Curiosity Mars Descent Gets 1080p Video

What you're about to see is a collection of photos taken by NASA and constructed into a video with extremely high definition by a fellow by the name of Daniel Luke Fitch. This guy is a visual effects producer for Altitude-FX that simply did what noone else took the time to do – took all the photographs that NASA's Mars mission had sent back at full resolution while it was landing and turned them into one massive video. The video runs at 15 frames per second, that being just about 3 times the speed of the actual landing according to the space between photos from NASA.

What you're going to find here is that if you're afraid of heights, you're going to hurl basically right away – that much is true. Otherwise there's one astonishing bit of film magic going on here straight from the most awesome modern space mission we've ever had the pleasure of living through. The entire movie is just 50 seconds, but it's the best 50 seconds you'll spend on a YouTube video all day, guaranteed.

The real drop took around 7 minutes – that's "Seven Minutes of Terror" for those of you that've been following NASA's presentation of the whole mission from start to finish. You can also see NASA's 3D rendering video of the landing below – it's terrifying!

Also have a peek at our Curiosity collection with no less than a massive offering of stories and updates regarding this mission from start to – right where we are now. This mission has been a total success thus far and will certainly lead NASA into the future on a wave of hand claps and science love for some time to come.