Have you ever wondered what you would see as you touched down on Mars? This timelapse video stitches together photos of the Curiosity rover's descent, and lets you watch as the Martian surface comes closer and closer until you're completely surrounded by alien dust.

Spaceflight 101 pulled together high-resolution images from the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI), capturing the heat shield separation and powered descent. It's not quite a full frame rate video, but it's still a remarkably view of what the rover saw as it landed.

NASA has also released images of the rover's heat shield hurtling down to the surface and throwing up dust on impact. The heat shield is simply not as dainty a lander as Curiosity itself.

[via Bad Astronomy]