NASA's Curiosity rover made its first drive on Mars today, more than two weeks after its high-stakes landing on the Red Planet. To celebrate the day, as well as what would have been the late science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury's 92nd birthday, NASA said the rover's landing site would be forever known as Bradbury Landing.

The raw images, displayed on the Mars Science Laboratory mission's Web portal, showed the tracks of the rover's wheels curling around and backing up, in accordance with the driving plan that was sent up overnight.

Today's drive amounted to only about 23 feet (7 meters) of maneuvers, but it represented the first step in a $2.5 billion, two-year trek that's expected to go at least 12 miles (20 kilometers) and take in a commanding view from the flanks of a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain within 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer-wide) Gale Crater.

The mission's project manager, Peter Theisinger, said the drive "couldn't be more important."

"We built a rover," he told reporters during today's briefing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "So unless the rover roves, we couldn't really accomplish anything. It's a big moment."

The drive also marked a transition for the Curiosity team — from the entry, descent and landing phase of the mission, known as EDL, to surface operations and rover mobility. "Wheel tracks on Mars. The EDL team is finally done. :) Congrats to the mobility and surface teams!" Allen Chen, the mission's EDL operations and flight dynamics lead, declared in a Twitter update.

Lead rover driver Matt Heverly said that today's drive started at 7:17 a.m. PT (10:17 a.m. ET) and lasted roughly 16 minutes. "The majority of that time was spent taking images," he said. The rover rolled out 15 feet (4.5 meters), made a 120-degree turn in place, and then backed up 8 feet (2.5 meters) to a new spot for scientific observations.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

A polar projection image, assembled from pictures taken by the Curiosity rover's navigation cameras, shows the tracks of the rover at Bradbury Landing on Mars as seen from above.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

An image from the navigation-camera system on NASA's Curiosity rover shows the six-wheeled craft's hardware in the foreground, and wheel tracks going around a rock just a few yards (meters) away.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

A mosaic of black-and-white images shows a panoramic view of the Curiosity rover's trail, including wheel tracks leading to an area where the rover turned in a circle, and then backed up to its current position. Four blast marks, or "scours," can be made out near where the rover landed. The flanks of Mount Sharp can be seen in the far background, toward the upper left corner of the frame.

First trek will follow checkouts
Since the rover's landing on the night of Aug. 5, Curiosity has been going through a series of checkouts and taking pictures of its immediate surroundings. Nearly all of the systems are working as planned — with the sole exception of wind sensors on one of the booms connected to the rover's weather station. Scientists speculate that the circuit boards for those sensors were probably damaged by small rocks that were thrown up onto the rover during landing. Despite the damage, the weather station will be able to gather wind speed data using other sensors.

Curiosity's first destination will be a spot known as Glenelg, about a quarter-mile (400 meters) from the landing site, where three types of geological formations come together. That months-long trek could begin in about a week, deputy project scientist Joy Crisp said today. The rover's first scoop sample could be taken on the route between Bradbury Landing and Glenelg, she said, but the first drilling sample would probably be extracted at Glenelg.

By the end of the year, the nuclear-powered rover is expected to retrace its route and head toward the mountain, known as Aeolis Mons or Mount Sharp. The layers of rock along the mountainside are thought to preserve a geological record going back billions of years.

The primary goal of Curiosity's mission is to look for geological and chemical evidence that could reveal how habitable Mars might have been over eons of geological time. To take on that challenge, the 1-ton, car-sized rover has been equipped with a bevy of scientific instruments — including high-resolution color cameras, two onboard chemical labs, an X-ray spectrometer and a rock-zapping laser.

Theisinger said Curiosity was making "excellent progress" at Bradbury Landing, 16 days into a mission that could last far longer than its scheduled duration of nearly two Earth years. "We've got a long way to go before this mission reaches its full potential," he said. "But the fact that we haven't had any early problems is fantastic."

In memoriam
Michael Meyer, the lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters, announced the naming of the landing site at the start of today's news briefing. He began by airing a clip of Bradbury discussing Mars with Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan and other luminaries, just before NASA's Mariner 9 probe entered the Red Planet's orbit in 1971. During that session, Bradbury read a short poem titled "If Only We Had Taller Been."

