dunes, red soil and tan rocks. And they can hardly wait to sample the material behind all those colors.

The picture unveiled today at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., isn't the best imagery that the rover's Mastcam is capable of. It was put together from 130 images, each measuring a mere 144 by 144 pixels. The high-resolution version goes eight times wider, but that also means it's a much bigger load of data. Curiosity just hasn't had the bandwidth to send it yet.

Much better panoramas will be coming from Curiosity's stomping grounds in Gale Crater over the next couple of years, said Michael Malin of San Diego-based Malin Space Science Systems, the principal investigator for the two-camera Mastcam system. But for a low-resolution "random shot," the picture released today isn't so bad.

"This was pretty enough and interesting enough that we thought it was worth sharing with you guys," Malin told reporters.

The Mastcam panorama, along with a higher-resolution panorama taken in black and white by the rover's navigation cameras, show the intriguing blast marks left behind by the rover's sky-crane descent stage, just yards away from the landing site. They also show the foothills of a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain, more than 4 miles (6 kilometers away).

"These beautiful knolls of layered rocks, and those layers, are what's recording history at Gale Crater," said Dawn Sumner, a member of the Curiosity science team from the University of California at Davis.

The prime objective of the $2.5 billion Curiosity mission is to document billions of years of geological change on Mars by analyzing the layers of rock at that mountain, known as Aeolis Mons or Mount Sharp. It could take more than a year for Curiosity to get to the mountainside, because researchers intend to take their time analyzing the rocks along the way. Curiosity's primary mission is scheduled to last a complete Martian year, or two Earth years, but scientists hope the nuclear-powered rover will last much longer than that.

Eventually, Curiosity's chemical analysis could tell scientists whether Mars was potentially habitable in ancient times, when there was enough water to deposit sediment inside the 96-mile-wide (154-mile-wide) crater.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

The shadow of NASA's Curiosity rover shows up prominently in the middle of a black-and-white Navcam panorama. Click to download larger versions.

Eager to use the laser
Curiosity is equipped with 10 scientific instruments to tackle the challenge, including an onboard chemistry lab and a device known as ChemCam, which can shoot a laser at rocks and read the chemical signature that's encoded in the light that's given off. One of the first targets may well be the blast marks created during Sunday's landing. After Curiosity touched down, its rocket-powered sky crane blasted itself back into the air and crash-landed more than half a mile away. The exhaust from the sky crane's thrusters scoured away gravelly soil on the surface and exposed the bedrock underneath.

"There's an awful lot of eagerness to know what the composition of those rocks are," Sumner said, "and to use our laser."

Malin said the color panorama seemed to be, well, more colorful than the typical imagery from previous rovers, including the Opportunity rover, which is still at work on the other side of the Red Planet. "Some of the coloration we're seeing here really has to do with the sand dunes," he said. "There's dark sand, there's the red dust, and then there's the substrate rock, which is tan. ... The way dust and sand are trapped by a surface will also change their color. So I can't say it's a more colorful or diverse site just based on the photometry or the colorimetry, but obviously, geomorphically it's a very diverse place."

Flawless rover, flawless team
Mission manager Mike Watkins said the Curiosity team is continuing to check out the six-wheeled rover's scientific instruments, in preparation for its first drive sometime in the next few weeks. "Curiosity continues to behave flawlessly. ... The team operating Curiosity also is performing basically flawlessly," he said.

One surprise turned up in the latest batch of high-resolution images taken by the navigation cameras: The deck of the rover was littered with dark pebbles that were apparently thrown up during Sunday's landing. "They pose no problems for operations ... but it's a little unexpected that it is there," Watkins said.

The team that managed Curiosity's flawless entry, descent and landing is taking a closer look at the pebble issue. "They need a problem to go start working on, right? So this is something for them to do," Watkins joked.

Over the next couple of days, the team will be "standing down from science" while Curiosity's electronic brain is reprogrammed with software that's more tailored for surface operations, Watkins said. "Sometimes you're stuck in this mode where you have the old software on part of your computer, and the new software on part, and we didn't want to start trying to execute other complex activities in the middle of that," he explained.

