Watch New Footage Of Curiosity Landing On Mars In Glorious HD

This video of Curiosity's descent on Mars is awesome. If you've been following the Curiosity adventure, you'll probably notice that it's based on NASA's original 4 frames per second (fps) video of Curiosity's descent on Mars. To be fair, it's an enhanced version of NASA's original because it's so much better. And we've got an amateur enthusiast who's put 29 days of work—including one week of full time computer-staring—to thank for this beauty.

The original video NASA released last month was stunning because of what it was showing us: a probe descending and landing on Mars. I mean, landing on Mars, you guys! Beats LOLcats videos everyday of the week. But quality-wise, it wasn't too great. In this era of ubiquitous ever-increasing smartphone camera capabilities, it would've been a bit of a bummer if we had only this video to put in the archives.

The new video, on the other hand, gives us the descent in the HD quality we're now used to. While we were passively watching Curiosity's descent in the original video, we now find ourselves aboard Curiosity while it's coming down onto Mars. Stunning! Plus, this is something our kids just might watch in twenty years' time and not shrug off because "cameras were really bad in your days".

The magician behind the video took to Reddit to explain how he/she created it. bard_canning (his/her Reddit username) used a video processing technique called motion interpolation to enhance NASA's original into this beauty. Basically, he/she augmented the number of frames per second from four to thirty by creating intermediate animations:

"The original was 4 fps, so converting to 30 fps at the same speed means that you're essentially inventing 87% of the footage."

Yes, inventing. So there might be some mistakes, as bard_canning quickly points out:

"It should definitely be noted that by its very nature interpolation creates inaccuracies. [...] people should understand that although I took great pains to make this accurate, you should still watch the original footage if you want a true accuracy."

It's so well-made though that, at least to my untrained eyes, there are no apparent flaws. No flaws in the 26 frames bard_canning had to create for every second of the video. An achievement that required a lot of work:

"I had to go the laborious manual route because the frame-rate is too low causing the footage to jerk around too quickly for automated motion tracking to handle it. [...] It took 29 days from start to finish, working full-time on it for the last week. This was the most laborious media project that I've ever done. But I don't regret a minute of it."

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The feeling I got when I watched NASA's original video of the descent last month was one of awe. And pride. We were landing on Mars after all, a planet 225 million kilometres from Earth on average. Yes, we've been on Mars before but with Curiosity, NASA practically invited us to join their team. From our laptop screens, we witnessed the elation of the NASA engineers upon confirmation that Curiosity had safely landed on Mars, the press conference afterwards, Mohawk guy (who is on Twitter)! We felt part of the team. We felt a similar joy they did. And just like that, Curiosity became special to us.