Bradbury, best known for science-fiction tales such as "The Martian Chronicles" and "Fahrenheit 451," passed away in June at the age of 91. "Today would have been Ray Bradbury's 92nd birthday, but he's already reached immortality in his short stories and books," Meyer observed. In his honor, Meyer said the landing site would "forever be known as Bradbury Landing."

In a statement issued by NASA, Meyer said deciding on the name "was not a difficult choice for the science team."

"Many of us, and millions of other readers were inspired in our lives by stories Ray Bradbury wrote to dream of the possibility of life on Mars," he said.

Today's christening adds to NASA's list of Martian landing sites named after VIPs, including:

• Mutch Memorial Station, the Viking 1 lander site, named after Thomas Mutch, former NASA associate administrator and Viking team member.
• Soffen Memorial Station, the Viking 2 lander site, named after Gerald Soffen, NASA scientist and leader of the Viking mission.
• Sagan Memorial Station, the Mars Pathfinder landing site, named after astrophysicist Carl Sagan.
• Challenger Memorial Station, the Opportunity rover landing site, named in honor of the shuttle Challenger's fallen crew.
• Columbia Memorial Station, the Spirit rover landing site, named in honor of the shuttle Columbia's fallen crew.

More about Mars:

• 3-D adds depth to tracks on Mars
• Watch the rover fall to Mars ... in HD!
• Where's Curiosity going? Arm points the way
• Mars mega-rover wiggles its wheels
• Mars Curiosity rover flexes arm for first time
• Curiosity shoots at rock with its laser
• Britney Spears to Mars rover: What's new?
• Rover reveals more of Martian peak
• Mars rover team faces the masses
• Mars fans make viral video
• Panoramas add spin to Mars
• Mars rover survives its 'brain transplant'
• Mars orbiter gets a long look at Curiosity rover
• Reprogrammed rover getting ready to roll
• Obama tells rover team: Watch out for Martians
• Search for life to shape future Mars missions
• Why the rover has such a dinky camera and computer
• How to build your own Mars rover with Lego blocks
• The Puff on Mars: Photo mystery solved!
• Panorama reveals a colorful Mars
• NBC video: Panorama featured on 'Nightly News'
• Curiosity reveals a Martian Mojave
• Tour the Martian Mojave in 3-D
• Flying saucer spotted over Mars
• First 3-D pictures sent by Curiosity
• Orbital photo spots rover and its trash
• Curiosity sends color snapshot from Mars
• Rover video looks down on Mars during landing
• Mars orbiter spots rover in midair
• NASA's Mohawk Guy marvels at his fame
• Curiosity rover scores touchdown on Mars

This report was last updated at 5 p.m. ET.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The supermoon of 2012 is over, but the joys of moongazing are not. Even though Saturday night's lunar showing was the biggest and brightest of the year, the views are nearly as good anytime around the full moon — tonight, for example.

Photographs of the supermoon sight streamed out over online channels, including Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, blog postings and slick slideshows (such as our own roundup). They also streamed into msnbc.com's FirstPerson in-box. I've put together a selection of 10 submissions here.

The kind of supermoon we saw last night isn't exactly a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. The phenomenon, also known as a perigee moon, can be seen whenever the full moon occurs while it's near the closest point of its elliptical orbit around Earth. Last night, the moon was just 221,802 miles away from Earth, or about 15,000 miles closer than average. The moon's angular size was 14 percent wider than it is at maximum distance, and it was 30 percent brighter than minimum moonshine.

If we define a supermoon as the biggest, brightest full moon of a given year, next year's supermoon will be almost as good as this year's, on June 23, 2013. The supermoon of 2014 will be brighter, and the 2016 supermoon will outdo last year's, which got the moongazing fad started. EarthSky News has the schedule for the next few years. Some rightly note that the moon is worth watching on every night of the year, and that the full moon isn't necessarily the best time to see all the detail the lunar disk can offer. But there's nothing wrong in having an annual holiday devoted to moongazing, is there?

