The space probe Shoemaker landed bouncing on the asteroid Eros yesterday - the first time any craft has landed on this kind of space rock.
The unmanned craft kept sending signals even after it touched down on the cosmic object 196 million miles from Earth.
"Are we on the surface?" mission director Mr Robert Farquhar called to colleagues in the control room in suburban Washington during the voyage's last moments.
"We haven't lost the signal yet . . . It looks to me like it might have touched down and come back up again, but we'll see."
Minutes later Mr Farquhar faced a camera in the control room and jubilantly declared: "I'm happy to report that the spacecraft has touched down on the surface of Eros. We are still getting some signals, so evidently it's still transmitting from the surface itself."
Mr Ed Weiler, NASA head of space science, said the mission would give space voyagers practice for future landings on asteroids and even on comets.
Asteroids and comets are primordial bodies that could give clues to the beginning of the solar system.
Mr Farquhar and other scientists had given the craft less than a 1 per cent chance of being able to send signals back to Earth after it reached the asteroid's boulder-strewn surface.
Just as Mr Farquhar and his colleagues planned, the craft's terminal velocity - the speed it was going when it came to rest on the asteroid - was about 3.5 m.p.h. - the speed a pedestrian might walk on Earth.
But with gravity about one-thousandth that of Earth a big bounce was always a possibility.
Reuters