And the second picture shared was captioned: "There's a quiet beauty here. Looking forward to exploring my new home."
The picture was taken with the Instrument Deployment Camera (IDC), on the robotic arm of Nasa's InSight lander a few hours after the spacecraft landed, Nasa said.
The camera's transparent dust cover was still on when the image was taken, to prevent particulates kicked up during landing from settling on the camera's lens.
The vehicle appeared to be in good shape, according to the first communications received.
InSight has sent signals to Earth indicating that its solar panels are open and collecting sunlight on the Martian surface, Nasa said.
It's the first spacecraft built to explore the deep interior of another world, carrying instruments to detect planetary heat and seismic rumblings never measured anywhere but earth.
After waiting in white-knuckle suspense for confirmation to arrive from space, people hugged, shook hands, exchanged high-fives, pumped their fists, wiped away tears and danced in the aisles.
"Flawless," declared JPL's chief engineer Rob Manning. "This is what we really hoped and imagined in our mind's eye," he said. "Sometimes things work out in your favour."
Vice-President Mike Pence called to congratulate the US space agency for its hard work.
Because of the distance between Earth and Mars, it took eight minutes for confirmation to arrive, relayed by a pair of tiny satellites that had been trailing InSight throughout the six-month, 482-million- kilometre journey.
The two satellites not only transmitted the good news in almost real time, they also sent back InSight's first snapshot of Mars just 4 minutes after landing. The picture was speckled with dirt because the dust cover was still on the lander's camera, but the terrain at first glance looked smooth and sandy with just one sizable rock visible - pretty much what scientists had hoped for.
Much better pictures will arrive in the hours and days ahead.
"What a relief," Manning told AP. "This is really fantastic." He added: "Wow! This never gets old."
It was Nasa's - indeed, humanity's - eighth successful landing at Mars since the 1976 Viking probes, and the first in six years. Nasa's Curiosity rover, which arrived in 2012, is still on the move on Mars.
The three-legged InSight probe, catapulted thanks to a US$1 billion international venture, was designed to burrow beneath the surface of the red planet after the journey.
The spacecraft reached the surface after being slowed by a parachute, supported by braking engines because of Mars' thin atmosphere.
The plan called for the spacecraft to go from 19,800km/h to zero in six minutes flat as it pierced the Martian atmosphere and settled on the surface.
"Landing on Mars is one of the hardest single jobs that people have to do in planetary exploration," said InSight's lead scientist, Bruce Banerdt.
"It's such a difficult thing, it's such a dangerous thing that there's always a fairly uncomfortably large chance that something could go wrong."
Mars has been the graveyard for a multitude of space missions. Up until now, the success rate at the red planet has been only 40 per cent, counting every attempted fly-by, orbital flight and landing by the US, Russia and other countries since 1960.
The US however, has pulled off seven successful Mars landings in the past four decades, not counting InSight, with only one failed touchdown. No other country has managed to set and operate a spacecraft on the dusty red surface.
"We never take Mars for granted. Mars is hard," Thomas Zurbuchen, Nasa associate administrator for the science mission directorate told reporters.
InSight was shooting for Elysium Planitia, a plain near the Martian equator that the InSight team hopes is as flat as a parking lot in Kansas with few, if any, rocks. First images appear to confirm this has been achieved.
WHAT INSIGHT WILL DO
No lander has dug deeper on Mars than several inches, and no seismometer has ever worked on the planet.
The stationary 360kg lander will use its 1.8m robotic arm to place a mechanical mole and seismometer on the ground. The self-hammering mole will burrow five metres down to measure the planet's internal heat, while the seismometer listens for possible quakes.
Germany is in charge of InSight's mole, while France is in charge of the seismometer.
By examining the interior of Mars, scientists hope to understand how our solar system's rocky planets formed 4.5 billion years ago and why they turned out so different — Mars cold and dry, Venus and Mercury burning hot, and Earth hospitable to life.
InSight has no life-detecting capability, however. That will be left to future rovers, such as Nasa's Mars 2020 mission, which will collect rocks that will eventually be brought back to Earth and analysed for evidence of ancient life.
Earlier, project manager Tim Hoffin said the success of the InSight landing won't be fully clear for a number of hours.
"We'll definitely have a celebration when we get successfully landed but we're going to have to temper that just a little bit while we wait about five-and-a- half hours to know absolutely for sure we're in good shape," he said.
InSight will spend 24 months, about one Martian year, examining Mars.
While Earth's tectonics and other forces have erased most evidence of its early history, much of Mars is believed to have remained largely static, creating a geological time machine for scientists.
