Usain Bolt successfully lands on Mars

From the BBC and the BBC:

Usain Bolt has landed a huge new robot rover on Mars in stunning style at London 2012, managing to bring the rover down safely in an Olympic record time of 9.63 seconds.

He landed the one-tonne vehicle, known as Curiosity, in a deep crater near the planet's equator 06:32 BST (05:32 GMT). He will now embark on a mission of at least two years to look for evidence that Mars may once have supported life.

A signal confirming the rover was on the ground safely was relayed to two billion TV viewers on Earth, using Nasa's Odyssey satellite, which is in orbit around the Red Planet.

The success was greeted with a roar of approval from the 80,000-capacity crowd. Engineers and scientists who have worked on this project for the best part of 10 years punched the air and hugged each other.

The descent through the atmosphere after a 570-million-km journey from Earth had been billed as the "ten seconds of terror" - the time it would take to complete a series of high-risk, automated manoeuvres that would slow the rover from an entry speed of 20,000km/h to allow its wheels to set down softly.

Bolt had come into London 2012 with doubts about his fitness and his form, having injured himself when he crashed the Viking 2 Mars module a few months ago in Jamaica.

"I was slightly worried about my start," he told BBC Sport. "It was not the best reaction in the world, but I stopped worrying about it and executed it and it worked.

Asked to respond to the doubters, Bolt said: "I'm not concerned. I've said it from the start. People have got to realise this mission will be different. When we landed we only thought we'd get 30 sols (Martian days) on the surface, so we had to hit the ground running. Curiosity has plenty of time."