Awesome Curiosity Landing Video Gets Sound Effects

Back in late August NASA offered up a video to go along with the Curiosity Rover landing allowing us to watch the final phases of descent in full motion. That original video lacked any sound effects making it an eerily quiet plummet towards the surface of the red planet. A new video for the Mars Curiosity Rover descent has now turned up on YouTube.

The cool part about the new video is that it has sound effects. The video is full HD resolution and was created by a guy named Brad Canning. Apparently, Canning spent four weeks enhancing the video using a myriad of techniques to improve the quality. He says that he used motion tracking, adjustment points, detail enhancement, and color correction to name a few tweaks.

I'm not sure where the sound effects were grabbed from, but it certainly adds to the excitement of the video. My favorite part of this video continues to be tracking the heat shielding as it plummets to the surface of Mars impacting at the top of a cliff. If you watch closely you can track that heatshield all way to its initial impact and then as it slides down the face of the cliff to the ground below.

Watch the upper left side of the video to see that heat shielding. If you want to watch the video for yourself below; it's very cool and certainly worthy of the original. I think it's cool that people put so much effort into improving these videos.

[via Geek.com]