Joy as NASA spacecraft touches down on Mars

US space explorers successfully landed a craft on Mars on Monday, and it has already started sending images back to Earth. 

Audiences from around the world watched in nervous anticipation as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) delivered the spacecraft, InSight lander, to the surface of Mars.

NASA said it had taken nearly seven months for the spacecraft to complete the 458-million-kilometer journey.

According to a CBS News report ahead of the launch, NASA's principal investigator Bruce Banerdt said: "The goal of InSight is nothing less than to better understand the birth of the Earth, the birth of the planet we live on, and we're going to do that by going to Mars."

And that they certainly did. 

Barnedt said that the team behind the project now faces a new challenge. "We have to do a survey of the area in front of our spacecraft, make sure we don't put the instruments down on a rock or in a hole or something like that."

The unmanned spacecraft is remotely operated by a team based in NASA's Jet Population Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

When InSight touched down on the red planet, there was just as much excitement on social media as there was in NASA's Pasadena lab.