he spacecraft Phoenix landed successfully on the northern plains of Mars, ending a circuitous journey of 423 million miles over a 10-month period to reach the red planet.

The touchdown, at about 8 pm Eastern time, was the first successful soft landing on Mars. After a dramatic voyage half-way around the sun, Phoenix entered the Martian Arctic, where it separated, as per plan, by firing pyrotechnics from the 900-pound, three-legged lander, touching down near the north pole of Mars.

"It could not have gone better, not in my dreams," said Barry Goldstein, NASA's project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

The entire process took about seven minutes - dubbed the "seven minutes of terror" by mission specialists. During that time the probe had to slow itself from 12,700 miles (20,438 kilometers) an hour to 5 miles per hour before gently setting down on Martian permafrost. The spacecraft's red-and-white striped parachute was deployed about 7.8 miles above the surface, slowing the lander's speed from 1,100 mph to 120 mph in 3.3 minutes.

During the final four minutes, Phoenix deployed a parachute, cast off a heat shield and lowered its lander legs. At that point, the lander's ground-seeking radar switched on, sending its signals to Mars Odyssey, the orbiter flying directly overhead and relaying all signals to the antennae of NASA's Deep Space Network. With a 130-pound cargo of instruments and a robotic digging arm to probe for ancient water and ice, the lander's three legs settled gently onto a rock-free Martian surface.

Successful in its landing, the Phoenix is ready to begin an intensive search for life beyond Earth.

The schedule planned for a 15-minute pause while the Martian dust of red-brown particles settled. Once settled, the lander's two broad fan-shaped solar panels would open to provide electricity and replace the spacecraft's expected-to-be-depleted batteries.

Because the planet is 171 million miles away, it took 15 minutes at the speed of light for the first radio signal of success to reach earth, relayed from Mars Odyssey, the orbiter flying high above the landing site. If the checkout goes well, the craft could flex its arm for the first time on Tuesday, and could take the first soil sample within the next week or two.

Successful in its landing, the Phoenix is ready to begin an intensive search for life beyond Earth. Phoenix is equipped with a 7.7-foot arm to sample what scientists believe is the water-rich Martian subsurface, but The unit will have to dig through permafrost. Each scoop will be heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit and transferred to the UTD spectrometer, which will analyze the substance.

This landing took more than a decade of planning, five years of painstaking tests, and ten months of flying on its long looping course through space before Phoenix triumphed. The blue-and-gold lander is the cornerstone of a $457 million mission designed to determine whether the chemical building blocks of life ever existed on Mars. The methodical soil studies could unfold over three months. SLN, NewsExtensions.com