Watching this amazing high-definition video of Curiosity’s hair-raising landing on Mars will make you clutch at your armrest. Compiled from the probe’s MARDI descent camera, it is the and gives you a chance to experience what it’s like to ride along with the rover down to the Martian surface.
The video starts with Curiosity’s heat shield being jettisoned from its landing stage body — comprised of the rover tucked up beneath a UFO-like platform.
The rover hovers for a while under its parachute, wobbling back and forth as it takes in the spectacular view of craters and the lower reaches of Mount Sharp, its eventual target.
Vertigo kicks in as the rover dives lower and the engines kick in for Curiosity’s powered descent sequence.
Though they can’t be seen in the video, the rover gets lowered down on 25-foot-long cables for its “sky crane” maneuver near the end.
Just before hitting the Martian soil, the engines kick up a huge amount of dust and pebbles, which obscures the ground and may be responsible for damaging one of Curiosity’s wind sensors.
The soft landing went off with pitch-perfect precision and was a big victory for NASA engineers.
This video was compiled by visual effects editor Daniel Luke Fitch from the high resolution images that the rover has beamed back.
All but a few frames from the descent video have come back at this point, with low-res thumbnails filling in for the missing ones in the video.
The images have been enhanced with noise reduction, color balance, and sharpening “to make it look as good as it could,” said Fitch.
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