NASA releases video of Curiosity landing on Mars - watch

NASA has released a video showing the view of its massive new robot rover, Curiosity, as it descended to the surface of Mars.

The stop-motion video consists of 297 colour thumbnail photos taken by Curiosity during the last two and a half minutes of its landing.



The video is fairly blurry, especially towards the end when Curiosity's landing kicks up a swirling cloud of dust, but it represents a rare close-up glimpse of the Martian landscape.

Curiosity landed on Mars on Monday (August 6) on a two-year mission to see if the Red Planet once supported life.

This marks the fourth time NASA has sent a rover to Mars, but the size of the $2.5 billion Curiosity project dwarfs all previous attempts.

To get an idea of its scale, it is worth noting that Curiosity's biggest instrument is almost four times larger than the entire first robot sent to the planet in 1997.

The rover will investigate the 5km-high central mountain in the Gale Crater, searching for traces of water that in the past may have supported microbial life.

Curiosity has so far only taken low 192 x 144 resolution thumbnail images from Mars, though NASA hopes to retrieve higher 1600 x 1200 resolution photos as communications with the rover improve.