The science rover Curiosity took a break from instrument checks on its third full day on Mars to beam back more pictures from the Red Planet, including its first self-portrait and a 360-degree colour view of its home in Gale Crater, Nasa said.

The panoramic mosaic, comprising 130 separate images that Curiosity captured with its newly activated navigation cameras, shows a rust-coloured, pebble-strewn expanse stretching to a wall of the crater’s rim in one direction and a tall mound of layered rock in another.

That formation, named Mount Sharp, stands at the centre of the vast, ancient impact crater and several kilometres from where Curiosity touched down at the end of an eight-month voyage across 566 million kilometres of space.

The layers of exposed rock are thought to hold a wealth of Mars’ geologic history, making it the main target of exploration for scientists who will use the rover to seek evidence of whether the planet most similar to earth might now harbour or once have hosted key ingredients for microbial life.

But mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles are exercising caution immediately following Curiosity’s jarring, death-defying descent to the surface on Sunday night.

They plan to spend weeks putting the nuclear-powered, six-wheeled rover and its sophisticated array of instruments through a painstaking series of “health” checks before embarking on the thrust of their science mission in earnest.

The $2.5 billion Curiosity project, formally named the Mars Science Laboratory, is Nasa’s first astrobiology mission since the Viking probes of the 1970s and is touted as the first fully equipped mobile geochemistry lab ever sent to a distant world.

After three full days on the Red Planet, “Curiosity continues to behave flawlessly” and has “executed all planned activities” without a hitch, mission manager Michael Watkins said at a JPL news briefing.

The latest round of equipment checks included an instrument designed to determine mineral composition of powdered rock and soil samples; one to analyse soil and atmospheric samples for organic compounds; one to detect traces of water locked in shallow mineral deposits; and another that uses particle X-rays to identify chemical elements in rocks and soils.

The very delivery of Curiosity to the surface of Mars already has been hailed by Nasa as the greatest feat of robotic spaceflight.

The car-sized rover, which flew from earth encased in a protective capsule, blasted into the Martian sky at hypersonic speed and landed safely seven minutes later after an elaborate, daredevil descent combining a giant parachute with a rocket-pack that lowered the rover to the Martian surface on a tether.

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