The next big sky event is coming up on May 20, when the new moon blots out most of the sun to create an annular solar eclipse. A wide swath of the Asia-Pacific region and North America will see a partial eclipse, while folks situated along a narrow track of territory extending from China across to the Oregon-California coast and down to Texas can witness a "Ring of Fire," in which the moon's disk covers all but the thin rim of the sun's disk. That'll be an amazing thing to see, but make sure you use proper eye protection. You can get the details from my eclipse viewing guide, and learn more about the appeal of an annular eclipse.

There's an astronomical connection between this weekend's supermoon and this month's "Ring of Fire": Because the moon was nearly as close as it can come for the full-moon phase, it's nearly as far out as it can go for the new-moon phase. Thus, the moon's apparent size is significantly smaller than usual when it tries to covers up the sun — and that's why we have a ring of fire rather than the fully blacked-out sun of a total eclipse. For that, we'll have to wait until November. Stay tuned in the weeks and months ahead for more about all these astronomical phenomena, plus June's last-in-a-lifetime transit of Venus.

Submitted by Isaiah Blount / Smooth Images / UGC

Florida photographer Isaiah Blount of Smooth Images submitted this picture of an airplane crossing the disk of the supermoon on Saturday night.

Submitted by Penny Wainwright / UGC

The supermoon looms in the skies of Louisiana, outside Farmerville.

Submitted by Campbell McCubbin / UGC

Campbell McCubbin says this is the "first glimpse of the 'supermoon' from my deck overlooking Semiahmoo Bay, White Rock, B.C., Canada."

Submitted by Prashanti Pasupuleti / UGC

Prashanti Pasupuleti of New Delhi, India, says the supermoon is "within my reach."

Submitted by Angie Lucero / UGC

Wisps of clouds waft over the supermoon in this view from Albuquerque, N.M.

Submitted by Maria Johnson / UGC

Maria Johnson took this picture of the moon around 1 a.m. ET on Sunday in Sarasota, Fla.

Submitted by Larry Shiflett / UGC

The supermoon rises over a sailboat in the waters near Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Submitted by Bianca Fister / UGC

Spring flowers are silhouetted against the supermoon in this picture from Bianca Fister of Hilton, N.Y.

Submitted by Joe Leonard / UGC

The supermoon peeks over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in a picture from Joe Leonard of Taos, N.M..

Submitted by Justine Daniel / UGC

The supermoon is partly hidden by clouds in the skies above St. Augustine on the island of Trinidad.

More about the supermoon:

• Slideshow: Greatest hits from the supermoon
• How big is that supermoon anyway?
• Wonders of sun, moon and sky
• Five moon mysteries
• Five moon myths

Many thanks to all our FirstPerson photographers, including Lynn Schneider, John McNamara, Josh Warner and Mitzi Easley.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Colorful videos prove that the astronauts on the International Space Station had the best seats in the house during last month's flare-up of auroral activity.

NASA's Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth is offering a whole new batch of time-lapse videos from the Jan. 25-30 period, when an active region on the sun was blasting out a healthy dose of electrically charged particles and lighting up Earth's upper atmosphere.

These latest videos are notable because they're assembled from still pictures that were taken at a rate of one frame per second, rather than the usual frame every three seconds. As a result, the pace of the videos is more leisurely and a somewhat closer match to the true speed of the space station.

The video above documents a minute of flight heading east from the Pacific over the Canadian West Coast, heading toward southern Alberta near Calgary. I love watching the ripples and flashes of the green aurora over Canada — seasoned with a dash of red from the atomic oxygen that exists at higher altitudes. Why is there red as well as green in the aurora? We've addressed that question before, but this Aurora FAQ from the University of Alaska provides a quick explanation.

Here are a couple more videos, tracking the space station's flight over the U.S. East Coast as well as central North America. But you don't have to stop here. Visit NASA's Gateway, which offers still photos from the space station in addition to the videos, and check out the YouTube channel for NASA Crew Earth Observations. My favorite places for space imagery also include the Fragile Oasis Facebook page, NASA astronaut Ron Garan's Google+ page and Jason Major's Lights in the Dark blog.

If auroras, atmospheric phenomena and solar activity are your thing, you can't do much better than SpaceWeather.com, which is keeping track of lovely aurora pictures like this one from Chad Blakley at Abisko National Park in Sweden. Be sure to check out Blakley's Lights Over Lapland website while you're at it.