That prompted a joke from Malin about his own computer acumen: "I sure hope he does better than what I've done on my machines."

Other angles from Mars:

• Watkins said the team has been gradually raising the data transmission rate from Mars, starting with 8 kilobits per second to the current rate of a few hundred kilobits per second. In about a week, the transmission rate could reach 2 megabits per second, he said.
• Sumner said that Curiosity's surroundings have been mapped onto a navigation grid that is divided into "quads," with each quad measuring about 0.9 mile (1.5 kilometers) square. The rover happened to land in Quad 51, which led to a string of conspiracy-theory jokes. Even the official Twitter account for @MarsCuriosity got in on the fun: "Area 51? No, Quad 51 is where I landed on Mars. ... (PS - I come in peace)." Quad 51 is also known by the nickname Yellowknife, which refers to the frontier town in Canada's Northwest Territories. Sumner said the "beautiful knolls" that are visible in the panoramas released today lie in Quads 120, 121, 134 and 135.
• Pictures of the Curiosity's wheels brought another in-joke to light: The treads are molded with a pattern of dots and dashes that spell out the initials of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ("JPL") in Morse code (dot-dash-dash-dash, dot-dash-dash-dot, dot-dash-dot-dot). The arrangement is more than a joke: As the rover travels, its cameras can read the asymmetrical pattern left behind in the Martian soil to determine exactly how far it's traveled, and whether there's been any slippage along the way. The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla spelled out the significance in a blog posting last year. To which I can only say: ·—— ——— ·——

Still more from Mars:

• NBC video: Panorama featured on 'Nightly News'
• Curiosity reveals a Martian Mojave
• Tour the Martian Mojave in 3-D
• Flying saucer spotted over Mars
• First 3-D pictures sent by Curiosity
• Orbital photo spots rover and its trash
• Curiosity sends color snapshot from Mars
• Rover video looks down on Mars during landing
• Mars orbiter spots rover in midair
• NASA's Mohawk Guy marvels at his fame
• Curiosity rover scores touchdown on Mars
• Mars probe provides radiation revelations
• Video: Highlights from rover's first two days on Mars

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The first pictures from the best cameras on NASA's Curiosity rover document a Martian landscape so Earthlike it reminds scientists of home.

"The first impression that you get is how Earthlike this seems, looking at that landscape," said Caltech's John Grotzinger, chief scientist for the $2.5 billion mission. "You would really be forgiven for thinking that NASA was trying to pull a fast one on you, and we actually put a rover out in the Mojave Desert and took a picture."

California's Mojave Desert is less than 100 miles away from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, where Grotzinger and his colleagues are poring over each batch of images sent back by the car-sized rover.

Mission manager Jennifer Trosper said 100 megabytes of data had been received from Curiosity as of today, and that figure is sure to grow rapidly once the spacecraft's high-gain antenna gets up to speed.

The day's biggest milestone was the raising of the rover's 3.6-foot-tall (1.1-meter-tall) camera mast on Curiosity's deck, which provides a vantage point 7 feet (2.1 meters) above the Martian surface. The mast houses Curiosity's high-resolution navigation camera system, also known as Navcam, as well as the two-camera Mastcam imaging system — and a laser-zapping rock analysis experiment known as ChemCam.

Damian Dovarganes / AP

Curiosity rover scientists Justin Maki, John Grotzinger and Michael Malin discuss Martian imagery showing a Mojave-like scene on Wednesday.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

This Picassoesque self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity rover is based on images taken by the navigation cameras on the rover's mast. The camera snapped pictures all the way around the rover while pointing down at the rover deck, up and straight ahead. Those images are shown here in a polar projection.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

The first image taken by the navigation cameras on NASA's Curiosity rover shows the shadow of the rover's now-upright mast in the center, and the arm's shadow at left. The arm itself can be seen in the foreground. The position of the shadow helps confirm the sun's location. The rover's name and a simplified smartphone tag are emblazoned on a piece of hardware in the foreground.

One Navcam image shows the shadow of the mast against the gravelly ground surrounding the rover, with pieces of hardware in the foreground. The picture includes a pixelated rover logo that JPL plans to incorporate into an augmented-reality "Virtual Rover" smartphone app.

