Just as astronomy has benefited from private citizens scanning the heavens with their own telescopes or offering some of their computer capacity to search for extraterrestrial life, private citizens are now assisting with videos and other media to make the space achievements more dramatic for the public. I provided one example last month from
Andrew Bodrov, and this month we have Bard Canning's painstakingly created
"Curiosity Descent" covering Curiosity's landing on the Martian surface. This video covers events from the heat shield separation all the way to the landing and Curiosity's panning the landscape. A separate video shows how Mr. Cannin was able to create the video. It's a fun presentation And while it is not science, but rather a simulation (I covered
NASA's pre-landing simulation earlier), it can only bring greater attention to NASA's amazing adventure.
In an
interview, Mr. Canning stated:
My aim with this video was to bring the wonder of the Mars Science
Laboratory mission to a wider audience. To this
end, I had to make the video a little more ‘Hollywood’ than its previous
incarnations. I expected some backlash for this, but as you can see,
the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
