Nasa's Curiosity rover has beamed back a video taken from the vehicle itself showing the last two minutes of its journey to Mars, including the landing.
The recording begins with the protective heat shield falling away and ends with dust being kicked up as the six-wheeled rover was lowered by cables inside an ancient crater.
The low-resolution footage was described as a sneak preview as it will take some time before full-resolution frames are transmitted depending on other priorities.
The full video "will just be exquisite," said chief scientist Michael Malin.
Nasa has also released more black-and-white images of the surface of Mars, including the landing site and the mountain it aims to climb as it tries to discover if the Red Planet could have once supported life.
Mount Sharp is 3.4 miles high and scientists think its layers may hold clues to past environmental change.
Because the thin Martian atmosphere offers little friction to slow a spacecraft down, Curiosity had to go from 13,000mph to zero in what was described as "seven minutes of terror", unfurling a parachute, then firing rockets to brake.
Cables then delicately lowered the one-ton rover, which is the size of a Mini, to the ground at 2mph.
At \$2.5bn (£1.6bn), the project is the most expensive and ambitious mission to the Red Planet.
The nuclear-powered Curiosity will dig into the Martian surface to analyse what is there and search for some of the molecular building blocks of life, including carbon.
It will not start moving for a couple of weeks, because all the systems on the rover have to be checked.
Colour photos and panoramic images will start being transmitted in the next few days.
The project also aims to study the Martian environment to prepare for a possible human mission there in the coming years. President Barack Obama has vowed to send humans to the planet by 2030.
The spacecraft has already collected data on radiation during its eight-and-a-half-month, 352 million mile journey following its launch in November 2011 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
