This video captures the final few minutes of the Curiosity rover’s white-knuckle thrill ride as it fell toward the surface of Mars. 
 
 Taken by the rover’s Mars Descent Imager (MARDI), the low-resolution video begins immediately after Curiosity’s heat shield fell away and follows the rover down for the entire entry, descent, and landing sequence. During the film, you can see the camera nodding back and forth as the probe rocks underneath its supersonic parachute. Rocket engines firing below the rover shake the video in several places. A few seconds before landing, the rover’s rockets kick up a large plume of dust as it gets lowered on its 25-foot sky crane and is then gently placed on the ground. 
 
 MARDI took a better-quality video in high-resolution color but it won’t be available until engineers can get more data back from the rover. Eventually, this data will help scientists determine exactly where inside of its target ellipse within Gale crater the probe landed. As well, they will see the surrounding landscape close-up and in spectacular detail that orbiting satellite imagers can’t resolve. 
 
 Video: NASA/JPL-Caltech 

 Enlarge Brian van der Brug / AP NASA Associate Administrator John Grunsfeld waits for landing inside the Spaceflight Operations Facility for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. on Sunday. Brian van der Brug / AP 
 
 The newsroom at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is beginning to thin out as the Mars Science Laboratory transitions from an exciting news story, to a long duration — possibly very long duration — exploration of the geologic and environmental history of Mars. 
 
 For the reporters still in the newsroom, fatigue is beginning to set in. BBC science correspondent Jonathan Amos has been at it nonstop for 30 hours. I feel a bit guilty for stepping out and getting a few hours sleep. 
 
 Reporter fatigue is matched by the scientist and engineers who stayed up for the landing and that had to go back to work preparing for ground operations. They have the added problem of going on Mars time. The Martian day is 24 hours and 39 minutes long, so if you're on Mars time, you have to stay up an extra 39 minutes a day. That doesn't sound so bad at first, but after a while on the schedule you find you're going to bed when the sun is shining, and you face a case of non–stop jetlag. 
 
 In the hours before landing the newsroom was packed. I mean packed. While engineers fretted about a safe landing, reporters fretted about deadlines. We all knew when landing was supposed to happen, 10:31 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. But what would we report if there were no signal? And just as important, when would we report it? Many reporters, including me became instant experts in the rover's X-band and UHF capabilities for sending a signal about its status back to Earth. 
 
 Happily we never had to use that knowledge. 
 
 This is the fifth Mars landing I've covered. They have all been successful. I didn't cover Mars Polar Lander and it crashed. There's a tradition at JPL to break out peanuts just before a planetary landing. I think peanuts are no longer needed. All they need to do is make sure I cover the landing. 
 
 (Joe Palca is a science correspondent for NPR.)
– NASA has released a rover's-eye view of Curiosity's nail-biting landing on Mars yesterday. The video, which captures a minute of what engineers described as "seven minutes of terror," begins as the rover's heat shield falls away, and ends with dust being kicked up as Curiosity descends into the Martian crater it will spend years exploring, Wired reports. NASA says the low-resolution video will be followed by a high-resolution one, along with color photos and panoramas. Curiosity has already sent back two stunning high-resolution photos, including one of Mount Sharp, a three-mile-high mountain in the center of the crater which is its chief scientific target. NASA says the photos show that the rover has a clear path to explore in any direction, and it will begin doing so within days. At the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, fatigue is beginning to set in among the scientists and engineers who were celebrating wildly yesterday, notes NPR's Joe Palca. They are working on Martian time, with days 24 hours and 39 minutes long, which has left them with "a case of non–stop jetlag," he writes.