Chad Blakley / Lights Over Lapland

Photographer Chad Blakley captured this view of the northern lights over Sweden's Abisko National Park on Feb. 6. "The lights started around 6:00 p.m. and continued into the very early hours of the morning," Blakley told SpaceWeather.com. Check out Blakley's gallery on SpaceWeather.com for still more stunning views.

AuroraMAX / CSA

The rippling northern lights share the skies with a nearly full moon over Yellowknife in Canada's Northern Territories early today, as seen by the Canadian Space Agency's AuroraMAX wide-angle camera. To keep on top of northern Canada's aurora extravaganza, check the AuroraMAX website and Twitpic account.

Update for 3:25 p.m. ET Feb. 8: I originally wrote that the pace of the latest videos from the space station was nearly a true match to the station's orbital speed, but after double-checking with the folks at Johnson Space Center, I'd say it's more accurate to call them a "truer" match than usual. The videos were assembled from still photographs that were captured by a digital camera at the rate of one frame per second, rather than the usual frame every three seconds. That makes for a slower-paced video, but not a real-time speed, because the Web video plays at a rate that's more than one frame per second.

M ore auroral glories:

• Planet looks back at northern lights
• Auroras spark awe across the north
• Northern lights go way, way south
• Speed through Lapland's lights
• Beautiful blasts from solar storms
• Get a video view of Canada's aurora
• Slideshow: The best of the northern lights
• Cosmic Log's auroral archive

David Harvey

The Geminid meteor shower was in full swing when this image was taken from Arizona's Kitt Peak National Observatory.

This week's Geminid meteor shower, one of the year's best sky shows, has been living up to expectations — as demonstrated by the photos you've sent in. We asked you to share your Geminid gems with Nightly News, and we're posting a sampling of your submissions right here. You can still send your photos to us here, and we'll add a selection to the gallery.

One of the choicest gems was sent in by David Harvey, who works at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Ariz. "It was a great shower," Harvey told me today. "We're having a warm spell here in Arizona, and it was perfectly clear."

Harvey got the picture you see above by setting up his camera at the observatory and taking a series of time exposures over the course of the night. "I would see dozens of meteors ... well over a hundred an hour," Harvey said.

That fits right in with other reports about the Geminids: Chris Peterson of Colorado's Cloudbait Observatory said on the Meteorobs mailing list that "this year's shower was very impressive, reaching a peak visual rate of about 120 meteors per hour." The International Meteor Organization recorded rates of 80 or more meteors per hour leading up to last night's expected peak.

Matt Freechack

Matt Freechack created this picture by pointing his camera north from Lake Odessa, Mich., for a 13-minute exposure. The curved arcs are star trails, and the straight lines are meteor streaks.

Two other Geminid pictures were sent in by Matt Freechack. The first is the result of a 13-minute camera exposure, looking north from Lake Odessa, Mich., at 3:20 a.m. today. "If you look closely, you can see 18 meteor trails," he wrote. But to look that closely, you'll have to peer at this enlarged view.

Freechack's last meteor of the night shows up at upper right in this snapshot, taken just before 7 a.m. looking south from Grand Rapids, Mich.

For other pictures from last night's Geminids, check out this roundup from Space.com, this collection at SpaceWeather.com, and this beaut from Photoblog.

Want to see the meteors for yourself? Even though the peak has passed, you can still spot some gems tonight. The best time for viewing comes after midnight, when the world is turning directly into the stream of cosmic grit left behind by Phaeton, a highly unorthodox asteroid. Try to find a vantage point far from city lights, where skies are clear and you have a nice, wide view of the night sky. Although the Geminids appear to emanate from the constellation Gemini, they can flash in any area of the sky.

Be sure to bundle up and get comfortable — for example, in a lounge chair or winter sleeping bag. And give your eyes at least 15 minutes to adjust to the darkness. If you want to take pictures, here's some advice from SpaceWeather.com.

You're not likely to see more than 100 meteors per hour tonight. In fact, Harvey isn't even going to try repeating his photographic feat. "Looks like the weather might be changing here," he told me, "and the peak is fairly steep. Tonight probably won't get more than 30 to 40 an hour."

But maybe you'll get lucky tonight. If you capture a gem of Geminid on camera, please share it with us.