Curiosity Mars Rover descent footage interpolated from 4fps to 25fps (video)

[Video Link] This is a magnificent thing.

YouTuber hahahaspam explains, "This is the Curiosity Mars Rover descent footage interpolated from ~4 frames per second to 25 frames per second. It is playing back in real time. This took me 4 days straight to put together, so I hope you enjoy it! Music: Kevin Macleod."

(via Joe Sabia)

• [Andrew Leonard]

  Best one I’ve seen so far. Really, the fact that we can interpolate from 4FPS to 25FPS is pretty remarkable when you think about it. You’re basically predicting movement between frames and then semi-inventing all of the frames in between.

  What I still find interesting about this video is how absolutely impossible it is to judge scale, even right up to the moment it touches down.

  • [ldobe]

    absolutely impossible it is to judge scale

    That got me too!  I think there’s a few good reasons why we have so much trouble with it:
    1.) Humans rarely (if ever) look straight down during an entire descent.  Whether it’s in a balloon, helicopter, or highdive we can see where we started.
    2.) The video isn’t stereoscopic so there’s no 3D perspective at all.
    3.) The surface of Mars seems almost fractal.  From high up you see giant impact craters and canyons and mountains, from a hundred meters you see small craters, and hills, and wind channels, from a half meter, you see pebbles that look like mountains, and little tiny impact craters from rocks that bounce along the surface in sandstorms.

    It looks all pretty much the same from any angle if you’re not a exogeologist: like Arizona, or Utah, but with even less liquid water.

    • [benher]

      The scale thing. Felt like a Mandelbox zoom until the dust was kicked up at the end.

    • [ldobe]

       I have no way of knowing from real data, but from just my shaved ape intuition I have the feeling (mock me if you will, but please show your data, as I explain that I have none) that the lander is about 90-120 meters above ground at time 1:08.  I’m not sure why I feel that’s right, but I’ve watched this video about 20 times, and I know the sky crane itself stops 20m above the ground.  So maybe I’m going off of the final jolt.

• [traalfaz]

  Once I muted the sound, yes, very good. Why do people feel the need to put music tracks on EVERYTHING?

• [ifreecarve]

  I’d like to see a remix of this with the altitude reading as well as an indication of when the engines are ignited.

  • [ldobe]

     I absolutely want exactly this.  Or a director’s commentary by Will Wheaton or William Shatner.

  • [Dan Huby]

    Taking that to the extreme, you could end up with something like this, a visualisation of all of the data received during the Huygens Titan landing.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOSQSJD5IxY

• [xian]

  Now I’d like to see that footage with added lens flare.

  • [Gerald Mander]

     Thank you, JJ Abrams.

• [trentondouglas]

  I listened to the pink floyd moonhead audio on another post while watching the video on this post.  

  • [flappy]

    I turned the sound off, made whooshing and beeping noises until I fired my engines with a loud guttural CXCXCXCXCXCXCXCH.

    • [Mark Dow]

      I did this three times, and it gets better every time. GhKKPPTHT on release of the skycrane, and mix some frantic RchRchRch…  with CXCXCX… of the winch in the final descent.

• [Paul Renault]

  I especially like that you could see the heat shield hit the ground,  at about the 45 second mark…right next to those, uh, trees?

  • [CyberCraftRobots]

     Thanks for pointing that out.  I would have missed it.

• [CyberCraftRobots]

  Thank you so much for the work you put into this.  I really enjoyed watching it a real speed.