This video of thumbnail images from the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) on NASA's Curiosity rover shows the heat shield dropping away from the rover on Aug. 5. It covers the first 25 seconds of MARDI observations as Curiosity descends toward the surface of Mars, starting about two and one-half minutes before touchdown. The video starts in darkness because there is no illumination inside the aeroshell. It starts about six seconds before heat shield separation (sometimes called heat shield jettison). About one-quarter of the way into this video, the heat shield starts to move away from the rover and back shell, and sunlight illuminates the inside surface of the heat shield. Over the course of the next 19 seconds, we see the heat shield falling away from the lander as the lander rapidly slows under the parachute. The heat shield is 15 feet (4.5 meters) across.
This stop-motion video shows 297 frames from the Mars Descent Imager aboard NASA's Curiosity rover as it descended to the surface of Mars. These thumbnail images were received on Earth on Aug. 6, 2012, and cover the last two and a half minutes of descent.
For many of us who watched in awe as Apollo 11 delivered the first men to the moon in 1969, it was common to believe that in another 10 years, 20 at the most, there would be boot prints in the Martian dust to match those in the Sea of Tranquility. The safe landing of Curiosity on Mars isn't quite what we had in mind. But the engineering prowess that went into building and putting that machine down in Gale Crater was nonetheless marvelous to behold.
Below is the first color photo taken by the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars. As you can see, it's a bit fuzzy. That's because the lens cover has Martian dust on it. Those covers can be opened and closed. This picture of the landing site puts the color view in the context of a computer simulation derived from images acquired from orbiting spacecraft. The view looks north, showing a distant ridge that is the north wall and rim of Gale Crater.