"Right now, [the logo] does not link to anything, as we will be working with it as Curiosity begins exploring," Michelle Viotti, Mars public engagement manager at JPL, said in an email. "It's a way to increase immersion for public audiences following the mission through 3-D modeling and other techniques — bringing supplemental info into a real environment in a way that's interactive."

Another black-and-white image documents Curiosity's environment at Gale Crater: There's an intriguing trench that was apparently scoured out during the rover's descent, just a few yards (meters) away; and there are what appear to be imposing peaks at the crater rim, more than 12 miles (20 kilometers) away.

Grotzinger said the trench could serve as a "freebie" for studying the Martian subsurface. "It's a bird in the hand right there," he said. When asked whether the blast of the thrusters on Curiosity's sky-crane descent stage might have exposed minerals worth analyzing, Grotzinger replied, "Sure, why not."  

Rover is in for the long haul
Curiosity's prime mission is to study Martian rock and soil to find out whether the types of carbon compounds associated with organic processes might be present. Finding such compounds might lead scientists to conclude that the Red Planet was potentially habitable in ancient times, and provide pointers for future exploration. The big prize is a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain in the crater's interior, known as Aeolis Mons or Mount Sharp. The mountain's layers of rock are expected to document billions of years of Mars' geological history.

Grotzinger and his colleagues say they may devote the first Earth year of the mission to studying the ground between the landing site and the mountain, roughly 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) away. Curiosity's primary mission is due to last almost two Earth years, or one complete Mars year, but scientists hope that the nuclear-powered rover will last much longer than that.

Trosper said that the rover was in good shape, and that previously reported problems with Curiosity's REMS weather station have been cleared. "The instrument is completely healthy," she said.

Another scientific instrument, known as the Radiation Assessment Detector or RAD, took its first measurements of cosmic rays and solar radiation on the Martian surface over the past day, said Don Hassler, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute who's in charge of the RAD experiment. He noted that the measurements were made 100 years after Austrian physicist Victor Hess made the first observations of cosmic rays from Earth.

"We've learned a lot in the last 100 years," Hassler said. The RAD instrument picked up multiple spikes of heavy-ion radiation that could be a concern for future human explorers, he said.

Sharper images
Michael Malin, a Curiosity team member as well as the head of San Diego-based Malin Space Science Systems, said that high-resolution color pictures taken by the rover during its descent on Sunday night were gradually being sent down to Earth. They'll soon be assembled into an animation with much more detail than the low-res version that was released earlier this week.

Malin also showed off before-and-after imagery from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, pointing out six disturbed spots where tungsten ballast weights fell after they were discarded by the descending spacecraft. Previous imagery from MRO showed where Curiosity's parachute and backshell, as well as its heat shield and descent stage, hit the dirt. There are currently no plans to visit any of those sites, primarily because they're low-priority scientific targets.

The Curiosity team is currently considering what route the rover should take in the short term, even as the instrument checkout continues. The next milestones on the time line include the return of high-resolution color pictures from the two Mastcam imagers, and the release of high-resolution, 360-degree panoramas. (A low-resolution all-around panorama from the navigation cameras was made available today.)

The six-wheeled rover is expected to take its first drive sometime during the next few weeks, depending on how the checkout goes.

Trosper cleared up one question that has bedeviled the clock-watchers covering the mission: Exactly when did Curiosity touch down? The official time, she said, was 10:17:57 p.m. PT on Sunday (1:17:57 a.m. ET or 05:17:57 GMT Monday). When the 14 minutes of light-travel time between Mars and Earth are added in, that suggests that first word of the landing was received at 10:31 p.m. PT, which is in line with the schedule that NASA announced in advance. It took at least a few seconds more for Curiosity's fans, in JPL's mission control room and around the world, to react to the alert.

