Phoenix, the Mars Lander whose mission is to collect information about the ice in the soil of the planet, has successfully landed and has beamed back the first images it took on Mars.

After a journey of more than 425 million miles, the mission successfully completed the most difficult and dangerous stage, the landing. The Phoenix Mars Lander has entered the planet’s atmosphere at 13,000 miles per hours and has slowed down to 5 mph in only 7 minutes.

The landing method was one that hasn’t been used for over 30 years for missions on Mars’s surface. Barry Goldstein, mission controller at Jet Propulsion Laboratories said that the Lander has touched down on the planet without any vertical velocity after a procedure in which both a parachute and 12 propulsion rockets were used to achieve this.

Now that Phoenix has completed most of its post landing procedures it will be ready to start taking soil and ice samples of Mars’s surface and analyze them in its miniature laboratories. The samples will be obtained using an 8 ft robotic arm. It is considered that the ice located at the planet’s poles, where Phoenix landed, has a temperature so low that it is as hard as concrete.

Mars orbiter Odyssey has already found ice in the soil of the planet, but Phoenix is going to be the first mission to ever get samples of it and test them.

Even though this mission is not planned to search for life, it is possible that the geological information that the scientists will have access at will provide information about whether life has been or is possible on Mars.