Pasadena, Calif. ? The U.S. rover Opportunity settled safely inside a small Martian crater over the weekend and opened its eyes on a dark, brooding landscape unlike any previously seen on the planet, complete with the first outcropping of bedrock ever encountered there.

Flush with their second successful robotic landing in three weeks, and mesmerized by their first glimpses of this surreal new face of Mars, scientists were left groping for words to describe the revelations pouring in from 124 million miles away.

“I will attempt no science analysis because it looks like nothing I’ve ever seen before in my life,” Steve Squyres of Cornell University, lead rover scientist, told the rapt flight control team as Opportunity’s first images began to parade across large projection screens in mission control here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory early Sunday.

He was seeing in some directions a relentlessly smooth surface, darker than any seen by other landers, and lacking the typical rocky rubble. There were disturbed areas of somber red — possibly spots where the rover bounced and removed the overlying dark material, he said. The powder was so fine in spots that it held the imprint of the airbag seams. Then there were the prized outcroppings of light-colored, layered rock — apparently in the rim of the crater — which, he said, should serve as a kind of rare history text revealing the evolution of Mars.

‘Interplanetary hole in one’

“Holy smokes!” he interrupted himself as he glimpsed a particularly intriguing view. “Opportunity has touched down in a bizarre, alien landscape. … I’m flabbergasted. I’m astonished. I’m blown away.”

“We have scored a 300 million-mile interplanetary hole in one,” he said.

The landing of a second U.S. rover within three weeks — both times without a hitch — brought NASA’s Mars team full cycle through what several described as a wild and exhausting roller-coaster ride. They had experienced the jubilation of the Jan. 3 landing of Opportunity’s twin, Spirit, followed by more than two weeks of progress at the first site, in Gusev Crater. Then came Spirit’s sudden crippling failure Wednesday, with the worrisome possibility it would never recover, followed by engineers’ increasingly promising effort to resuscitate the 384-pound, golf-cart-sized robot.

The Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity's panoramic camera shows where the rover's airbag seams left impressions in the Martian soil. The drag marks were made after the rover landed and its airbags were retracted. The rover can be seen in the foreground. The unmanned, six-wheeled rover landed Saturday in Meridiani Planum, NASA said.

“We resurrected one rover and saw the birth of another,” said NASA’s chief space scientist Edward Weiler. Before these successes, Mars had defeated two out of every three international attempts to land there, but he noted the U.S. tally now stands at five out of six.

Work continues on Spirit

The ailing Spirit was still regarded as being in “serious” condition, project manager Pete Theisinger said Sunday afternoon, but “I think we’ve got a patient well on the way to recovery.”

The goal of both rovers is to hunt for evidence showing whether Mars ever had water in liquid form long enough for life to evolve.