More about Mars:

• Tour the Martian Mojave in 3-D
• Flying saucer spotted over Mars
• First 3-D pictures sent by Curiosity
• Orbital photo spots rover and its trash
• Curiosity sends color snapshot from Mars
• Rover video looks down on Mars during landing
• Mars orbiter spots rover in midair
• NASA's Mohawk Guy marvels at his fame
• Curiosity rover scores touchdown on Mars
• Mars probe provides radiation revelations
• Video: Highlights from rover's first two days on Mars

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL / James Canvin / Martian Vistas

This stereo image from NASA's Curiosity rover shows the view looking out toward the rim of Gale Crater on Mars. Put on red-blue glasses to get the 3-D effect.

Two dimensions just aren't enough to get a sense of the Earthlike terrain that surrounds NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars — fortunately, weather researcher and former astronomer James Canvin adds some depth to the view in this 3-D version of a partial panorama from Curiosity's navigation cameras.

We're using a cropped version of Canvin's anaglyph, which shows the view looking northwest toward Gale Crater's eroded rim. You'll have to visit Canvin's Martian Vistas website to see the full wide-screen image.

If you put on red-blue spectacles, you can clearly make out the rolling terrain between the rover and the rim. In the foreground, there are two spots that have apparently been carved out by blasts from the rover's descent-stage thrusters. The 3-D stitching process results in a bit of visual discontinuity around one of the spots, but you get the idea.

Most of Curiosity's cameras come in pairs, including the Navcams as well as the color Mastcam imagers, so we can look forward to many more stereo views over the coming years. But to see red-blue pictures like this in their full 3-D glory, you'll need special specs — which you can order from NASA's list of providers or perhaps find at a local novelty shop.

We usually do a 3-D glasses giveaway on Fridays, as part of the "Where in the Cosmos" picture quiz on the Cosmic Log Facebook page. Be sure to click the "like" button for Cosmic Log on Facebook and get ready for Friday's giveaway.

More about Mars:

• Curiosity sends pictures of a Martian Mojave
• Flying saucer spotted over Mars
• First 3-D pictures sent by Curiosity
• Orbital photo spots rover and its trash
• Curiosity sends color snapshot from Mars
• Rover video looks down on Mars during landing
• Mars orbiter spots rover in midair
• NASA's Mohawk Guy marvels at his fame
• Curiosity rover scores touchdown on Mars
• Mars probe provides radiation revelations
• Video: Highlights from rover's first two days on Mars

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other science and space stories, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. Also, check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

This color full-resolution image showing the heat shield of NASA's Curiosity rover was obtained during descent to the surface of Mars on Aug. 5 PT (Aug. 6 ET). The image was obtained by the Mars Descent Imager, known as MARDI, and shows the 15-foot (4.5-meter) diameter heat shield when it was about 50 feet (16 meters) from the spacecraft. This image shows the inside surface of the heat shield, with its protective insulation. The bright patches are calibration targets for MARDI. Also seen in this image is the MEDLI hardware attached to the inside surface. At this range, the image has a spatial scale of 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) per pixel.

This is no science-fiction movie or UFO hoax: It's a real picture of the heat shield falling away from NASA's Mars Curiosity rover, snapped by a camera on the rover's underside just a couple of minutes before Sunday night's landing. We've already seen a low-resolution movie clip of Curiosity's descent, as recorded by the Mars Descent Imager (a.k.a. MARDI). This is the first high-resolution MARDI imagery to be sent down.

Eventually, hundreds of frames will be transmitted to Earth and combined to create a high-res movie showing the rover's-eye view of Curiosity's touchdown on the Red Planet. "This is the good stuff," said Mike Malin, who heads up the MARDI team.

The imagery has already been compared with pictures taken by satellites orbiting Mars to figure out exactly where Curiosity ended up. Still more of Curiosity's high-resolution cameras are due to get up and running in the days ahead.

This picture, showing a field of dark dunes running across the red Martian soil inside Gale Crater, is just part of one full-resolution frame: For another version of the wide-angle view, sweetened with a little extra image processing, check out Emily Lakdawalla's post on the Planetary Society blog.

