I know, I've posted a few of these, but a new video came out showing the descent of Curiosity to the surface of Mars that's worth a look. YouTube user "hahahaspam" did a clever thing. The Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) is a camera that points straight down, past the rover, so engineers on Earth could later see the exact path Curiosity took on its way down to the Martian surface and also get an overview of the area. It took a series of images that were later put together to make various animations (see Related Posts below). The motion appears jerky because the camera only took about four pictures per second. What hahahaspam did was interpolate between the frames, making the motion appear much more smooth. The animation he made is really quite wonderful:
[embed width="610"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJgeoHBQpFQ[/embed]
Nice, huh? Interpolation is a math term that involves estimating the value of something ...
