This just in from Wolfgang Hell, one of our ESTRACK engineers looking after the ESA station support to MSL. ESA’s 35m New Norcia (NNO) station made contact with MSL earlier this afternoon — and the connection went fine! Wolfgang wrote:

We had a fully nominal MSL pass over NNO and NASA JPL reports that the telemetry obtained via the first communication chain at NNO was error free. I expect reports for data receipt from chains 2 and 3 during the upcoming telecon.