Mars

Pictures downloaded to Earth on Friday indicate the excursion was a short roll and turn.

It's two weeks now since the one-tonne robot landed on the Red Planet.

Engineers have spent the time commissioning the vehicle and its many systems, including its instruments and robotic arm.

Perseverance's mission is to explore a near-equatorial crater called Jezero, to search for evidence of past life.

This will involve roving some 15km over the coming Martian year (roughly two Earth years).

The American space agency has successfully landed its Perseverance rover in a deep crater near the planet's equator called Jezero.

Engineers at Nasa's mission control in California erupted with joy when confirmation of touchdown came through.

The six-wheeled vehicle will now spend at least the next two years drilling into the local rocks, looking for evidence of past life.

Jezero is thought to have held a giant lake billions of years ago. And where there's been water, there's the possibility there might also have been life.

In his photo series "Greetings from Mars," photographer Julien Mauve imagines life as a tourist on the Red Planet -- selfie-stick and all.

The irreverent photos were awarded the 2016 Sony World Photography Award for professional conceptual photography.

CNN Style spoke to Mauve to find out why he turned his lens to life on mars.

What inspired "Greeting from Mars"?

"It suggests that it would be possible for there to be life today on Mars," NASA's science mission chief, John Grunsfeld, said at a news conference.

Scientists in 2008 confirmed the existence of frozen water on Mars. But instruments aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have yielded the strongest evidence yet that salt water in liquid form flows down certain Martian slopes each summer, according to the researchers.