Want to see what it looked like for Curiosity as it hurtled toward the surface of Mars? After the heat shield separates, the car-sized rover, still protected by its back shell, continued to fall quickly toward Mars by parachute, until it separated from the back shell and began its powered descent and touchdown (via sky crane) to the ground.
Using footage provided by NASA, Reddit user Godd2 just spent the last four days on behalf of all humankind creating a stunning interpolated HD version of the descent. In layman’s terms interpolation involves taking a choppy video, in this case NASA’s 4 frames-per-second video, and rendering the “missing” frames in between resulting in an incredibly smooth 25 frames-per-second video.
Related reference: The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Mast cameras and Descent imager: Investigation and instrument descriptions.
Compared to the more suspenseful Seven Minutes of Terror video, this one is rather majestic, and inspires awe in a completely different way.
From the archives, all things Mars Curiosity.
via Colossal.
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