New HD Video Lets You Plummet to Mars With Curiosity
By Adam Mann
Watching this amazing high-definition video of Curiositys hair-raising landing on Mars will make you clutch at your armrest. Compiled from the probes MARDI descent camera, it is the best landing video yet and gives you a chance to experience what its like to ride along with the rover down to the Martian surface.
The video starts with Curiositys 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 Curiositys powered descent sequence.
Though they cant 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 Curiositys 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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