Stay tuned for the rest of the movie from Mars. I have a feeling it'll have a happy ending.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

In this wide-angle view, the disk-shaped heat shield from the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft can be seen falling away against the backdrop of the Red Planet's Gale Crater, less than two and a half minutes before the Mars Curiosity rover's landing on Sunday night. This image is part of a full-resolution view provided by the Mars Descent Imager, a camera mounted on the bottom of the rover.

Update for 2:30 p.m. ET Aug. 8: I've added the super-amazing flying-saucer close-up at the top of this item, as well as a video featuring Mike Malin of Malin Space Science Systems, explaining the MARDI image as well as some of the attractions seen from orbit.

More amazing sights from the Curiosity mission:

• Orbital photo spots rover and its trash
• Curiosity sends color snapshot from Mars
• Rover video looks down on Mars during landing
• Mars orbiter spots rover in midair
• NASA's Mohawk Guy marvels at his fame
• Curiosity rover scores touchdown on Mars
• Video: Highlights from rover's first two days on Mars

Hat tip to Doug Ellison at UnmannedSpaceFlight.com and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA's Mars Curiosity rover is in fine shape, but the sky crane that lowered the car-sized, 1-ton craft to the Red Planet's surface is not looking so good. That's plain to see from the "crime scene photo" provided by Curiosity's high-flying sister probe, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The orbital image, released today, not only shows Curiosity and the sky crane, but the rover's parachute, backshell and heat shield as well. The picture was snapped on Monday night (Pacific Time), about 24 hours after the sky crane executed a perfect maneuver to lower Curiosity to its landing spot in Gale Crater, then flew away for a planned crash landing.

Sarah Milkovich, a member of the orbiter's science team, unveiled the latest jaw-dropping image during today's news briefing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The debris scattered around the rover documents each step of the Mars Science Laboratory's nail-biter of a landing sequence.

"It's like a crime scene photo here," she said.

The heat shield is visible toward the lower right corner of the scene, which is part of a larger strip of imagery acquired by the orbiter. NASA's schedule for Curiosity's landing called for that disk-shaped part of the spacecraft to be thrown off two and a half minutes before landing — and in fact you can see the shield falling away in a video released Monday. Milkovich said it landed about three-quarters of a mile (1,200 meters) from the rover's landing site.

Curiosity's backshell and its attached parachute are spread out southwest of the rover, about four-tenths of a mile (615 meters) away. Those pieces were jettisoned from the spacecraft about a minute before landing. You can see them still attached to the rover in a different picture taken by the orbiter during Curiosity's descent.

The sky crane was the last piece of the landing puzzle: It was a rocket-powered platform designed to reduce the descent velocity to a near-standstill, and then drop the rover to the ground on the end of three strong cables. When the rover hit the surface, the cables were cut with explosive charges, and the sky crane flew itself away to avoid crashing on top of the rover. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's picture shows the dark streaks left behind by the crane's crash, about a half-mile (650 meters) to the northwest. The blast pattern suggests that the crane hit the dirt obliquely, Milkovich said.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona

This view shows the whole scene around the Curiosity rover, as captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Click on the image for a larger view, or check out NASA's close-ups for the rover, the parachute, the sky crane and the heat shield.

Analyzing the crime scene
At each site where something landed, the relatively bright material on the surface has been disrupted, exposing darker material beneath, Milkovich said. The pattern of dark and light material around the rover supports the view that Curiosity is oriented along a northwest-to-southeast axis, with the rover's front facing the 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain known as Aeolis Mons or Mount Sharp.

"You're getting the same information from orbit as you're getting from the ground, and that really makes you feel very good," Milkovich said.

Some observers noted that images taken just after the landing, by a rear-facing camera on Curiosity, seemed to show a puff of dust rising from a spot northwest of the rover — and they hypothesized that the disturbance was caused by the sky crane's crash. Now the orbital imagery shows that the spot really is roughly where the wreckage is located. A reporter asked Mike Watkins, one of the mission managers for Curiosity's $2.5 billion mission, whether the hypothesis could actually be right.

"I don't think you can rule it out, based on this image," Watkins replied.

In order to get the shot, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter had to be rolled to an unusually high 41-degree angle, producing a sidelong view similar to what you'd see from an airplane window. The picture was taken from a height of roughly 186 miles (300 kilometers), yielding a resolution of 15 inches (39 centimeters) per pixel.  Future pictures are expected to show the hardware in greater detail.

Kenneth Edgett, a member of the Curiosity team from Malin Space Science Systems, said the picture showed three different types of geological formations converging on a point near Curiosity's landing site. "If it were up to me, I would go where those three come together," Edgett said. Nature's Eric Hand provides more detail on Curiosity's potential future route. However, mission managers say it's too early to tell exactly which places the rover will visit.

There's one place the rover will definitely not visit: the sky crane crash scene. Engineers estimate that there were still about 300 pounds (140 kilograms) of hydrazine rocket fuel left over from the sky-crane platform's 880-pound (400-kilogram) supply when the crash occurred. Mission managers want to make sure the rover avoids having its scientific instruments contaminated by the fuel that was splashed around the impact zone.

Steven Lee via Twitter

The Curiosity mission's team for entry, descent and landing evaluates an orbital image that shows the impact location for the sky-crane descent stage on Mars.

Curiosity is getting busy
Watkins said the rover is in good shape. It's already taking lots of pictures and acquiring scientific data with its RAD experiment (which reads radiation levels) and its REMS weather station. Over the next day, mission managers will tweak the REMS settings to get it in better working order, and fine-tune the orientation of Curiosity's high-gain antenna to get it pointing more directly at Earth.

By Wednesday, Curiosity's mast should be raised to its full height of 7 feet (2.1 meters) above the ground, which will clear the way for the checkout of the mast's science and navigation cameras. The first high-resolution, 360-degree views of Curiosity's surroundings could become available in the next day or two.

Curiosity will be gathering data for at least the next two years, with the prime objectives of unraveling billions of years' worth of the geological record at Mount Sharp and looking for chemical evidence that could show whether or not Mars was ever potentially habitable. There'll be lots of cool pictures ahead, but Watkins said the early pictures are particularly treasured because they show places that have never been seen up close before.

"These are the days that people have worked five or 10 years for, going on right now," he said.

Update for 5:45 p.m. ET: Thanks to JPL's Steven Lee for sharing his picture of the entry, descent and landing team poring over the picture of the sky crane crash site. Lee also reports on the winner of the team's office pool to predict the landing location: Congratulations to entry controller designer Paul Brugarolas. 

More about the Curiosity mission:

• Curiosity sends color snapshot from Mars
• Rover video looks down on Mars during landing
• Mars orbiter spots rover in midair
• NASA's Mohawk Guy marvels at his fame
• Curiosity rover scores touchdown on Mars
• Mars probe provides radiation revelations
• Video: Highlights from rover's first two days on Mars

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spots the Curiosity rover and its parachute during its descent on Sunday night, just a minute before landing.

NASA's Curiosity rover may be the star of the Martian show, but it was the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter that wowed the crowd this morning with an incredible picture of the rover at the end of its parachute, six minutes into its "seven minutes of terror."

The orbiter's imaging team had planned the shot for months, and the payoff came Sunday night when MRO snapped the picture from a distance of 211 miles (340 kilometers). At the time, Curiosity was about 2 miles (3 kilometers) above the Martian surface, still protected inside its Mars Science Laboratory back shell and heat shield.

Journalists applauded when the image was unveiled at this morning's news briefing by Sarah Milkovich, a scientist on the team for MRO's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE.

"If HiRISE took the image one second before or one second after, we probably would be looking at an empty Martian landscape," Milkovich said in a news release. "When you consider that we have been working on this sequence since March and had to upload commands to the spacecraft about 72 hours prior to the image being taken, you begin to realize how challenging this picture was to obtain."

Milkovich said the image resolution was 13.2 inches (33.6 centimeters) per pixel. The operation was more difficult to take than expected, due to the relative positions of the two spacecraft as their paths crossed, but MRO managed to get the shot and send it back overnight. In the days ahead, the orbiter has been programmed to take additional pictures of the rover on the ground, within Gale Crater.

"Guess you could consider us the closest thing to paparazzi on Mars," Milkovich said. "We definitely caught NASA's newest celebrity in the act."

By the way, this isn't the first time MRO has caught a falling star on Mars: Back in 2008, the orbiter snapped a similarly amazing picture of Phoenix Mars Lander during its descent to the Red Planet's north polar region.

Update for 7:55 p.m. Aug. 7: Another section of the same image apparently shows the spacecraft's heat shield, which was flung away from Curiosity just before this picture was taken. The fact that the disk-shaped shield is standing out in such sharp relief against the background of the Martian terrain, with no disturbance surrounding it, suggests that we're seeing it as it's falling through the air. Here's the wide-angle view:

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona

This is a wide-angle view of Gale Crater's interior, seen during the descent of the Curiosity rover. The upper inset zeroes in on the rover's backshell and parachute, while the lower inset appears to show the spacecraft's heat shield descending separately.

A post-landing picture from MRO shows Curiosity as well as the heat shield and other spacecraft components on the ground.

More about Mars:

• Curiosity rover scores touchdown on Mars
• Scientists want to look for Martian life
• Last-minute guide to the Mars landing
• What will we see from Mars, and when will we see it?
•  Why we're obsessed with Mars
• Mars probe provides radiation revelations

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

ESA

This natural-color view of the Danielson and Kalocsa craters and their surroundings in the Arabia Terra region was captured by the High-Resolution Stereo Camera on the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter on June 19, 2011.

In honor of science-fiction legend Ray Bradbury's passing, here's a totally non-fictional Martian chronicle: a picture of two craters on the Red Planet that record how the climate has changed over the course of billions of years.

The photo, sent back by the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter and released today, focuses on the Kalocsa and Danielson craters in Mars' Arabia Terra region. Danielson is the larger crater, measuring roughly 38 miles (60 kilometers) across. Kalocsa is smaller (20 miles, or 33 kilometers across) and about a half-mile (1 kilometer) shallower.

The most noticeable features on Danielson's crater floor are the dark, eroded layers of sediments and streamlined hills known as yardangs. In today's photo advisory, ESA's science team explains that the sediments appear to have been cemented by water, possibly from an ancient deep groundwater reservoir, and then were eroded by the wind.

The orientation of the yardangs suggests that strong north-northeasterly winds initially deposited the sediments, and eroded them during a later, drier period of Martian history. Danielson's layers may chronicle fluctuations in the climate of Mars, triggered by changes in the planet's axis of rotation.

In contrast, Kalocsa's crater floor is smooth, with no layered sediments. This may be because the crater is too shallow to have reached the groundwater reservoir, or because the crater was blasted into the Martian surface after the water in the reservoir was lost.

One of Bradbury's best-known books, "The Martian Chronicles," spins tales about the disappearance of an ancient Red Planet civilization. The disappearance of the Red Planet's ancient water is a story worthy of the Ray Bradbury treatment, and fresh chapters of that story are sure to be written after NASA's Mars Science Laboratory lands in Gale Crater in August.

Someday, a crater on Mars may well bear Bradbury's name — but Mars Society President Robert Zubrin had something even grander in mind when he issued a tribute to the author:

"I was saddened today to hear of the death of Ray Bradbury.  I first read Bradbury's 'The Martian Chronicles' when I was in elementary school.  He was one of those who inspired me, and I'm sure millions of others, with the vision of a new world.  While science has since shown nearly all the details of Bradbury's Lowellian Mars to have little relationship to reality, still, I think on a deeper level he was fundamentally right.  The human future need not be limited to the Earth.  It is from imagination that reality springs.  There are no crystalline cities on Mars, yet, but there will be someday.  Perhaps one of the first should be named after Ray."

I'm certain that "Bradbury" will be a future destination on Mars, whether it's Bradbury Crater or Bradbury City. What do you think? Feel free to leave your tributes as comments below.

More about Ray Bradbury and Mars:

• The Last Word: Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012
• Science-fiction legend Ray Bradbury dies at 91
• Scientists and sci-fi authors alike mourn Ray Bradbury
• Ray Bradbury foresaw the future — and didn't trust it
• Cosmic Log archive on Mars

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.